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The Guard placed a barefoot Smith as the museum’s sole guard over a five-hour period as Alleyne, in her role as “Professional Staff”, observed and documented interactions between museum visitors and The Guard.

 

In the call and response tradition located throughout the black diaspora, artists and writers Llanor Alleyne and Nyugen Smith combine prose, and poetry to critically engage topics of invisibility, tourism, sites of memory, and value of the arts resulting from their collaborative intervention at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (BMHS) titled, The Guard. 

 

As both participants and observers, the artists took note of their invisibility and hypervisibility as visitors walked through the museum’s galleries. The Guard publication examines what it means to actively inhabit a place rooted in a past in which your marginalized ancestral presence underpins all that is on display. Each author weaves a line from the present to the past and back again while acknowledging their bodies as interloping vessels of time and possibility.