Amanda T. McIntyre announced as 2025 Tilting Axis FellowAmanda T. McIntyre announced as 2025 Tilting Axis Fellow

Amanda's project Present Continuous brings new and fresh ideas, presented in her application with an inviting approach that pulls you into the project, addressing urgent themes. Amanda's project, centered on festival culture and waste, specifically through the lens of Dolly Mas, offers innovative solutions for archiving costumes. Her research on the Baby Doll, focusing on its representation and parody of women in early Caribbean masquerades historically performed by men, is particularly compelling. The jury felt the proposal which linked architecture, mas (Caribbean masquerade traditions), queer studies, and climate justice further raised critical questions about the future of these costumes with an emphasis on non-extractive material focuses.

The jury was compelled by Amanda’s ambitious submission concentrating on urgent themes approached with sensitivity, seriousness, and interdisciplinary approaches. Amanda’s ability to think through carnival culture and the determination to archive these traditions and practices by future-proofing them highlights the importance of documenting the fluid migrations and influences within this culture including its evolution in two other Caribbean islands. Although the proposal had a clear focus, the jury was also impressed by Amanda’s willingness to remain curious, flexible, and open to exchange with partners on ways of archiving. Moving into the fellowship period, the jury suggested further research into deadstock materials from Jamaica and Martinique to enhance her project.

Amanda T. McIntyre is a Trinidadian writer and artist. She is Creative Director and Lead Designer at Dolly Mas Visual and Performing Arts Company. Her work experiments with harmonising architectural and textile cultures of the Caribbean. She was previously an Art Administrator at New Local Space (NLS), an art studio and gallery based in Kingston, Jamaica. In 2020 McIntyre was part of the faculty for La Pràctica Artists Residency, Puerto Rico, and an advisor for the NLS, Curatorial, and Art Writing Fellowship. In 2021, she was awarded a Futuress Coding Resistance Fellowship for her project Mapping Queer Carnival. In 2023 she was longlisted for the prestigious Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize.

Amanda's selected proposal, Present Continuous, is a practice-based research project that applies digital intervention towards archiving the materiality and intellectual properties of contemporary Caribbean masquerade cultures, with corresponding designs including architectural elements from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when masquerade emerged in the Caribbean. The project also assesses non-extractive material considerations in this era of climate emergency attempting to answer the question: Can Caribbean Carnivals be sustained materially? And if so, what are the ways that would best serve the planet and the communities that exist within Caribbean Carnival ecosystems?

Members of the jury were impressed by the wide range of themes approached by the projects, as well as the relevance and timeliness. Fifteen applicants submitted a wide cross-section of projects from all four linguistic territories of the Caribbean. This year’s submissions were strong, competitive, and transgressive, indicative of the Fellowship’s growing profile over the past eight-year period. Proposals were concerned with topical themes such as new pedagogies, maroonage, anti-colonialism, embodied and ancestral knowledge, speculative fiction, myth-making, the circular economy, climate justice, cartographies, vernacular architectures, marine, and spiritual ecosystems, ceremony, and shared rituals of masquerade. The projects demonstrate the creativity and power of practitioners living and working across the Caribbean, highlighting the importance of continued collaborations with those in the region.

This Fellowship is supported by lead host partner, Nieuwe Instituut and its collaborators including the Amsterdam Museum, De Appel, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Kunstinstituut Melly. Between the announcement of the open call on May 30th, 2024, and the deadline on June 30th, 2024, Nieuwe Instituut and Tilting Axis received 15 eligible entries in response to the open call from eight countries across the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch Caribbean region including Barbados, Cuba, Curacao, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The proposals were reviewed by a committee composed of the following members:

• Tijn van de Wijdeven, program manager, Nieuwe Instituut
• Holly Bynoe, ARC Magazine, Sour Grass and Tilting Axis co-founder
• Annalee Davis, Visual Artist, Founding Director of Fresh Milk, Sour Grass, and Tilting Axis co-founder
• Jessy Koeiman, Curator of Collective Learning, Kunstinstituut Melly
• Mark Raymond, Director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa
• Lara Khaldi, Director at De Appel
• Imara Limon, Curator, Amsterdam Museum & Silke Kamp, Curator-in-Training, Amsterdam Museum
• Charl Landvreugd, Head of Research and Curatorial Practice, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The meeting was chaired and moderated by Nieuwe Instituut researcher Federica Notari.

Proposals were evaluated based on their research proposal, methodological approach and connection to the disciplines of architecture, design, or digital culture; and their interest in working with the hosting partners. Four candidates were shortlisted and invited to an online interview with members of the selection committee on July 11th, 2024. Following the interviews, the committee selected Amanda T. McIntyre (Trinidad and Tobago) as the recipient of the Fellowship. The other shortlisted candidates were Lucia Piedra Galarraga (Cuba), Alex Martínez Suaréz (Dominican Republic ), and Johanna Castillo (Dominican Republic).