ANBA DLO
ANBA DLO - NOIR (2025)100 x 60 x 20 cm – 40 x 23 x 8 inches
Congolese mask, snorkelling mask, flipper, sailing boat cable, iron wire, and hand-painted acrylic lettering.
The series Anba Dlo, meaning “underwater” in Haitian Créole, combines African masks with casual aquatic artifacts, remnants of the tourist industry in Haiti. In a way reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s phrase “The sea is history,” the series engages in an implicit dialogue with the middle passage—the kidnapping of African people to be sold in the slave markets of the Caribbean and other plantation societies. Millions died in the Atlantic during the slave trade. Contemporary scholars call attention to how water graves—unmarked, flowing, invisible—make it impossible to memorialize the loss of millions of kidnapped Africans. This is one of the stories taken up in Anba Dlo.
The masks were brought from the Congo, the homeland of Lafleur’s ancestors. The inclusion of found objects like flippers and snorkeling gear underscores how in the world’s imagination the Caribbean continues to be perceived as an untouched paradise. This series reminds us of the work of Dominican artist Tony Capellán and others, suggesting a conversation about plastic and nondegradable debris that create synthetic islands in the ocean. The phrase anba dlo commonly evokes a sense of living in constant crisis, under conditions so harsh that even breathing seems unsustainable. However, rather than focusing solely on death and nonexistent burials, the pieces introduce play as a response to precarity, without erasing the complex layers of history in that ocean.
The series was conceived for the 2024 Ghetto Biennale, the second consecutive edition that had to be canceled due to violence. Lafleur and Bogaert create opportunities to keep their projects alive, collaborating through WhatsApp, DHL, Western Union, Zoom, and Instagram—forms of communication that traverse air and cables buried at the bottom of the ocean. As Kamau Brathwaite famously said, “unity is submarine.”
Guillermina De Ferrari
Professor of Caribbean Literatures and Visual Cultures
University of Wisconsin-Madison