Wish You Were Here

DOMINIQUE HEYSE-MOORE It’s January 2026, a few weeks before the opening of Hurvin Anderson’s survey show at Tate Britain, and I wanted to talk to you, Christopher, about the time you spent with Hurvin in Trinidad in 2002. Hurvin grew up in Birmingham and was living in London at the time, and he visited Trinidad for an eight-week Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA) residency in 2002, which was a key moment for him in terms of the development of his painting. I’m at my computer in Tate Britain’s offices in London. I wanted to ask: where are you right now?

CHRISTOPHER COZIER I’m in my studio in St Ann’s, which is a tributary valley that comes down from the north into Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. It’s not rural, but it’s some respite from Port of Spain. St Ann’s is famous for two things. When the early Trinidadian anthropologists, people like J.D. Elder and Andrew Carr, were studying traditional folklore in the mid-20th century, they came up to St Ann’s to see people do things like bongo dancing. But there’s also a mountain called Mount Hololo, which was famously associated with a slave rebellion. One of the slave rebels escaped into the St Ann’s hills.

There’s a calypso called Let Them Fight For Ten Thousand Years (1942) by Growling Tiger, which he sang just after the Second World War broke out. In it, he says he’s going to move into the St Ann’s hills and plant fruits and vegetables, and let the white people fight for 10,000 years. It feels like a pertinent moment to be talking about this, with the US military intervention in Venezuela taking place around us. You can see Venezuela from most parts of Trinidad on a clear day. When I go up into the mountains, which are three or four minutes away in the car, I often think about Burning Spear’s song Man in the Hills (1976), in which he says ‘we should live up in the hills’. It is a homage to the notion of marronage, being off-plantation, off the Western project. Of course, this desire is a fantasy. The technology via which we’re currently speaking draws us back in, in this age of surveillance capitalism. But at least you get some side benefits, like having this transatlantic conversation.

DHM Of course, all of Hurvin’s work is a transatlantic conversation. Having visited you in St Ann’s, I remember it as being really lush. There is that feeling of escape into the verdant landscape, which Hurvin loves to paint so much.

While Hurvin was on his residency, you took him around and introduced him to a lot of Trinidad. (You did the same for me too when I visited.) Could you tell me about meeting Hurvin? How did that happen?

CC Hurvin first visited in 2002, but I had been taking people around Trinidad throughout most of the 1990s. I grew up in the Northwest Peninsula, which is close to the capital but feels different to the rest of the country. The Northwest Peninsula has a higher proportion of Afro-Creole people, and fewer people of Indian descent. Once you leave the peninsula, that situation is reversed. My parents are immigrants from Barbados, so growing up I wasn’t travelling around Trinidad visiting family. The only way for me to get out and see the country was to tour with my mother, who worked as a travelling officer for the cocoa and coffee industry board.

In the 1990s, as my art was getting more popular locally, students would come and interview me for their school exams. I started saying that, in exchange for doing the interview, they had to invite me to their home or neighbourhood. And that was really fascinating, because I would end up in parts of the country you wouldn’t even think of going. So, that’s the background to how I started exploring the island. Around the time Hurvin arrived, I was already doing tours of Port of Spain but trying to understand a different way of navigating the space – because there were ways that people talked in that era. They wouldn’t say ‘meet me at the corner of this street and that street’; they would say, ‘by the nuts man who sells on the corner’, or ‘by the tamarind tree’. It’s a very confusing way of navigating a place. I started doing these informal tours of Port of Spain with students from Trinity College in the US. I was teaching as well. I would do maxi taxi [independently owned minibus] tours with a class, and we would observe things on the routes. I had this classroom of the streets. I even gave Joan Armatrading one of these tours. Someone actually recorded it – you can find it in the BBC archives.

So, Hurvin got pulled into all that when he arrived on his residency in 2002.

DHM Did you and Hurvin go around together in a maxi taxi?

CC No, we were just driving around ourselves. There was one drive in particular that was crazy. I think I almost fell asleep it was so long. We must have driven all the way down to Moruga [on the island’s south coast] or something. I want to believe that there were one or two other people in the car with us. I know the artist Petrona Morrison was there.

DHM I love that kind of inability to recall, because that’s so much part of Hurvin’s work. That strange un-memory.

CC It’s very interesting, the fuzziness of it.

DHM There are places in Port of Spain where you spent some time, but in some of the photographs it looks as if you are just driving past locations. You can almost feel the car moving.

CC I would love to see those pictures.

DHM Hurvin’s got all these plan chests in his studio, and I think a lot of his archive is in there. He returns to these pictures and paints in the studio, returning again and again to certain scenes. But a lot of these photos have been blown up and merged with other images, in the way that memories merge when you repeatedly return to them. What was it like to travel around with Hurvin?

CC When you are talking to someone, moving around with somebody, sharing your experience of a place, something happens. Particularly when you’re dealing with artists. I was showing Hurvin something about Trinidad, which was opening up thoughts for him. But at the same time, his reactions to what I was showing him, and to what he was observing independently, were opening up thoughts for me. It was very fertile. It was exchange. It wasn’t just a one-way conversation. I’m not really sure if he grasped what was at stake there, in terms of how his observations impacted me.

He kept on talking about spaces in between spaces. He was talking about these kinds of spaces he experienced as a young person growing up in England, where he was free from the surveillance of parents, the police, all these organisational things. So, at one point, we started looking at particular places – under flyovers, or empty lots between two buildings – as spaces of freedom. Spaces of becoming.

DHM That’s so interesting, because anybody walking around the show at Tate Britain will recognise that his paintings nearly always depict in-between spaces in some way: street corners in Birmingham, park benches.

CC On one of these drives, Hurvin started telling me about the film Pressure (1976) by Horace Ové, which at that point I hadn’t seen, because it’s not a film that’s available here in the Caribbean. So, he instigated me to go and look for a copy. This is a funny story, but eventually I got a copy on the black market in Brixton.

DHM That is absolutely where you should find your copy!

CC I knew Horace and I told him: ‘Horace, I finally saw Pressure!’ and he was alarmed: ‘Where?’ When I said I got a black-market copy in Brixton, he had the biggest grin on his face. I mean, that’s the ultimate distribution platform. But it wasn’t a good copy, so I didn’t see the film properly until much later, at the Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami. After I watched it, I got back to Hurvin, who said: ‘That kid in there feels like me. My developing years.’

DHM Could we talk about Country Club? We’ll be showing three from this important series of works that Hurvin started in 2003. These works depict the Trinidad Country Club in the Maraval district of Port of Spain. You see the clubhouse and tennis courts, but they are surrounded by high hedges and fences.

CC The property that was rented by the organisers of the residency, and where Hurvin stayed while he was in Trinidad, was next door to the Country Club. They were staying on the second floor, which looked across into the tennis courts. So, when Hurvin was here he took a lot of pictures looking into that space, and these eventually became his Country Club series.

The St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott had a poem set in a country club, ‘A Country Club Romance’ (1951), originally titled ‘Margaret Verlieu Dies’. And there was a country club incident, where I think a white expat woman, married to a Black man, came to Trinidad and wanted to play tennis at a club, but she was asked to leave, which was a scandal. That was one of the scandals in the newspapers that led to greater racial and social awareness. 

When Hurvin and I drove in the countryside, we were looking at the landscape, and we could see those old sugar estates that are abandoned. You can still see the large houses; some of them have pools. There was always a hierarchy. You kind of occupy the places related to your station. When Hurvin started painting the Country Club through that chain-link fence, one of the things that he spoke about – separate from this notion of free spaces, non-surveilled spaces of becoming – was looking through these barriers.

He mentioned that when he went back to Jamaica with his mother as a child, his encounter with Jamaica was through the security barriers in the shops, behind these kinds of grilles in the kiosks. That was where our interests joined. When I think of Hurvin, I think a lot about wrought-iron patterns. One of the first pieces I showed when I came back to the Caribbean in 1988 after studying in the US was a small card with wrought-iron burglar bars on it, and it said ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. I left it around in bars, like a calling card. So, I think that created a dialogue between Hurvin and me, because we both spoke about seeing the world through barriers.

DHM That site – the Country Club – is now earmarked to become an American embassy, right? America wants another foothold.

CC They bought the Country Club property, and building work started there last year, in 2025. I’m assuming that the plan is to build a big compound, because it’s a lot of property. But they’ve always had an embassy here. It used to be a little building on the Savannah, the huge park at the centre of Port of Spain. Hurvin used to play football with guys I went to school with there, right outside the embassy. Hurvin at that point was very sporty. He was always in a tracksuit.

DHM We will be starting the show with Ball Watching 1997, which is a painting that Hurvin began after he went to the Royal College of Art. In that work, also based on an old photograph, he’s sitting with his teenage friends, and they’re watching their ball that has gone into the lake in Handsworth Park in Birmingham.

Ironwork is also present in Hurvin’s Welcome series of works – often it’s the security grille in front of the bar that you visited in Maraval, right? I’ve heard that on the last night of the residency, there was a night out and all the artists went to that bar, and Hurvin has repeatedly painted this place since. We’re going to be including several of the paintings from that series in the show. What are your memories of that bar?

CC My memory is hazy, but Hurvin and people on the residency used to go there while they were in Trinidad. It was in Laventille. In my teenage years I had a girlfriend living in that area. I think a famous DJ and his wife, DJ Gabby and Swanky Gemma, used to own that bar. They were big in the 1960s and 1970s – kind of pre-dancehall. They used to have something called Blockorama then. Reggae hadn’t quite arrived yet. They would play Fela Kuti, James Brown, funk and soca on these massive sound systems. That’s the era I grew up in. My developing years.

DHM You’ve taken us on a tour of the city. We’ve been to St Ann’s, Maraval, Laventille – and then there’s also Belmont, where you now have your arts initiative, Alice Yard. Can you tell us about that place?

CC When my family came here from Barbados as migrants, Belmont was their first point of settlement. It’s a very interesting area. It was the first development area outside downtown Port of Spain. At first it was called Freetown, because a lot of free Africans and different groups were settling there. And then, as the 19th century evolved, it turned into Belmont. All these famous people – activists like Stokely Carmichael, Darcus Howe, Michael X, or musicians like David Rudder – all these people have their roots in Belmont. It’s not a perfect analogy, but Belmont to Port of Spain is almost what Harlem is to New York.

When you visit the homes of people in Belmont, you see these photos of Black people in suits with side parts, brushed-down hair. There are debating societies, pianos, book clubs. There were a lot of free Black people, but also Portuguese, Chinese, and Black and Indian Islamic people too. And it’s been a seedbed of cultural production: writers, artists, calypsonians, musicians. So, this area is very important in the history of carnival. And Belmont has a very proud history. My first experience of the Notting Hill Carnival in the 1980s, when I was taken by a relative, was that the vibe was a Belmont vibe. Alice Yard was inspired by Trinidad’s tradition of communal urban yard spaces and Mas camps. It’s in Belmont now, but it was first based in Woodbrook, another part of downtown Port of Spain.

DHM Woodbrook is also central to the history of carnival.

CC Yes, Woodbrook started in the 1930s, Belmont in the 19th century, and they’re both entwined in terms of cultural imagining.

It’s funny, because areas like Belmont are now being denigrated by real-estate developers. A relative who works for the United Nations was recently told in his security briefing that his insurance wouldn’t cover him if he goes to areas like Belmont. People in the embassies are getting those same briefings.

DHM It’s in an interesting kind of control, isn’t it?

CC Of course there are problems, like every city on the planet. But here it feels like an enterprise. Like fear is a commodity that leads to a real-estate prospect.