Todd Ayoung

Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World (Z Magazine insert):

Deborah Small and Peter Jemison
Calvin Reid
Ernie Pepion
Jerry Kearns
Tomie Arai
Todd Ayoung
Noah Jemison
Eva Skylark (Bing Lee)
Tim Drescher, Miranda Bergman (George Chacon)
Charles Frederick (Wenti Tsen)Jimmy Murry (Bing Lee)
Natasha Mayer
Peter Gourfain
Doug Minkler

An installation within the book-stacks at the Tompkins County Public Library 101 E. Green St., Ithaca, NY 14850
January 11 - March 30, 2008

Organized by Ithaca/NYC based artist
Todd Ayoung

Participating artists:
Ayisha Abraham Kenseth Armstead Kim Asbury
Jeff de Castro Elizabeth Cohen David Diao
Toby Greenberg
Johan Grimonprez
Jane Jin Kaisen
Janet Koenig
Katherine Liberovskaya Phill Niblock
Jenny Polak
Rit Premnath
Martha Rosler
Dread Scott
Greg Sholette
Buzz Spector
Jacob Tell
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Catalogue essay by Jelena Stojanović

Exhibition: Project For A Re-Volution in New York

Todd Ayoung & Krishna Ramanujan, Exhibition Organizers
Jelena Stojanović, Art Historian
Sally Grubb, Tompkins County Public Library Exhibit Coordinator, Ithaca New York

With Featured Artists:
Aaron Bass
Aaron Burr Society – Jim Costanzo Allison Bolah
Antonio Serna
Carlos Andrade
Curlee Holton
Elaine Angelopoulos
Floyd Hughes
GK2
Greg Sholette
Jason Kates van Staveren
Kadie Sali
Kaleb Huckele
Kara Lynch
Kim Asbury
Krittika Ramanujan
Lucas W. Melkane
Melissa Tuckey
Nestor A. Gil
Patricia Capaldi
Sarah Gotowka
Sowon Kwon
Suada Demirovic

CarlosAndrade and Todd On September ii, 200I the images of the attack on the World Trade Center Ayoung. What is Left Over, 2000. Plastic bag (made in instantly joined the ranks of photos and footage of visually impressive catastro-Colombia), mannequin phes that circulate ...

https://issuu.com/thedecolonizer/docs/the_decolonizer__febuary_2017_1_

Notes on A Mode Of Address: Talking Back (presented at Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015)
What do I mean my a “mode of address”? This notion from Judith Butler’s “Black Lives Matter” New York Times interview, and her essay on “violence, nonviolence”, reflections on Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth”.
A mode of address is a form of speaking out, an enactment of a “social constitution of ontology” according to Judith Butler. This social constitution of ontology of a mode of re-directing, demanding, and as a result a placeholding.

Emergency Ectoplasmic Exodus, Rejected Material (Take 4)

SAT, JUNE 8, 2019, 3-6pm, The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 10011 New York
CONTRIBUTORS: Todd Ayoung, Stephanie Deumer, Ectoplasmic Materialism, Gregory Sholette and Sekretariat für Geister, Archivpolitiken und Lücken: http://www.skgal.org/ emergency-ectoplasmic-exodus-rejected-material-take-4-june-8-the-kitchen/


Notes (unedited) on the Ouija board, raising the dead, and emptying the house No people there
“ There are no people there [West Indies] in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own”
When I was growing up in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1960’s, spectral hauntings were embedded in both my cultural imaginary, and the daily impending treat, especially at night (some spirits haunt daylight), of an actual ghostly encounter. Each island has their own naming for disembodied spirits, telling of the roles each ghostly island inhabitant plays in their specific colonial trauma/drama. In Trinidad and Tobago to name a few, there was Soucouya, a ghost that can remove their skin nightly, and suck peoples blood while they sleep, Jablesse, a deadly woman with a hoof and a human foot, and La Gahoos, a male version of Jabesse, a shape shifter, which can be also be seen in the daylight.
The disembodied hauntings of these ghosts, are kept alive/archived, primarily through the “subjectile” of orality, the book, and of course today, ghostly globalization, enabled by “tele- technology”.
Caribbean spirits inhabit parallel dwellings, haunting the entire geo-graphical region of the Antilles, never only a specific house or place.
In everyday life, the ghosts are always in/on hand, in disembodiment, in one’s tropical embodied daily conversations. The “always on/in hand” of this oral archive, is the repetition, translation, rhythm of past, present and futures to come mediated by European-US colonial imperialism, the initiator of genocide, chattel slavery, and indenture servitude.
One wonders how these hybrid disembodied ghosts of the Caribbean, the outcome of expansionist violence, and to use todays naming, locations of intersectional hauntings, by indigenous, African, Asian and European spectral wanderings, cope with today’s growing fascist, anti-migrant demons of their former imperial masters?
The ‘former”colonies on top of having to negotiate the rise of European-US fascism, also have to contend with climate change, the legacy of Western industrialization, which is already having and impact on the Antilles. Just think of hurricane Maria, the “natural disaster”, with close to 3000 dead in its wake, that devastated the US commonwealth island of Puerto Rico, and President Trump’s refusal to provide adequate relief.
One would think that the 19th century English historian James Anthony Froude’s remark still speaks not only of the past, but also the present and future erasure of populations of the West Indies, in part evident in the original misnaming of this geo-graphical location: “there are no people there”.