Lou Elie Dit Cosaque

Caribbean traditions, especially from Martinique, arrived to me in fragments—fabrics frayed by time, recipes missing ingredients, songs without verses. But where do we begin when our history is so recent, so violently interrupted, and so often erased? What can we hold onto when so much was never written down, or was deliberately destroyed?

To answer, I am building my own island.

 

I’m drawn to the gaps in history—silences where memory was meant to be. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, I stitch together what was erased: archival whispers, speculative truths, and the ghosts of untold stories.

 

When stories are lost one can only use imagination to fill in the gaps. I imagined Ostreoidea, a fictional living land that serves as a mirror to gaze into our Caribbean histories. Grown from soft soil and humid air, shaped by colonization, memory loss, and survival. I created screen prints and used embroidery on fabric which I hand dyed using natural pigments such as cochenille and logwood. I’m mapping the island's wounds and migrations, its collapsed cities and blooming futures. I gather the traces—oral echoes, ancestral symbols, unspoken words—and spin them into a living tapestry. My voice guides you through the tale of this long lost island.

 

This is a tale, a memorial, a dream woven from ruins.