By: Staff Writer
February 14, 2023
A respected Trinidadian cultural activist is preserving the heroes of Trinidad through the Pantheon 2023 Exhibition on the King and Queen Costume Tradition in the T&T Carnival.
Rubadiri Victor, Curator and President of The Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad and Tobago and organiser of the Pantheon 2023, told Caribbean Magazine Plus that this year’s festival during Carnival is “forcing” the powers that be to “apprehend” the significance of these costumes.
Mr Victor also said: “Lloyd Best used to call Trinidadians an unresponsible people, not irresponsible but unresponsible, even beyond the notion that we are supposed to be responsible. That is how we are with certain traditions.”
The mission is ensuring that as many of those Carnival Kings and Queens costumes are preserved as part of Trinidadian history and culture, while at the same time preserving the biographical heritage of Trinidad heroes of eras past. “That has been our inquiry throughout the artists’ coalition’s tenure as artists’ representatives, those are the ideas that we’ve grappled with and we have created solutions all the way through,” Mr Victor said.
He continued, “So one solution was, we realized that we were not documenting biographical skill and biographical information, and so we created something called project memory, which was a unit as well as a programmatic of how to how to record elder memory.”
Mr Victor also said: “We recorded hundreds of biographies under that and then commissioned photographers to take literally tens of thousands of images of the highest quality, of every class, including many elders and have done so much I think we probably have the largest archive of the hero class in the country, because we’ve been doing this now for almost 30 years and it’s a massive archive of audio visual biography.”
This audio visual biography of the hero class in Trinidad encompasses, writers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and a whole host of individuals who have added value to the Trinidadian society over the years and is not exclusive to cultural artists.
Mr Victor added: “We just were documenting people’s life story, putting cameras and mics in front of them and letting them speak and then the other part is the guild of masters, which the idea of the guild was actually the transmission of skill from Master artisans to Master younger apprentices, and set up some guilds and started passing on some skills like that. “Pantheon falls within that mode. A lot of issues around the King and Queen competition, one of which is the transmission of skill. We have lost and are losing literally hundreds of engineering solutions that previous generations had created, simply because Trinidad and Tobago unlike a lot of the other civilizations that decided that they were doing not many civilizations say they’re doing large scale costuming,” he noted.
Trinidad does large scale costuming different than other countries around the world as Mr Victor likens them to “engineering masterpieces” that can only be created in Trinidad. “People have tried to imitate it outside of the Caribbean, but they end up with a static 40 foot piece that has little to no movement and very static,” he said.
The Pantheon, now in its third year, was created to preserve these large scale costumes that would normally be destroyed after the Carnival season is over.