You can sketch a house using basic geometry: a caret atop two parallel lines for the roof and walls. ⌂. A rectangle on one side of the caret for a chimney, a series of smaller squares for windows ⊞, a door 𓉞. These symbols represent the hegemonic understanding of a house, however there is an entire symbology of home that doesn’t rely on the same simple lines and squares. The smell of day-long stews in a colorfully tiled kitchen, the pale yellow stucco of churches on dirt roads, the sound of lightly swaying palm trees.

Home exists beyond the traditional conception of a house in Modeling Ecologies: Take Care, a group exhibition curated by Sienna Fekete which explores the architectures of the Caribbean with works by Ibany𝝴, Gwladys Gambie, Shani Strand, Zenobia, and Deborah Anzinger. The exhibition is on view at Lower Manhattan’s Entrance gallery through December 21, and is hosted by Caribbean architecture and aesthetic research project Sucking Salt (Shani Strand and Zenobia) and revisions, an experimental media initiative from the restorative climate organization rearc.institute. Modeling Ecologies creates a symbology of home by using the nuance of Caribbean architecture to recontextualize a traditional notion of landscape; home is a constructed idea as much as it can be a physical construction in conversation with a natural landscape. The exhibition considers the material, social, political, and ecological aspects that go into this construction of both place and idea, centering the Caribbean as a terrain where built environments and preexisting ecologies collide.

Ibany𝝴’s elombe (2024) is an example of what producing that knowledge in combination with past, present, and future looks like. The sculpture comprises a mahogany stool positioned atop a 20-inch-by-24-inch patch of ceramic tile arranged like a multicolor checkerboard. The tiles—in shades spanning the full spectrum of ochre, ocean, and olive—give the feeling of a warm kitchen full of delightful smells, an emotional environment all its own. “These are ecosystems that do not remain intact,” writes the artist in the show’s checklist. “What becomes of the houses our parents and grandparents built? And then? It is a simple question that crosses the mind when a drive from the coasts to the heart of the island reveals deserted houses: archives, fragments of us, bits of Martinique.”

Photo by Entrance.

In the basement floor of Entrance plays Deborah Anzinger’s Training Station (2020), a 16-minute short film created Maroon Town, St. James, where her family is from. The film centers an alternative relationship between people and the environment, where instead of mining land for resources, humans care for it, building a relational aesthetics in situ with the earth. Anzinger’s work refers to the history of the Maroon Wars against the British empire in the 18th century as well, where the unique environmental landscape of the battleground gave the Maroons an advantage against their colonial interlopers. In the same way the Maroons found harmony with the land to help fight colonizers, may people learn to understand the relational dynamics between themselves and the land they live on.

Modeling Ecologies drops audiences into an aesthetic ecosystem where the Caribbean can be reconstructed as a collection of images, impressions, and symbols to beg the question, how do we archive a place, or channel a feeling? “I think an essential aspect of the archives we are making and engaging with is the identification of the lack that is always present due to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and beyond,” says Zenobia. “I’m interested in archives as spaces for both imagination and designations of reality.” This idea is present on the walls of Entrance’s ground floor, which are taken up by Missorting Pigeonholes (2024), a large-scale inkjet-printed vinyl collage of Caribbean architecture by Shani Strand and Zenobia of Sucking Salt. The piece features images of brightly colored storefronts to churches to family homes. The massive volume of images expand the possibility of understanding Caribbean history through its architecture while the sheer scale of the piece shrinks the gallery’s physical space, giving the audience a unique perspective to interact with this wallpaper-archive.

The show is accompanied by Sucking Salt’s zine Take Care, which contains poetry, prose, and images as a part of their long-form project on Caribbean architectures, as well as a print edition of revisions: Vol. 1. “For revisions, we were interested in how the exhibition format could be a method for animating Sucking Salt’s archive, putting it in conversation with other artists and setting new imaginations in motion from the vantage point of diasporic peoples, as well as from artists located within the Caribbean,” says their editorial team via email.

“I think it’s helpful to think of the archive itself as a possible act of reconstruction of the past that can alter both those who live in the Caribbean and those who are in diaspora relation to it,” says Zenobia. “Those without much of a conception of the Caribbean as a place will hopefully have wider access to repair those biases because of the work people are doing now.” Modeling Ecologies does just that, locating a vast network of ideas that function as their own social and environmental ecology and archiving those ideas in place; on the wall, in sculpture, on film. The result is a rich portrait of home.