This very humid land that I love so much

Visiting Bertin was a singular experience. In the mid-90s the artist purchased a plot of sloping land at the foot of volcanic Mount Pelée, upon which he built his studio, perched on a bluff over the sea. It’s marked by a fence and gate made by Bertin: electrical wire braided into grill-work, yellow mailbox doors bolted in a grid, their apertures winking as sunlight seeps in. Conch shells emblazon one façade, like a crest, a coat of arms. Once inside, it’s Bertin’s world, a metal-infused land of his wonder, and of his salvage: everywhere there are sculptures, assemblies, collages; of washing machine tumblers and doors, car fenders, tin roofs, new or with layers of red-golden rust, glass bottles flickering in curving patterns, ornamented pieces of wood. Barrel bottoms flattened and joined with nails—the metal made to look so thin, nearing translucency. Bertin uses scrap with the same fluidity as an illustrator with ink in their pen. Reclaimed metal, glass, and wood—so seemingly inflexible, worn down, already consumed, considered delinquent, unusable—take on new form under Bertin’s care. Scattered around the property are Bertin’s ovens, in which he sometimes bakes his sculptures—serrated tin sheets hitched perpendicular to the sky, panelled in glass, with light pouring in.

After the visit, I sit next to a younger local artist on the bus ride back. He’s never met Bertin before, even though he’s lived his whole life on the island. He is moved, humbled: “They are out here,” he says, damp-eyed, “whether or not anyone is paying attention, they are here and making the work, and they are our elders.” Bertin is in his early seventies, but he’d never betray that; he’s sprightly, energised. Now we continue our conversation online, via video call and text message.  Bertin is affable, his broad smile is encouraging, and when I ask him a question, he frowns slightly and leans in, one ear tilted toward the computer camera. But I do not always speak with Bertin alone, partly because I don’t speak French and he doesn’t speak English, and partly because of the geographical distance between us. Me, currently living in the old empires, trying to eke out a life, and him, in his tropical studio, always affectionate in his correspondence, always first to mention the island before anything else: “Quel plaisir de vous lire dans ce pays très humide que j’aime beaucoup.” (It’s a pleasure to read you from this very humid land that I love so much.) The writer Isis Labeau-Caberia accompanies Bertin and I, whose own work is that of history, myth and speculation. I ask a question, Bertin elaborates, and Labeau-Caberia translates each in turn, her voice and perspective infused in my requests and in Bertin’s responses; her authorship inscribed into both our voices.

We speak about Bertin’s life and work, his studio, the island; each subject a special pathway to grander questions of selfhood, agency, even nationalism; inquiries that appeared to dog not only Bertin’s work but also Isis’s and my own. And as we enter these deep waters, I am especially grateful to witness the precious relationship between Labeau-Caberia and Bertin: two radical, brilliant Martinicans from far-apart generations, each grappling with a history that is being written as they inherit it, and still propelling them steadfastly into an unknown future. They are joined by the figures that continue to frequent the island: Césaire, Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and more—interconnected biographies that leak outward from this island to others in the archipelago, and further beyond. What Empire seeks to isolate, we work to entangle; such is one project of decolonisation. And like this, we proceed.

The dresses are for a tableau, in which Bertin restages a painting through sculptural installation, a work entitled Juan de Pareja and his Matadors (2025). Bertin has taken up a fascination with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting, 1656). It’s a classic of the Western canon, made in the Spanish Royal Court of the seventeenth century, a baby girl at its centre, the Infanta Margarita. It has one peculiar, distinguishing feature: the painter is positioned inside the frame, attending to a canvas the viewer cannot see, but his eyes are fixed on the viewer, as are those of the painting’s characters. For classical portraiture to so brazenly invite its audience to be the subject of the painting is its oddity and brilliance. The scene is populated with those that dote on the Infanta: her meninas, a dwarf, a dog. The painter’s gaze is particularly striking; as Michel Foucault writes in The Order of Things, Velázquez is “observing a place that, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, form, face, and identity.”² If there ever was a painting in the canon that demanded its viewer to enter and construct its meaning, it is this one. It’s as though Velázquez asks for his attention to be diverted, distracted, or even repaired. He is less interested in court decorum and more in those who come to perceive it. And so Bertin does what was set up 300 years ago. He enters, and restages the painting’s centre: the Infanta, flanked by her attendants.

His dresses each stand upon their own podiums, bracketed by additional layers of metal, fabric, and wood. Bertin is revisiting not just Las Meninas but what it hides—not a secret or an idea, but an individual. Juan de Pareja was an enslaved man at court and was Velázquez’s assistant. He ground pigments, stretched canvases, and contributed to his paintings. Numerous myths surround him: so undaunted was he that he painted in the dead of the night, a forbidden act done stealthily, under weakening lamplight; so impressive was he that apparently when the King of Spain happened upon his secret paintings, he instantly freed him. In truth, Velásquez signed de Pareja’s manumission papers. De Pareja went on to have his own career as a painter, attentive to detail and tone, with an elegant handling of form. In Bertin’s installation of the four dresses, de Pareja is the centre of the frame, symbolically represented by the metal dress draped in metal necklaces, which is a pointed remark on the architecture of enslavement. He is the cradle of the court, the one around which the scene revolves. His meninas are the matadors: Sanité Bélair in her cutlass-emblazoned dress, and another, meant to be the Martinican model Monique-Antoine “Mounia” Orosemane, the first Black haute couture model of the French runways—who Bertin renders in a dress made from feather and silk. A scene from high European culture is rewritten with a new cast of characters, each a manifestation of agency split from the shadows. 

Bertin’s use of Las Meninas, he tells me, is to collapse the histories of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Fanon wrote: “Europe is literally a creation of the Third World.”³ He wrote of the docks in each harbour that traded in slaves. He wrote that when this Europe, with its hand on its heart, declares it has come to the aid of its previous colonies, “we do not tremble with gratitude.” And indeed, this is true not only in the literal sense, of the labour and the stolen money and gold and the minerals, but also figuratively, Europe can only understand itself—conceptually—in relation to the other, to its colonies.

Inadvertently, Bertin sends me on a quest. I am off searching for de Pareja in Madrid, where I currently live. Tucked close to the opulent Velázquez rooms at the Museo del Prado is a single work by de Pareja, depicting Christ visiting Saint Matthew, at the moment of his vocation. Gold spills onto the tabletop as a group of men surround it; it is the scene from the New Testament in which Christ persuades tax collector Levi to join him as an apostle. It’s an interesting choice of topic by de Pareja: a piercing look at European attachments to property and the conditions of exchange; a spiritual confirmation of its bias. De Pareja paints each figure as though all on one plane; Christ is not necessarily more remarkable than the others, not cloaked in a vivid halo or an effusive divine glow. His clothing is rendered more elaborately, with the folds exaggerated, and his gaze stern; only faint white lines emanate from his temples as indication of his holiness. I feel a rush of excitement at the sight of this painting, as rare as it is, and I am looking for the clues of de Pareja’s analysis, the plastic manners by which he betrays his opinion of his time, this much-elaborated history in which we so rarely hear from the captives. The most remarkable aspect of the painting is at its far left, where de Pareja has drawn himself. He stares out pointedly at us, the viewers, inviting our inference. 

Upon their return to Martinique, Césaire gave the men housing in the capital city’s slums. In Trénelle-Citron, where Bertin grew up, on the outskirts of Fort-de-France, and without realising it until much later into his adulthood, he had been frequenting the Basse-Pointe 16’s homes and lives; they were his neighbours, and his elders too. There is an unquestionable, intractable heroism to the Basse-Pointe 16: not only in their rebellion, but in their unwavering, and in this case, silent commitment to each other, to their community, however imagined and fractured it was by the conditions of their meeting and of their labour contracts. Labour repeats through Bertin’s work, and in his preoccupations. Labour is the autonomy, strength, and material condition by which a life, community, or even a nation is constituted. The ongoing work Merci, merci, merci (Thank You, Thank You, Thank you, 2025), is a collage of used gloves collected by Bertin over twenty-odd years, at the centre of which a small video plays on loop: stuttering footage set to tonal music—percussion, and ascending beats—of Bertin’s studio, fragments of his works, his ovens, his kitchen, his garden and floors, the material, tangible elements of his work. 

It is an homage, a literal thanks, to three men, he tells me: Camille Darsières⁴, Pierre Aliker⁵, and Césaire. There’s a communist intonation here, I say, nodding, thinking Bertin will acquiesce. He does not. “I am not a communist,” he says. In 1956, Césaire quit the French Communist Party, his letter of resignation bitingly detailing the party’s indifference to race, and the segregation he felt between the privileged rights of the white French worker versus those of the Black. “This is not a desire to fight alone and a disdain for all alliances,” he wrote, “It is a desire to distinguish between alliance and subordination, solidarity and resignation.” I understand Bertin’s position better. I can’t help but ask him: If not communism, then what? “I am—profoundly—Black,” Bertin says into the camera, beaming. 

It’s an echo, the voice of those who came before him, like Césaire, whose book of interviews with the scholar Françoise Vergès is titled Nègre je suis, Nègre je resterai. In it, Césaire describes his time in Paris and his early days of studying Greek and Latin cultures: “Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world? It was a hell of a problem. Then came the ethical question. What should I do? This was followed by a metaphysical one: What can we expect?”⁶ The quest remains alive. Bertin explains how his time at SERMAC allowed him to gain perspective on exactly these questions, and indeed what he came to, keenly, was his own Blackness, and even more specifically, to what informed it: those eight women, those that he grew up with, those that find their way into all of his works. Interestingly, the questions that plagued Césaire during his time abroad are precisely those he later created spaces to address once he returned home—or at least begin to. Each of the three men did this; each was, at some point in their lives, a politician with elected mandates. Darsières and Aliker were also involved in establishing the Le Campus Caraïbéen des Arts, the fine arts school of the island, and L’Amep Martinique, a school for underprivileged children. They had an eye on culture, art, and the proliferation of both. Aliker famously said, “La chance de la Martinique, c’est le travail des Martiniquais.”⁷ (The luck of Martinique is in the labour of the Martiniquais.) 

As we near the end of our conversations, I see that Bertin is formulating his own tangible synthesis toward a nationalist sentiment. Very early on, when speaking of autonomy as guided by the actions of women, Bertin and Labeau-Caberia had explained to me the practice of sou-sou—a version of which was also practised in the Americas—where enslaved women would pool their resources to share them. This evolved with time; with money, women pooled what they had and nominated one from the group to receive the funds. A people’s micro-bank, a system of sharing. Should illness or an emergency strike, that woman would be prioritised. Especially when enslaved people were not afforded the rites of dignity: burials for the dead, rituals for the living, the sou-sou would step in, and make it possible. Since we press him, Labeau-Caberia and I, on his nationalism, on his aversion to communism, and as we’re all smiling, feeling moved by and thankful to each other, and as our time is drawing to a close, Bertin says, well, since you ask, “Je suis sou-sou.”