Awa Archives: A community-based digital archive of water poetics from the ABCSSS island

Presentation Awa Archives: A community-based digital archive of water poetics from the ABCSSS island, by Mikayla Ribeiro, MA 

Welcome to the public launch of Awa Archives, a community-based digital and oral archive of ABCSSS poetics on water. Developed in collaboration with Simia Literario, an intergenerational Dutch Caribbean writers collective, the Awa Archives documents and amplifies poetic expressions of water (awa) as a repository of memories, encompassing ocean mythologies, coastal politics, migration stories, agricultural knowledge, and imaginaries of water as sites of healing and spiritual connection. Come hear key insights from this year-long artistic-research project, and take part in further building the oral archive. You will be invited to read-aloud ABCSSS poetry related to water, and collectively engage in a creative writing reflection.

Mikayla Vieira Ribeiro (she/her) is a writer, educator, and translator born and raised in Curaçao. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Black Studies and English from Amherst College (USA), and a Research Masters in Literature from the University of Amsterdam (NL) where she focused on ecological relations in Papiamentu literature.

Her work explores healing relations with the land and sea in the Dutch Caribbean, and broadly across Latin America. Drawing from the territories and communities that have shaped her, Vieira Ribeiro is a bridge across geolinguistic imaginaries. Her work engages digital and oral archives, community based artistic-research, and poetic translations, and she has been published in Archipelagos, Islands in Between, and PREE. She currently lives in Amsterdam, and works as a teacher-librarian.