Event

The Institute of Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) will show the film “The Sign of the Loa,” at a lunchtime seminar which it will host on March 17th, 2010, at noon, at the SALISES Conference Room.  

Producer: Patricia Mohammed (winner of awards from the Trinidad and Tobago Film Co &  University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Research and Publications Fund)

Directors: Patricia Mohammed/Luke Paddington

Editor: Luke Paddington  

Produced and directed by Professor Patricia Mohammed, Director of award-winning film “Coolie Pink and Green”, The Sign of the Loa (2007) cuts through the clichéd scripts of Haiti in the popular imagination as poor and backward, and suffused with a demonic religion, exploring Haitian creativity through the complex geometric design of the vèvè, the sign of the loa. The film invites the uninformed and wary traveller to put aside unfounded fears of Haiti and to locate in Haitian religion and artistic production the basis for originality and innovation in new world culture.

“The Sign of the Loa” is the fourth film in the DVD series, “A Different Imagination”, and an outcome of the project of visualising the Caribbean, which Mohammed has been carrying out for the last decade. It is based on onsite research in Haiti in 2001. The book, “Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation”, which the film series accompanies, is published by Macmillan, UK (2009).

About Patricia Mohammed

The title of her Professorship is Gender and Cultural Studies. The combination of the two parts of this title contains the interests that have preoccupied Professor Mohammed as a scholar over the last three decades: that of understanding what shapes our class, ethnic and gender identities and produces the culturally specific ways in which we produce and live. Her research interests appear varied but they are interconnected and cumulative, thus gender and feminist theory have been amplified with the new lens of visuality. She is interested at present in the reading of the image whether still or moving, and in understanding what the Caribbean has created as an aesthetic as a result of its peculiar new world history.