In Venice, Annalee Davis did not bring any abstract images of Barbados. For the 2026 Art Biennale, the artist brought plants from her garden, textiles, drawings of palm trees, and a life-size reproduction of a bird now believed to be extinct to the Arsenale. Behind this installation, a single question runs through her work: what to do with a land whose history remains steeped in plantation culture?
Creating from the very heart of history
Annalee Davis was born in 1963 in Saint Michael and now lives in Saint George, in the Barbados. Her studio is located at Walker’s Dairy, on a former sugar plantation where her Creole family has lived for several generations. The place is not merely a backdrop: it shapes her practice. Her family history adds a special depth. The estate, a former sugarcane plantation, was acquired by her paternal great-grandmother before being converted into a dairy farm. Annalee Davis has lived and worked there for over twenty years. The land thus becomes at once a family archive, a trace of the colonial system, and a space of the present.
An Artist at the Intersection of Biography, History, and Place
A visual artist, author, educator, and cultural organizer, Annalee Davis explores the intersection of biography and history. She is interested in “post-plantation economies” and the ways in which colonial legacies continue to shape Caribbean landscapes and societies. Her commitment extends beyond her own studio. She is the founding director of Fresh Milk and has co-founded several pan-Caribbean artistic initiatives, including Caribbean Linked, Tilting Axis, and Sour Grass. For her, creating is not just about producing artworks, but also about building spaces where artists from the region can meet, circulate, and think together.
After planting, what will happen to the soil?
For more than a decade, Annalee Davis has been exploring what she calls post-plantation restoration. The idea isn’t to erase the past. Rather, it’s about examining what it has left behind in the soil, in customs, in social relationships, and in memories—and then imagining new ways of relating to the place. At Walker’s Dairy, she walks, observes, cultivates, and works with plants. Gardens, medicinal herbs, and living plots become ways to reflect on healing, care, and passed-down knowledge. Her work thus reimagines planting: from an inherited economic system, it becomes a terrain to be reinterpreted, challenged, and transformed.
Repair Without Deleting
This is what makes Davis’s approach unique. She does not seek to transform a former plantation into a static heritage site. Instead, she works with its inherent contradictions. The site was once a sugar plantation, then a dairy farm; the artist notes that it is now in the process of transitioning to a business related to alternative energy. This succession of uses already tells the story of several lives within the same territory. Davis adds another possibility: that of a space capable of preserving traces of the past while generating new uses, new knowledge, and new forms of care. Here, “reparation” is therefore not synonymous with “forgetting.”
From Barbados to Venice
With “Let This Be My Cathedral”, presented at the 2026 Arte Biennale, this reflection takes on a particularly concrete form. The installation includes, among other things, a wall herbarium made up of plants grown in her Barbadian garden, a hand-embroidered textile, drawings of palm trees on the floor, and a life-size reproduction of the Eskimo curlew. The bird has a specific history: it was last sighted in Barbados in 1963, the year of the birth of Annalee Davis, and the species is now presumed extinct. In this way, the artist connects ecological memory, colonial history, and extinction. Venice does not erase Barbados: it becomes the place where a very local fragment of its landscape takes on a broader significance.
The Earth as an archive, but also as a possibility
Annalee Davis’s portrait ultimately tells less of a story about the conversion of a plantation than it does of a different way of looking at the land. The same soil can bear the violence of a system, the stories of a family, medicinal plants, agricultural practices, and contemporary artworks. This is where her work becomes distinctly Caribbean without seeking to speak on behalf of the entire Caribbean: it starts from a specific place and embraces its complexity. If former plantations are archives of the past, can they also become spaces where we can invent other futures?
Annalee Davis is a Barbadian visual artist, author, educator, and cultural organizer. Her work explores, among other things, the connections between colonial history, memory, territory, ecology, and the legacy of plantations in the Caribbean.
Annalee Davis lives and works at Walker’s Dairy, a former sugar plantation in Barbados linked to her family history. She uses this place to reflect on the legacies of the plantation and to envision new relationships between land, memory, creation, and healing.
Let This Be My Cathedral is the installation presented by Annalee Davis at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale. It combines plants from her Barbadian garden, textiles, drawings of palm trees, and ecological memory to explore the history and transformation of territories.
