Boston Tea Party, Nutrition for Carers: Casting Spells into Oyster Shells is a manifestation of artist and researcher Eshwari Ramsali’s dream.

“My dream is often of a big long table with members of my community seated facing one another as far as the eye can see. There is an endless stream of magical drink flowing through a fountain like a river across the whole table that I can see everyone dipping their cups into and drinking from eagerly. When I close my eyes, there is so much laughter I can’t wait to join in. I open my eyes again and everywhere around me is abundance - fruit, cake, drink, purpose and rest. Everyone at my big long table looks fabulous and adorned, singing and dancing, spilling and sipping”

Eshwari’s dream will be made manifest.

[Boston carries significance because it is referencing to the historical protest in 1773, as well as it being an ode to the women healers of the Salem witch trials that happened in Boston in 1692 to 1693, and because the shaker that Eshwari uses on a daily basis to make concoctions that momentarily soothe and heal, is called the Boston shaker.]

Eshwari’s artistic practice seeks to nurture the complexity of silliness and its capacity to hold the enormity of grief and anger. They are dreaming about this dream of a Boston tea party as they are sitting with the (post-) irony of being in this world today. Eshwari believes that we need communion more than anything in the practice of liberation.

This programme manifests as part of our current exhibition. A STATE OF GRACE: of Witches, of Seance, of Voodoo, of Speaking in Tongues and Othered instances of Diasporic TRANS-porta(l)tion.

A STATE OF GRACE is generously supported by the Gemeente Amsterdam West.

Graphic design: @ypsil_lon