AGNES’s Tracing Kingston’s Solidarities is a series of art-based performances initiated in 2023 that mobilizes Kingston’s rich Black entrepreneurial history through the art of printmaking.

Stories Out Loud transitions from Kingston’s past into its present. Here, Kingston is a site where many things lay embedded: childhood memories, echoes of beloved family and friends, an emergent sense of self and dreams of the future overlayed with traces of a home left behind.

We begin with questions and considerations about how diasporic experiences and archives evolve with new print-related technologies. During workshops, participants engaged in processes of collage, drawing, painting, digital printing, scanning, photography and editing to draw together their living Kingston histories.

Overall, the project seeks to highlight the integral role of print media in telling Kingston’s stories by connecting traditional print artifacts – such as printed text, photographs, passports, heirlooms, and other documents – to contemporary print practices. By considering both digital and material possibilities, it underscores the position of thinking through print to question personal and collective archives and express diasporic identities and experiences. Together, these images and their stories reinforce the idea that memory is mutable but still vital and ever-present.