Portfolio 3
LACUNA is a multi-disciplinary art project conceived by Maya Mackrandilal that bridges the past, present, and future, the material world and the digital world, to create a space for community, collaboration, and reflections on the role of identity within contemporary art practices. Built on the open-source interactive VR platform Mozilla Hubs (shut down in 2024), LACUNA was a rhizomatic art installation that spoke to relationships between family, ancestry, and cultural communities of indenture descended artists. The six artists who made up the initiating version of the project are based in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Suriname, and the Netherlands, tied together by the legacy of South Asian indenture in the Caribbean, and the intersecting forces of European colonialism and capitalism in the Americas that continue to constitute their lived experience. As products of a racially and ethnically intermixed culture, their work is in conversation with global histories or survival and trauma and involves the interrogation of spaces similar to what Dionne Brand described in A Map to the Door of No Return: “Imagining our ancestors stepping through these portals one senses people stepping out into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space… the frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence.” The virtual reality world of LACUNA offers a series of doorways to unknown, inexplicable, liminal spaces - the spaces missing from the fractured narratives handed down to us through language, gesture, body.