Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere 9780813594842

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Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art

Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, Car­ter Mathes, and Kathleen López Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays par­tic­u­lar attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Ca­rib­bean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Ca­rib­bean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Ca­rib­bean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Ca­rib­bean Colonialities. Giselle Anatol, The ­Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Lit­er­a­ ture of the Circum-­Caribbean and African Diaspora Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-­Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015 Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popu­lar ­Music and the Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Novel Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize Alaí Reyes-­Santos, Our Ca­rib­bean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

CARLOS GARRIDO CASTELLANO

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Garrido Castellano, Carlos, author. Title: Beyond representation in contemporary Caribbean art : space, politics, and the public sphere / Carlos Garrido Castellano. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018032218 | ISBN 9780813594811 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813594804 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Caribbean—21st century. Classification: LCC N6591 .G37 2019 | DDC 709.729/0905—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032218 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2019 by Carlos Garrido Castellano All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­r utgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

For my parents & Leonor, with archipelagic admiration

Any “social existence” aspiring or claiming to be “real,” but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the “cultural” realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or l­ ater dis­appear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of real­ity. —­Henry Lefebvre (1991, 53) Géographie impure et combien séculière! —­A imé Césaire (1962, 29)

Contents



Introduction: Art, Space, and Agency in the Con­temporary Ca­rib­be­an

1

Being ­Here and ­There: Curatorial-­Specific Approaches to Ca­rib­bean Real­ity 2 Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere 3 Art Melting in Site-­Specificity: Per­for­mance Art and Public Space in the Dominican Republic 4 ­Toward a Diasporic Counterstreaming Ca­rib­bean Imagination 5 Subversive Alliances: Collaborative Agency beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion Coda: Artistic Agency, Space, and the Praxis of Ca­rib­bean Studies

1 16 43 64 107 127 163

Acknowl­edgments 167 Notes 169 References 191 Index 207 Plates follow page 88

vii

Beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion in Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art

Introduction Art, Space, and Agency in the Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean What you might call the burden of context. The burden of history. The burden of being from a place—­it’s tiresome to keep saying this, but even more tiresome that it’s true—­from a small, peripheral place where individual sensibility is trapped on all sides: by ideologies, by national “culture” narratives, by stereotypes—by that ­whole tangle of expectations about what it means to be an artist from and in the Ca­rib­bean. —­Nicholas Laughlin (2007b, 10) Some histories can only be written from another place. —­Mimi Sheller (2004, 43)

This book investigates the ways in which Ca­rib­bean cultural prac­ti­tion­ers deal with concerns of space and location through con­temporary visual creativity. It examines the maneuvers that Ca­rib­bean visual practice carries out in order to secure spaces of empowerment and freedom. It deals with how Ca­rib­bean art has channeled a critical rationality, in other words, “the 1

2  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

everyday ways in which socie­ties explain and think through the prob­lems they confront” (Chabal 2012, 13). Through this study I propose to explore how Ca­rib­bean individuals and collectivities move beyond pre-­established mappings and expectations, showing the complex ways in which art and agency overlap. ­These encounters give rise to a reconfiguration of art spaces—­ including audiences, spectatorship, curatorship, institutional framework, discursiveness and strategic rooting, and networking—­that challenge the restrictions of nationalism but also the pessimism of some readings of globalization. Ultimately, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Ca­rib­bean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural frame­ work(s) they share. My contention is that con­temporary Ca­rib­bean visual practice is strongly linked to an exercise of spatial imagination in which alternative lives, encounters, and f­ utures are experienced and made pos­si­ble. Art practice is identified h ­ ere with a knowledge of emancipative mappings, an arena from which new social configurations can be envisaged and ultimately constructed. The transformative dimension of Ca­rib­bean visual creativity exercise is not limited to answering back the expectations about what the Ca­rib­bean is or how it is conceived was constructed; rather, it involves the active production of alternative strategies and spaces of enunciation. Delving into Ca­rib­bean artistic practices from the 1980s to the pres­ent day, this book considers how far some cultural initiatives arising in the Ca­rib­bean region can go to empower Ca­rib­bean agents. Its main concern is with agency: agency within space, agency through space, agency as space, space’s agency. The critical interpretation of con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art has been conditioned by the adscription of Ca­rib­bean visual landscapes to par­tic­u­lar, pre-­established geopo­liti­cal configurations (see Mohammed 2010). In this sense, artistic discourses have been understood as standing for and/or challenging “regional” categories such as “West Indies,” “Départements d’Outre-­ Mer,” “Latin American Art,” “Black British Art,” “Black Art,” or even “Ca­rib­bean Art.”1 Although necessary, recognizing ­these ascriptions as incomplete and in­effec­tive reveals to be insufficient if we fail to explain the mechanisms generating and dissimulating this naturalization. The relation between Ca­rib­bean artistic practices and already defined or predetermined contexts or global configurations does more than condition where art is shown and viewed; it also determines the ­whole pro­cess of artmaking.2 The focus on the active role Ca­rib­bean agents have developed in sketching out a context allows us to go a step further. Our task is to allocate and examine

Introduction  •  3

how Ca­rib­bean visual practices produce spatial configurations that operate from below as well as from within ­those systems. It is therefore essential to understand not just how “con­temporary visual artwork reflects the complex and contested aspects of perceiving, signifying, and defining the Ca­rib­bean self in relation to ­others” (Kempadoo 2013, 144) but also how artistic agency actively constructs that Ca­rib­bean self in multiple, heterogeneous ways. The Ca­rib­bean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. ­There is no doubt that the Ca­rib­bean has played a central role in the definition of a Western zeitgeist, where the region was (and is) associated with a tropical, exuberant landscape. More than that, it is undeniable that the Ca­rib­bean has been historically ­shaped according to external cultural and politico-­economic configurations. Acknowledging the weight of ­these forces (on this question, see De Maeseneer and Van Hecke 2004), I argue that something e­ lse must be added in order to address con­ temporary Ca­rib­bean visual creativity. The creative pro­cesses of spatial reconfiguration examined in this book involve multiple actors and span a vast range of contexts, including museums and art galleries throughout and beyond the Ca­rib­bean region, but also activist and socially-­engaged initiatives, urban reconfigurations, artistic interventions, or educational practices. Scrutinizing this diversity of practices, this book draws on the active and constructive side of visual creativity, conceived h ­ ere as a contextual practice transcending the medium of visual art and operating within an expanded social terrain. When dealing with geo­graph­i­cal theory, Tariq Jazeel warns about the importance of not forgetting “the ways that established conceptual orthodoxies within the discipline [of geography] work in fact to ideologically constitute the geo­graph­i­cal imagination in par­tic­u­lar kinds of ways” (Jazeel 2014, 89). In a similar way, the artists analyzed in this book are not just striving to answer back orthodox interpretations of Ca­rib­bean real­ity; rather, acting as “determined inhabitants of space” as Foucault would put it (1986, 22), they are actively developing a resilient, productive, and alternative geo­graph­i­cal imagination in which discourse is just one part of a more complex set of creative strategies that speak to “the grounded geo­ graph­i­cal contextuality of ‘real politics’ ” (Jazeel 2014, 89). Hence this book’s interest in embedding the critique of specific artistic discourses and artworks within a broader discussion of the ­whole set of cultural politics and social dynamics surrounding them.3

4  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

This discussion is tied into a very specific chronological framework, that of the last de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury and the first years of the twenty-­ first. The period between the 1990s and the 2010s is marked by the creation and consolidation of art institutions and biennials, the creation of artist-­ managed spaces and workshops, the consolidation of the exhibition format and its challenge, and the interest of mainstream contexts in Ca­rib­bean art. The period ­under scrutiny is also characterized by the final demise of revolutionary ­futures, which culminates in the series of pro­cesses and events that marked the 1980s: the murder of Walter Rodney, the collapse of the Grenada Revolution, the dispersal of the Ca­rib­bean Left from the cause of regional emancipation, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the establishment of neoliberal policies in the dif­fer­ent Ca­rib­bean states. The choice of this temporal framework responds to specific reasons: ­these de­cades constitutes a decisive moment in the histories of Ca­rib­bean artistic practice, one defined by the expansion of Ca­rib­bean artistic discourses, the rupture with national histories of artistic modernity, the development of long-­lasting creative bonds between dif­fer­ent Ca­rib­bean territories, the impact of globalization and neoliberalism. It is true that all of ­these pro­cesses took place within a framework of cap­i­tal­ist commoditization and cultural marketization; at the same time, however, the fluidity deriving from this pro­cess permitted a radical redefinition of artistic agency and, more specifically, of the space of art and artists within Ca­rib­bean socie­ties. Many of the artists and collectives whose proj­ects are analyzed in this book envisage active ways of engaging Ca­rib­bean socie­ties in a more effective way.4 They are concerned with inventing a dif­fer­ent art world, often adopting a “philistine” approach (to borrow Gregory Sholette’s [2017a, 21] apt conceptualization) to creativity, something that in many cases kept them beneath the radar of international experts and flaneurs. Working from such a position entails several risks, among them precarity, economic dependence, and institutional isolation. Coping with this situation then becomes a central concern in the artistic and creative practices of many Ca­rib­be­ans, and it takes pre­ce­dence over the preoccupation with defining and labeling what is distinctive about Ca­rib­bean creativity. Many of the artists interviewed for this book w ­ ere forced to combine their creativity with educational or more “commercial” jobs; many share the role of con­temporary artist and cultural entrepreneur; for ­others, fi­nally, studying abroad and getting loans represents both an opportunity and an economic path with no guaranteed results. This unstable situation has shifted the landscape of visual creativ-

Introduction  •  5

ity across the region, redefining how art is produced from a Ca­rib­bean perspective. My interpretation of the creative practices arising within this period is not a pessimistic one, however. The last two de­cades are marked by the increasing social relevance of artistic practice in the configuration of Ca­rib­ bean socie­ties and the establishment of platforms for civic engagement and negotiation. During ­these de­cades, Ca­rib­bean artists have challenged external gazes upon the region and, more importantly, have questioned what it means to make art and to be an artist, attempting to identify the sphere of influence and the public relevance of cultural practices. The agency of ­these individuals and platforms is determined by its subversiveness in re­spect of cultural identity as understood in national, territorial terms, by its capacity to translate and connect ­causes and differences (Mbembe 2001), awaking the interest of p­ eople with no previous rec­ord of engagement with con­temporary artistic practice. In this re­spect, transformation and subversiveness are identified as a driving force in the pro­cesses of cultural mappings analyzed ­here. When confronting Ca­rib­bean visual creativity, then, the following questions must be addressed: Who are the subjects of Ca­rib­bean art? What is the role of canonical demarcations in the configuration of Ca­rib­bean artistic practices? Whose forces and interests are contending in the configuration of a Ca­rib­bean art medium? How do such forces propose alternative cultural, emotive, and cognitive mappings? In what ways, and u­ nder what conditions, does art promote an alternative per­for­mance of race, gender, and identity? To what extent do contextual efforts challenge pre-­existing symbolic and normative artistic ­orders and which art defies? How are concepts such as innovation, engagement, responsibility, participation, and re­sis­tance to be mea­ sured if we translate the focus from discourse to contextualized agency? Does visual creativity allow the emancipation of citizenship for Ca­rib­ bean populations? In which ways does this creativity develop contextual strategies of enunciation and affirmation? “Contextual” stands h ­ ere for something other than recognizing that cultural agency is always spatially located. The assumption that art occurs within a postcolonial, geopo­liti­cal configuration marked by the consequences of imperialism not only falls short in explaining the singularities, and ultimately the possibilities, of practice and action;5 it also owes much to an imperialistic logic, in accordance with Said’s seminal thinking.6 The artworks and creative pro­cesses analyzed ­here challenge and reformulate the

6  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

­ hole spatial logic in which creative and social experiences unfold. By focusw ing on their productions, we ­shall be in a stronger position to mea­sure how “Ca­rib­bean Art” relates to a configuration of an ever-­shifting, ever-­negotiated context that overlaps and subsumes local and global spatial formations. Furthermore, the reading of visual creativity offered h ­ ere takes account of the multiple agents involved in visual creativity, who are actively reconfiguring, expanding, and constantly generating their identities and places of enunciation. In recognizing the active role of Ca­rib­bean creators, this book tries to provide a clear view of the energies, aspirations, and consequences of the efforts made by Ca­rib­bean p­ eople, who despite being occasionally silenced or misrepresented have not lost their capacity to remake the medium in which the action takes place. Ultimately, this book aims to destabilize the understanding of context as a framework in which artists operate and with which artworks deal. Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space offers valuable insights into how to undertake this task. The potential of Lefebvrian-­ produced space in the understanding of Ca­rib­bean cultural and po­liti­cal practices has already been discussed (Crichlow and Northover 2009, 47–49); for our purposes ­here, the notion of a differential space, a space embedded in power dynamics, holds special interest (Lefebvre 1991, 52). This real­ity is ­shaped by class strug­gles—as well as racial and gender ones, we must add—­ which materialize in spatial terms. Lefebvre contrasts this kind of space with an abstract one, marked by the reproduction of the homogenizing forces of world capitalism. If the second one is constructed from consensus and conventions, which gives it the image of being “trouble-­free,” the first is open to the fluctuations and the negotiations of a “spatial economy.” Space emerges not only as a produced, materialized real­ity but also as one that can gather and embrace the possibility of emancipation. It would be subjected to a pro­ cess of “making places,” in Crichlow’s and Northover’s (2009, 19) words. What is striking in Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space for the purposes of this book is that that it makes thinking on divergent fluxes of action—­ violent and other­wise—­susceptible to “molding” real­ity from potentially competing perspectives. For Lefebvre, power codifies space, but at the same time any sanctioning of spatial configurations is not exonerated from the possibility of being defied and transformed. This eventual transformation comes from action, since “a spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space: rather it is a means of living in that space, of understanding it, and of producing it” (Lefebvre 1991, 47–48). Dealing with curatorial,

Introduction  •  7

participatory, and collective practices that extend beyond repre­sen­ta­tion and discourse, this book tries to read Ca­rib­bean visual culture as an example of the capacity of cultural practices to transform Lefebvre’s spatial aspirations into real­ity.

Space and Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art Criticism In his monograph on the Grenada Revolution, David Scott (2013) recalls his idea of problem-­space in the context of a discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of temporality. ­A fter pointing out how Agamben rejects the time that is made equivalent to historical folding, Scott points out how Agamben’s interest in Benjamin is more a philosophical borrowing than a contextualized grounding in Benjamin’s troubled experience. Scott (9) warns against understanding context as “a muted background,” conceding greater relevance to critical engagement with space and context. H ­ ere he is seeking to grasp the specificities of thinking through space and time, si­mul­ ta­neously operating in a par­tic­u­lar and unrepeatable set of coordinates and being translatable to other situations, si­mul­ta­neously affecting and locating history and challenging its primacy over space and time. This book discusses a set of creative practices that share this radical interest. ­These case studies do not just relate to Ca­rib­bean space and history and time; they also challenge the reductive adscription and one-­sidedness to which many postcolonial creative practices have been historically confined. However, at the same time, the practices examined ­here point unerringly to the determination with which Ca­rib­bean individuals as well as collectives have striven to make other temporalities and spacings pos­si­ble.7 ­There have been many attempts to define what Ca­rib­bean art is, what constitutes Ca­rib­bean contemporaneity in terms of space. The invaluable contributions of Veerle Poupeye, Annie Paul, Krista Thompson, Patricia Mohammed, Claire Tancons, Leon Wainwright, Gerardo Mosquera, Tatiana Flores, Yolanda Wood, and Michelle Stephens have consolidated a sharp and vibrant critical thinking on artistic practice, one attentive (yet from a multiplicity of points of view) to the exchanges that Ca­rib­bean creators are developing within a global arena. The abovementioned authors have, in any case, represented a sort of virtual yet constant group of interlocutors throughout the pro­cess of writing this book. This book discusses their body of writing in some detail, borrowing concepts and discussing ideas as the dif­f er­ent

8  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

concerns of the text unfold, while at the same time developing a distinctive reading of con­temporary Ca­rib­bean visual creativity based on the relevance of visual practices in articulating active pro­cesses of space and context production. Before outlining this approach, a discussion of the most relevant lit­er­a­ture is in order. Veerle Poupeye’s Ca­rib­bean Art emerged in 1998 as the first major survey of con­temporary Ca­rib­bean artistic practice. It undertook the titanic task of mapping Ca­rib­bean visual practices from an era prior to the Eu­ro­pean colonization ­until the end of the twentieth ­century. Developing a thematic approach that privileges the last de­cades of that c­ entury, Poupeye perceived a shift between the artists working in the 1960s or 1970s and t­hose who appeared from the 1980s onward. This last generation, Poupeye argued, “has come of age in an era characterized by disillusionment with the social and po­liti­cal ideals of the previous generation” (Poupeye 1998, 184). Furthermore, they are more interested in “creating culture” than in representing it (183). Poupeye’s book has been already widely discussed (see, for example, Paul 1998, 1999). Ca­rib­bean Art advanced the idea that a new generation of artists and creative practices was emerging out of disenchantment with nation-­based po­liti­cal ideals, strengthening the bonds between the dif­fer­ ent Ca­rib­bean territories. Chapter 1 ­will explore this notion in greater depth. In Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Ca­rib­be­an, Leon Wainwright characterizes the region’s creative production in terms of its reception as anachronistic and out-­of-­date (2012, 4–14), coping with the demands of “ ‘catching up’ with a heritage that was not theirs” (5). Wainwright’s Ca­rib­bean is one s­ haped by transnational fluxes (especially t­ hose linking the West Indies with its former metropolises) and coexisting yet uneven time periods, in which artists strug­gle to “undermine the legacy of former imperial centers and how they temporally displace their former colonial peripheries” (2012, 13). Sharing with Wainwright the interest in exploring the practical consequences of the temporal disconnections caused by globalization and neoliberalism,8 the pres­ent work complements this idea by suggesting that Ca­rib­bean histories of contemporaneity are much more s­ haped by mo(ve) ments of shaping and instituting than of “catching up.” On the one hand, extemporaneity is not by force linked to diasporic movements, as it is already pres­ent and at work in Ca­rib­bean cultural landscapes (two chapters of this book are dedicated precisely to asserting the existence and the weight of a Ca­rib­bean institutional real­ity, one which cannot be subsumed ­under such binary categories of province-­metropolis, center-­periphery, and so on). On

Introduction  •  9

the other hand, many of the fluxes discussed ­here are not concerned with reversing “influences” and “transmission” across colonized and metropolitan territories; although “engaged on several historical fronts” (13), Ca­rib­bean creators are transcending the colony-­metropolitan binaries, grounding artistic practice on the shared, circum-­Caribbean, lived experience of contextual temporality.9 More recently, Michelle Stephens has argued that Ca­rib­bean art is strongly linked to the notions of space and, more specifically, to the idea of an archipelagic real­ity, which renders compulsory discussing her insights ­here. In a recent article, Stephens emphasizes the need to conceive Ca­rib­bean artistic creativity from a position transcending insularity, attempting to determine “new spatial configurations of a Ca­rib­bean contemporaneity” (2013, 25). This “maritime-­based” endeavor is set against the predominance of continentality in postcolonial approximations to the Atlantic space, including that of Gilroy (1993). With this in mind, she presses for a theoretical approach that takes account of the modernity and cosmopolitism of the creole subjects whose lived space is framed through the Ca­rib­bean insular territory. One of the major hindrances to this conceptual exercise of spatial imagination, she argues, is represented by the way that area studies and an external gaze have applied a fragmenting lens to the Ca­rib­bean, singularizing each island and reterritorializing the region through this restrictive movement (Stephens 2013, 12). Dealing with visual repre­sen­ta­tion, she suggests that “it is geography that could now provide some useful, complementary frames for resituating the status of culture as a category of knowledge about the Ca­rib­bean” (9). Fi­nally, the consequences of that critical reterritorialization would affect the idea of an academic discipline focused on Ca­rib­bean studies: “A con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Studies might think of itself as engaged in the proj­ect of connecting, drawing, and mapping the relations that emerge and evolve from the repeating patterns and tropes that have come to constitute Ca­rib­bean surfaces and places. In this kind of topology, con­temporary Ca­rib­bean studies also needs to move back and forth across both space and time, in a crisscrossing, decentralized motion not unlike the ones imaged by rhumb lines on old portolan maps” (25). This book shares Stephens’s interest in geography as the main path for the f­ uture of Ca­rib­bean studies. Her idea of Ca­rib­bean contemporaneity defined through space, not as a secluded privilege of diasporic, cosmopolitan subjects but also shaping the lives of (equally modern and cosmopolitan) “Ca­rib­bean creoles” is relevant throughout this study. Pursuing this line of enquiry

10  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

further, the main focus in this book is on the multiple ways in which artistic agency is spatially materialized. Although this would necessarily involve an exercise in regional imagination, throughout t­ hese pages imagination is linked to the active production of an archipelagic territory by Ca­rib­bean locals. Acknowledging the contributions deriving from this critical tradition, this book also attempts to approach Ca­rib­bean artistic practice in the light of the following questions: What happens when we “spatialize the historical narrative[s]” (to borrow Edward Soja’s words [1989, 1]) of artistic modernization, belatedness, or innovation?10 What would be the result of choosing experience and context-­based aesthetics as the central issue in con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art? How are artists and cultural creators defining and materializing spatial concerns in the Ca­rib­bean region?

The Structure of the Book This book is or­ga­nized in five chapters, which respond to the questions asked above. This structure w ­ ill facilitate exploration of the multiple levels on which Ca­rib­bean creative agency is embodied in spatial terms. Bearing in mind the theoretical concepts sketched out in this introduction, the following chapters address specific issues that range from curatorial practices, participatory proj­ects, public interventions, art criticism, and institutional politics. Chapter 1 draws on large-­scale curatorial proj­ects produced in the Ca­rib­ bean or dealing with Ca­rib­bean art in order to assess the impact of art exhibitions in configuring an expanded arena where divergent forces can be put into practice. Examining exhibitions curated in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, Curação, France, and Spain, among other locations, it attempts to define the Ca­rib­bean curatorial from a position that problematizes the identification of curating with exhibition-­making. Exploring Ca­rib­bean art exhibitions or­ga­nized from outside the region as well as internal curatorial dynamics, the chapter explores how specific curatorial practices are inserted within a complex set of spatial and social dynamics, while at the same time they are responsible for triggering and giving rise to ­those dynamics. Conceived sometimes in a discursive mode, as a platform for regional definition, and sometimes as strategies to resist the evils of globalization, the analy­sis of Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices should take full

Introduction  •  11

account of the complex set of interests and forces operating within them. Any judgment of such practices should therefore consider the impact and the consequences of the forces mobilized by curatorial means, investigating the effects and the bonds of solidarity that emerge in dif­fer­ent and divergent locations. This is not to minimize the scope of curatorial action within the configuration of Ca­rib­bean art’s contexts of display; rather, it is a question of factoring in the complex and heterogeneous ways in which artistic agencies develop and compete against and beyond, but also within, the “official” logic of cultural politics that lie b­ ehind curatorial practices. Such insights on curatorial initiatives raise other issues: how they accumulate and synchronize postcolonial, “South” solidarities and agendas (Dirlik 2007), generating new art mappings; how they challenge the global-­local divide, overlapping spatial practices, and widening national cultural forums; and fi­nally, how they foster and manage novelty and innovation, dealing with dif­fer­ent conceptions of the con­temporary. If regional displays are conceived not just as exhibitional surveys of a given state of ­things, but rather as multivalent cir­cuits of knowledge and exchange, a new map emerges, which is related to the active energies that Ca­rib­bean artists, curators, and critics develop. Delving into how curating brings together multiple actors and elicits interconnections, whilst highlighting the potential pluralism lying in curatorial practices, this chapter traces the history of Ca­rib­bean curatorship, from the moment of creation of the first biennials to the pres­ ent day, when a distancing from identity and “issue-­specificity” is pursued. This focus on the active, generative ability of regional curatorship critically illuminates the spatial logic of Ca­rib­bean artistic practice, determining the importance of curatorial activity in decentering the art world. Chapter 2 approaches a diverse set of practices seeking to challenge located forms of institutional power. It analyzes a wide range of practices extending across multiple locations and includes institutional critique, “fake” exhibitions such as Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann’s Invisible Biennial in St. Kitts, artistic interventions in international biennials, installations in Trinidad and Liverpool, public demonstrations in Cuba and Martinique, and anti-­biennials in the Dominican Republic. A ­ fter questioning the appropriateness and relevance of such criticism, this section identifies an interest in developing subversive ways of dealing with institutional spaces and normativity. This chapter evaluates how Ca­rib­bean creators have developed a long genealogy trajectory of interventive, critical approaches to the institutional conditions that regulate art. Responses to institutional power

12  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

have been frequently overshadowed by the difficulty of transcending the ­simple act of criticizing the creative experiences in cause. Although the examples presented ­here share some aspects of Institutional Critique, in that they operate within Ca­rib­bean art institutions in order to disclose the power relations at play ­behind ­these institutions’ normativity, they also go beyond the negativity and the pretensions of universalism of such a tendency through an engagement with institutional normativity aware of the specificities of the context and capable also of completing the disruptive side of criticism through active propositions. Per­for­mance and public space are the main topic of chapter 3. In this case, the politics of per­for­mance in the Dominican Republic are examined in order to determine how participatory artworks have ­shaped the context of spectatorship of Ca­rib­bean visual practices. The chapter covers actions undertaken in Santo Domingo, Santiago de los Caballeros, and Puerto Plata, cities subjected to very dif­fer­ent sociocultural dynamics. In looking at them, I try to determine how far participation and outsourced per­for­mance have brought a redefinition of practices of citizenship, putting ­these into practice within Dominican public spaces. Also in this chapter, the idea of community is subjected to critical scrutiny, paying attention to the forces aggregated within performative works. My aim h ­ ere is to reveal how artistic participation is grounded in the interstices between artistic and social transformation. U ­ nder discussion ­here is participatory art, equally concerned with the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and the role of practice in engaging heterogeneous audiences. The Dominican Republic offers a perfect case-­study in this regard: since the Trujillo dictatorship, the body has become a privileged locus for channeling prohibited racial, gender, and po­liti­cal options. Trujillo’s attempt to generate a “straightforward” national identity transformed the body into a potential site of subversion. Focusing on per­for­mance and participation, the chapter draws on the debates arising in connection with artistic proj­ects from the 1960s to the pres­ent day, detailing the importance of the spatial shaping of the complex politics of race and repre­sen­ta­tion within Dominican Republic. The second main objective pursued in this chapter involves extending the limits of a set of art proj­ects traditionally reduced to the expression of cultural and racial difference. Keeping in mind that “terms such as empowerment, agency, activity and re­sis­tance, as much as de­pen­dency, passivity and subordination, are key aspects of our con­temporary vocabulary of rule and are constituted in relation to definite regimes of government and power

Introduction  •  13

relations” (Dean 2013, 87), this section tries to locate the possibilities of Dominican performative proj­ects within a more open and heterogeneous framework, in which per­for­mance functions not as mere oppositional practices but rather as multivalent, contextualized resources dealing with, among other issues, the situation of Ca­rib­bean artists, the restrictions they face within national and transnational arenas, the difficulties of defining and speaking for “communities,” and the prob­lems of outsourcing artistic agency. Chapter 4 adds to our understanding of diasporic pro­cesses of spacing by focusing on the visual production of artists from the Francophone Ca­rib­ bean. Moving back and forth between Martinique, Guadeloupe, and France, the aim ­here is to analyze a Ca­rib­bean imagination able to respond to the phenomenon of mobility in which Ca­rib­bean individuals and groups are engaging. The rigid nation-­diaspora binary is challenged, as artworks and artists are participating in complex spatial relocations. The chapter borrows from recent conceptualizations of the Francophone cultural landscape, trying to embed analy­sis of visual practices within debates on citizenship, creolization, and nationalism (see Barrow-­Gilles and Marshall 2003). The chapter also explores how guianan, Martinican, and Guadalupean artists living between France and the Ca­rib­bean are tied in to dif­fer­ent categorizations and expectations between the metropolitan space and the Ca­rib­bean one (see Archer-­Straw 2000). Francophone Ca­rib­bean creators have managed to sketch imaginative, not easily comprehended responses ­toward t­ hese expectations, revealing the limitations of working within the given context of being “créole” artists living in the diaspora. Rejecting their classification as “second-­class citizens” or exotic subjects, Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists are creating a ­whole new understanding of transnational citizenship (Ong 1999) and defining alternative ways of mobility. The continuous movement of ­going back and forth between the metropolitan and Ca­rib­bean spaces is shown to be essential in rendering artistic practice expansive and ambivalent, providing it with the capacity to address multiple contexts and audiences at one and the same time. The final chapter of the book, chapter 5, deals with Ca­rib­bean infrastructural, socially-­engaged, and artist-­managed artistic initiatives. Ca­rib­bean stories of artistic contemporaneity have been linked to the success of specific individuals in whose works community appears to be a wall against which innovation and originality collide. In trying to dismantle this image, I argue that to a ­great extent horizontal and socially driven creativity is shaping recent Ca­rib­bean creativity. This examination gives priority to collaborative

14  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

art practices based on experience and practice, in which repre­sen­ta­tion falls short in capturing the spatial dynamics resulting from shared experience. It should be noted that the capacity for subversion of t­ hese art practices does not lie in the demarcation of subaltern c­ auses or indeed in granting them a voice but rather in the ways they create spaces in which dif­fer­ent ­causes can be linked and incorporated to a shared debate. ­These creative manifestations pres­ent a flexible understanding of community, one that involves recognizing multiple and often opposing modes of conceiving and acting within the public domain. In them, cultural translation emerges as a key ele­ment when trying to portray multiple agencies ­behind “alternative” models of artistic institutionalism, since it allows passing from an explanation based on elisions to one focused on degrees of engagement and empowerment (Santos 2006). The analy­sis focuses h ­ ere on Ca­rib­bean collaborative proj­ects dating from the 1980s to the pres­ent moment. Spanning Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Curação, it comprises three main ele­ments: First, it explores the ways in which divergent and competing agencies and modes of citizenships are generated within collective artistic spaces; secondly, it evaluate the impact of the cultural links established by t­ hose who generate new strategic mappings ­going beyond po­liti­cal and economic demarcations and enabling nonartistic bonds of solidarity. The distribution and relocation of innovation and knowledge is of special importance ­here. Fi­nally, more subtle and corporeal levels of engagement are considered, bringing together the performative condition of sexuality and citizenship and the subversive character of the contextual configurations arising within collaborative practices. Addressing ­these three strands through a comparison of heterogeneous creative initiatives, the chapter explores the ways in which in­de­pen­dent and artist-­run spaces generate spatial practices and function as platforms for creativity, bringing to the forefront a tension (though a productive one) “between structure and agency” (Kamugisha 2007, 21). This book was written in several locations, and its first draft versions contained comments and ideas expressed in Spanish, En­glish, French, and recently even in Portuguese. As I was born in Southern Spain, academically trained as a Ca­rib­be­anist between Eu­rope, the Ca­rib­bean, and the United States and am currently based in Portugal, something of this “diversity” may have affected—­hopefully in a positive way—­the final version of this book. Its pages contain insights gained from the Ca­rib­bean, Eu­rope, and the United States through many conversations held in many dif­fer­ent places.

Introduction  •  15

It arises as a response to the interests and the preoccupations found while curating several “Ca­rib­bean art exhibitions” and interviewing Ca­rib­bean artists, curators, art critics, and cultural agents of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti between 2008 and 2014. In t­ hese conversations—­held in a babel-­ like mixture of languages and accents—­the same concerns with specific aspects of Ca­rib­bean creativity ­were voiced time and time again. Namely, the lack of interest from an international art scene, the narrow-­mindedness of the local artistic scene, the exclusions and injustices found when dealing with art institutions, and national and international cultural politics, all identified as major obstacles to artistic creativity. ­These conversations, however, ­were also full of positive responses about the active role that art could play in envisaging and materializing alternative social configurations. This book therefore acknowledges the extraordinary capacity of Ca­rib­bean art practice and criticism to open up innovative ways of understanding cultural dynamics, ­going beyond theoretical bound­aries and establishing emancipative spaces for intellectual, symbolic, and social change.11 It is also an homage to a group of individuals and collectives who have endeavored to safeguard a space for debate and creativity at a moment fueled by the intensification of encounters within “a globalized world” as well as the radicalization of cultural—­and other—­inequalities. An account of Ca­rib­bean art based on a revanchist account of the categorizations, exclusions, and limitations in force in national and transnational scenarios at colonial and postcolonial eras ­will always remain incomplete without acknowledging the strategies, negotiations, and paths developed by the artists, spectators, and cultural agents involved in art. This is precisely what this book sets out to achieve.

1

Being H ­ ere and T­ here Curatorial-­Specific Approaches to Ca­rib­bean Real­ity Curatorial function is, thus, inherently restricted by the interests of larger or more power­f ul groups and constituencies. To pretend that any type of alternative field of action exists outside of the web of market or institutionally dominated interests is a fallacy. —­Belkis Ramírez (1996, 15)

“Why do we need curators anyway?” This last question shocked me. In 2010, while I was ­doing fieldwork in Santiago de los Caballeros (Dominican Republic), I attended a round ­table led by the Cuban curator Iván de la Nuez, whose book Un mapa de sal (A salt-­made map, 2010) related to the seminar topics. He was visiting the Dominican Republic and deci­ded to transform a conventional round t­ able into an open-­to-­all debate with the local art crew of Santiago. A ­ fter a short pre­sen­ta­tion, de la Nuez urged members of the audience to express their con16

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  17

cerns on creativity, institutional dynamics, and any other pressing issue they ­were facing. The statements w ­ ere predictable, ranging from shy introductions to passionate defenses of the importance of Santiaguero artists in the definition of the Dominican national imaginary. As in any improvised artistic gathering, the mood started heating up ­after the speakers grew more confident. Then an artist asked a question that took the atmosphere of the meeting back to its initial state: “Why do we need curators anyway?” The figure of the curator has always been a problematic one. Not long ago, the image of the curator was easily identifiable: when it came to mind, one could not help thinking of power­ful administrators, dictatorial figures scrutinizing and ruling over exhibition space. The history of curatorship, Terry Smith argues (2012a), is a history of curatorial practices (exhibition-­ making at the beginning), both the practices themselves and the role played by curators. In that regard, he argues, “the purpose of curating t­ oday is something like this: To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) con­temporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as ­these are manifest in art pres­ent, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal” (2012a, 29). Curating would then be a ­matter of ­doing and si­mul­ta­ neously reflecting reflexively on that d­ oing (Fowler 2007). The question launched at the round ­table in Santiago de los Caballeros arose out of the artist’s perception of the uselessness and unproductivity of curators (“they produce nothing, we can do well without their help”), as much as from suspicion about their interference (“they control how our production is displayed and understood”). ­Those questions are even more pressing when translated to the Ca­rib­ bean, where the development of curatorial practices has been marked since an early moment by external interference. Curatorial parachuting is just the last stage in a long tradition of transforming Ca­rib­bean real­ity into visual commodities, a tradition dating from colonial times. Ca­rib­bean curatorial agents (not exclusively trained curators but also artists, cultural man­ag­ers, or social animators, if this distinction between roles holds any value in our days) have striven to ­counter an international interest in the region that produced art exhibitions delimiting what the Ca­rib­bean is, where it begins and ends, and how it should be displayed, understood, and dealt with. International curators, on the other hand, have always provided “local” artists an opportunity of international recognition, networking, and ­career development. The words of the artist who attended de la Nuez’s lecture in Santiago ­were ­shaped by ambivalent expectations of curatorial

18  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

practice. Curators w ­ ere imported goods and modern-­day colonizers in equal parts, empowering agents or culprits of “shows of force” (Luke 1992). Four years ­later, in 2014, I was back in the Dominican Republic. On this occasion, my fourth visit to the country, I was the curator. I or­ga­nized a retrospective bringing together work produced by the artist Belkis Ramírez over the previous twenty years. Ramírez is a well-­k nown figure in the Dominican Republic landscape since the late 1980s. By then, we had a relatively long history of collaboration and friendship: In 2010 I interviewed Ramírez as part of a set of conversations with Dominican artists (Garrido Castellano 2011, 163–189); in the three months I spent in the country that year, she and the other artists who belonged to the Quintapata collective shared many conversations, challenged my ideas, and w ­ ere e­ ager to join me in studio visits, exhibition meetings, and talks.1 Three years ­later, the “Quintapatas” asked me to be their spokesperson in designing the intervention they brought to the Latin American Pavilion of the Venice Biennial, a collaborative piece called DNA curated by Paz Guevara.2 Organ­izing the retrospective, however, placed us in a dif­f er­ent situation, in many re­spects. Firstly, I was a young, foreign curator coming from the Dominican Republic’s former metropolis, and therefore by definition an outsider. Secondly, Ramírez’s ­career path of more than two de­cades was well known by the Dominican cultural audience. Thirdly, the space chosen for the show, a colonial ­house in Santo Domingo’s Ciudad Colonial hosting the Centro Cultural de España (CCE), had a long history of innovative and daring exhibition-­making in the local art milieu. And fi­nally, our show just followed the Quintapata’s participation in Venice. Expectations ­were high, and they w ­ ere matched by our enthusiasm. ­ oing a retrospective exhibition To be sure, Ramírez had her own ghosts. D ­after twenty years is a difficult task in many ways, one of t­ hese being the need to (re)view the fruits of a long ­career from the perspective of the pres­ ent. Self-­valorization and hesitation are the bread and butter of ­every artist; multiply their effect by twenty years, and a complicated situation to ­handle, to say the least, ­will arise. Twenty years of sustained artistic output is a long achievement but also a burden in which failures, success, influences, and histories intermingle. On top of that, ­there ­were practical issues we needed to resolve: some of the pieces we wanted to include ­were lost, ­others had deteriorated, and yet some ­others had been integrated in new installational devices and could not be removed from them. To deal with the situation, we deci­ded to make our doubts vis­i­ble. Many of the artworks that

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  19

Ramírez created for the retrospective w ­ ere s­haped by an essayistic tone that ­was not as vis­i­ble in previous pieces. Hasta que me guste (­Until I like it) was an unusual retrospective from the moment we deci­ded to focus on new material instead of creating a “Belkis Ramírez museum” with material with which the Dominican audience would already be familiar. In the place of a­ ctual artworks, we planted several artistic clues that the local public would easily recognize. Moreover, some installations updated old collaborations with colleagues and fellow creators who have accompanied Ramírez through ­those two de­cades, among them Pascal Meccariello, Raquel Paiewonsky, Citlaly Miranda, Frank Bueno, Alex Otero, and María Castillo. The exhibition’s main issue was hesitation. For instance, Hasta que me guste, the piece that gave the w ­ hole display its title, presented four hours of conversations accessible to spectators once they entered a semi-­sphere hanging from the art center entrance. At first, the dialogue is undistinguishable, but ­after a while spectators would recognize Ramírez’s voice commenting on the same exhibition they are visiting. I was the other interlocutor, and the conversation, in fact, consisted of se­lections from all the discussions we held ­until the proj­ect was fully configured. The exhibition was curated mostly through the continuous Skype conversations I held with Ramírez throughout 2013. Being separated by an ocean does not aid coordination, and although I had the advantage of knowing the space of the CCE from my stay in 2010 and subsequent visits, nothing could equal being t­ here in person. In the absence of that, we at least had the advantage of knowing each other well. Hasta que me guste attempted to make use of this advantage while transmitting to the spectator the sense of disorientation lying b­ ehind any curatorial pro­cess. An anecdote related to Hasta que me guste resulted in a situation that was revealing for both of us. At the exhibition opening, a relatively large audience gathered, among them a large w ­ oman who entered the sound installation and stayed t­here for a while, listening to our voices. I captured this moment in a photo­graph that seemed to perfectly stand for what we wanted to achieve through this exhibition: the vernacular image of the w ­ oman contrasted with the white design-­like semi-­sphere of the installation, fulfilling the intentions we had when we deci­ded to situate hesitation and trial and error at the center of the CCE space. Without looking deliberately, we found “our perfect spectator,” one capable of fruitfully engaging with the ideas and stimuli we w ­ ere presenting but also of challenging them and revealing their

20  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

limitations. The installation Hasta que me guste was special for many reasons, and soon it became the central point of the exhibition, the piece p­ eople interacted with most. Aware of this, the CCE used the piece to advertise the ­whole show, only, instead of portraying “our perfect spectator,” they chose the image of a young urban man dressed casually while hanging out inside the sphere. In my view, t­ here was a big distance between the two images. The former was about hesitation but also about the capacity of audiences to subvert the messages sent out by artists and curators. ­There was something in that photo­graph that resisted categorization and confronted the solemn tone of the institutional space. The latter, however, clearly resembled a flyer for any con­temporary art exhibition and therefore revealed how objectives can quickly be transformed into hype. We attempted to create an exhibition that would transmit to the audience a sense of density and instability. Although the exhibition was successful in terms of visitor numbers and we received positive feedback, its advertising image somehow contradicted our intentions, revealing how each exhibition hides many exhibitions inside it, portrays many agencies, regardless of the ­will of artists, curators, and institutions. In the end, exhibitions, like pictures, live their own life (see Mitchell 1996). So why do we need curators anyway?

The Ca­rib­bean Curatorial Curating is, or can be, many t­ hings. It can imply reinforcing institutions or casting doubt on them; advertising artworks or withdrawing from the art market; enshrining artists or creating horizontal bonds. The curatorial goes far beyond exhibition-­making, involving issues of education, organ­ization, research, and participation.3 ­These are frequently overshadowed by art exhibitions and biennials, which in many cases are designed in a simplistic way, as “the locus where con­temporary art is produced.” The preeminence of exhibition-­making in our understanding of the potential of curatorial agency is not without consequences. Privileging temporary displays over deeper, investigative artistic forms, installing newness and originality as preconditions of artistic innovation, relying on a transnational “cultural class” jumping from one event to the next, are some of the values we tend to associate with curating. Yet curatorial agency is not limited to the h ­ ere and

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  21

now of temporary exhibitions, nor do all t­ hose exhibitions respond to the model I described above. More than that, curating has stopped being a privilege in the hands of a minority, and now involves, as Alex Farquharson states, “a shift in the conception of what curators do, from a person who works at some remove from the pro­cesses of artistic production, to one actively in the thick of it” (2003, 8). However, t­ hese issues stand outside the debates on institutional politics and exhibition-­making. The way art is produced and discussed nowadays has been ­shaped by what I ­will call a “postcolonial exhibitionary complex.” By this I understand, with Tony Bennett (1996), the ways in which institutions exercise control and impose authority not by concealing but by exhibiting.4 For Bennett, the institutions of confinement and the institutions of display constitute coexisting and intertwined forces determining, through self-­regulation, the gap between individuals and institutions. The history of cultural institutions would then be the history of a specific relationship between audiences and display as well as one involving the creation of vantage points from which to see the world and to see oneself seeing; they would be “vantage points from which every­one could be seen, thus combining the functions of spectacle and surveillance” (62). Through this passing from conservational and restrictive to the making of exhibition, institutions ­will be ready to represent and exhibit “society itself—in its constituent parts and as a ­whole” as spectacle (62). Through the development of the technologies of seeing, Bennett establishes the division between seeing and being seen as full of colonial connotations: “And this power marked out the distinction between the subjects and the objects of power not within the national body but, as or­ga­nized by the rhe­toric of imperialism, between that body and other, ‘non-­civilized’ p­ eoples upon whose bodies the effects of power ­were unleashed with as much force and theatricality as had been manifest on the scaffold” (64). According to Bennett, “power” operates in two dif­fer­ent ways: first, as a ­matter of difference, a classical “us/them” rhe­toric; and second, and more importantly, through the display of that difference by exhibiting in spaces designated for that specific purpose. It involves images as much as audiences and platforms. Power does not depend on the external w ­ ill of an institution that commoditizes and swallows otherness but with the self-­regulatory pro­cesses of an artistic community. As we ­will see in chapter 2, a strug­gle for visibility and repre­sen­ta­tion within transnational scenarios has somehow

22  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

blurred the weight that less vis­i­ble, infrastructural practices emerging from dif­fer­ent scenarios have in configuring effective and long-­lasting public spheres. The commoditization of difference in discursive terms would be symptomatic not only on the continuities of central epistemic and cultural inequalities within our supposedly postcolonial real­ity; it w ­ ill also lie b­ ehind epistemic and cultural divisions between subjects with institutional agency and subjects still confined to repre­sen­ta­tion. This division, importantly enough, still holds a geo­g raph­i­cal appeal. The ways in which the public sphere associated with certain contexts is defined within and beyond the traditional frontiers of artistic practice in uneven ways, limiting curatorial agency to the role of repre­sen­ta­tional exhibition-­making (which is carried out in many cases by foreign “experts” who exert authority and legislate taste), is what I understand to be the postcolonial exhibitionary complex. The history of Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices is deeply embedded in a similar situation. On the one hand, we cannot disregard the impact of large-­ scale mega-­exhibitions, often produced outside the region, in determining understanding and images of the Ca­rib­bean and in deconstructing exhibitional Eurocentrism (Mosquera 1992). On the other hand, Ca­rib­bean curators and art institutions have attempted to c­ ounter the discourses produced about the region following external anx­i­eties and imaginaries. Controlling what is shown, in which context, and by whom, has been as impor­tant as finding alternative ways of engaging visual regimes beyond display. Inventing new ways of telling is just as urgent as escaping the over-­determination stemming from the insertion of Ca­rib­bean art into predefined geo-­cultural mappings.5 The history of Ca­rib­bean curatorial agency is one of perseverance and imagination, of tenacity and originality. In the conversations I have had with Ca­rib­bean curators over the last six years, both ele­ments (perseverance and imagination) w ­ ere conceived as indissolubly linked. Gerardo Mosquera, for example, mentions a double pro­cess of de-­exotizicing Ca­rib­bean exhibitions through a critical confrontation of Ca­rib­bean real­ity while inserting ­these exhibitions within global discussions (2010). For him, the fact that many Ca­rib­bean creators show “with no surnames,” with no need to pres­ent their national passport or to stand for any given cultural context, constitutes a ­great achievement that shapes the pres­ent situation (1992). For her part, Dominique Brébion (2012, 141) questions ­whether the design of an exhibition would remain the same when conceived for a local audience rather than for export. Fi­nally, José Manuel Noceda (Garrido Castellano

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  23

2012, 13) outlines how many of the Ca­rib­bean exhibitions (among them the successive editions of the Havana Biennial in which he was actively involved) popping up in the 1990s ­were the result of a locally driven pro­cess of research and networking involving artists, curators and cultural agents. Ca­rib­bean curators, in sum, have striven to challenge the ways in which regions such as the Ca­rib­bean are framed (Modest 2012, 93). Understanding curatorship as a complex, ambivalent terrain where multiple and divergent agencies come into play opens up a particularly appropriate position from which to analyze the dense spatial politics developed in postcolonial art exhibitions about and from the Ca­rib­bean. In many cases, regional art exhibitions have been criticized only by looking at their curatorial statements, as if they ­were ­little more than a direct extension of the curator’s ­will. Curatorial practices are, however, not only ideas and theoretical images but also practical materializations of ­those ideas and images, for they elicit multiple responses from their audiences, giving shape to heterogeneous and contradictory experiences and interpretations. Although exhibitions are configured by curators and specific art centers, expressing the interests of both and somehow “limiting” the terrain where the art proj­ect can express itself, their (­after)lives go far beyond the intention of the curators or the art centers. In this sense, if we aim to understand the spatial politics taking place within art exhibitions in and about the Ca­rib­bean, it ­will be necessary to conceptualize each proj­ect as more than ­ ill need to cona direct materialization of a single curator or art center. We w sider the curatorial as a terrain where multiple and occasionally contradictory forms of agency come into play in heterogeneous ways. To ensure a critical posture ­toward Ca­rib­bean curatorial discourses ­will require, borrowing from Krista Thompson (2012a, 99), that we transcend “a longer tendency in curatorial approaches to Ca­rib­bean art to view it as illustrative of ideals, facts even, of Ca­rib­be­anness or of historical pro­cesses in the region, instead of engaging what the work does visually and aims to affect and letting ­these visual and aesthetics ­matters inform the interpretation, narration, and display of the work.” In recent years, we have witnessed considerable advances in critical thinking about Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices. Many voices have attempted to define the conditions ­under which Ca­rib­bean art is presented and exhibited, as well as the institutional and curatorial gaps that exist in the artistic pa­norama and the extent to which curatorial practices are still attached

24  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

to colonial and postcolonial notions of regional and national identity and identification (see Asquith 2013, Tancons 2009). The turn ­toward “regional” art survey shows (which are quite heterogeneous in content, discourse, and quality) in the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century and the increase in transnational creative proj­ects within the region, make ­these reflections decisive for the Ca­rib­bean context. Although ­those critical forums began to address key issues related to the display and modes of spectatorship of artistic practices, thus generating a more sharply focused view of the predicament of Ca­rib­bean curatorial practice, some pitfalls are still pres­ent in regional curatorial criticism. For example, the effects of the representation-­ based condition of the critique of exhibitions—­and the presentism that blurs the fact that Ca­rib­bean cultures of display have a long, and contradictory, genealogy—­are often forgotten.6 Similarly, the preeminence of the “curator as star” in group exhibitions and the subordination of the aesthetic dimension of the artworks in f­ avor of a direct and immediate identification of their content through their provenance are also not fully addressed.7 Fi­nally, other similarities can be drawn to the pro­cess of overlooking the complex relationship between curatorial practice and spectatorship.8 A further reading of the role of the Ca­rib­bean curatorial is compulsory. In this chapter I ­will attempt to tackle that issue, analyzing, through the analy­sis of curatorial practices produced both within and outside the region, some of the most recent approaches to Ca­rib­bean curating. Traditionally, ­there has been a tendency to dismiss regional shows curated outside the region, along with their related “insider-­outsider” binaries (see, for example, Wood 2009). In examining the special context of several curatorial initiatives developed in the last two de­cades, I w ­ ill attempt to move away from such dichotomies as “us” and “them” in order to understand the curatorial terrain as a space in which pro­cesses of cultural domination, spatial configuration, and negotiation occur not only at a discursive but also at a practical level. I ­will then consider what happens when we acknowledge the problematic existence of art exhibitions, an existence that is partially in­de­pen­dent of the w ­ ill of curators and art institutions. That is, what happens when we no longer consider exhibitions as direct products or derivations of personal or institutional w ­ ill, and we attempt, instead, to approach their in(ter)dependent located existence. In tackling ­these issues, Christopher Cozier (2011, 9) has pointed out that “we remain nameless but labeled ­ ill explain how this proposition images.”9 Taking up Cozier’s observation, I w can be developed.

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  25

Curating the Ca­rib­bean Anyone approaching Ca­rib­bean curating has to acknowledge the weight of mega-­exhibitions in the configuration of a regional visual imaginary. “Ca­rib­bean art shows” w ­ ere a poisoned gift bringing exchange, recognition, visibility, and commoditization at the same time. Since 1984, when the Havana Biennial was created, exhibitions have regularly attempted to define what the Ca­rib­bean is and how its con­temporary artistic manifestations should be approached.10 This pro­cess took place si­mul­ta­neously inside and outside the region, involving dif­fer­ent actors, institutions, and contexts. It may seem that a focus on mega-­exhibitions would be countering what I have just said about the complexity of curatorial activity. However, the histories of Ca­rib­bean curating (including the reactions to the region’s “postcolonial exhibitionary complex”) w ­ ere grounded to a big extent in ­those practices. Art shows ­were the battlefield where the key issues concerning Ca­rib­bean socie­ties and cultures ­were negotiated, discussed, and undertaken through practice. In this section I w ­ ill attempt to “think through exhibitions” in order to examine their effects and to shed light on their potentialities. Thinking through Ca­rib­bean art exhibitions means addressing ambivalent pro­cesses. On the one hand, ­these exhibitions reveal the dependence of visual practice over an artistic infrastructure that is sanctioned by the expertise of curators, the desires of the art market, and the weight of artistic infrastructures. On the other hand, Ca­rib­bean exhibitional practices have arisen as a proving ground where the role of the curator can be cast into doubt, the relationship with the art market negotiated, and the insertion within art infrastructure overturned. When dealing with the pre­sen­ ta­tion of cultures or collective identities, curators became, in Mari Carmen Ramírez’s words, “cultural brokers,” a position she bestows new functions: “In contrast to the elite role of arbiter, the widespread assumption of the cultural-­broker function appears to have radically shifted the focus and field of action of contemporary-­art curators. By selecting, framing, and interpreting peripheral art in exhibitions and exhibition cata­logues, for instance, art curators can claim to be shaping a more demo­cratic space where specific cultural groups can recognize themselves. This shift of curatorial function, in turn, seems to have opened up new venues for the distribution, ac­cep­ tance, and appreciation of previously marginalized art” (Ramírez 1996, 16). However, this shift is not without some dangers: “On one hand, she/ he can be credited for helping to tear down art world hierarchies, seemingly

26  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

demo­cratizing the space for cultural action; on the other hand, in a market scenario where ‘identity’ can only be a reductive construct, the framing and packaging of images of the collective self can only result in a highly delusionary enterprise” (Ramírez 1996, 16). The prehistory of Ca­rib­bean art shows can be mapped from the debates described by Ramírez. The first group exhibitions attempting to portray “the Ca­rib­bean as a w ­ hole” introduced questions of identity, cultural repre­sen­ ta­ tion, visual commoditization, and transnationalism—­ questions that would remain in the minds of Ca­rib­bean curators (and curators dealing with the Ca­rib­bean) in subsequent years. Which practices should be included, which artistic languages represent Ca­rib­bean creativity, how to cover the entire region, what to do with diasporic practices, how to assure a regional spectatorship, t­ hese ­were the crucial questions at the beginning of the 1990s. The responses to t­ hose issues, as could not be other­wise, ­were hesitant and imperfect, only gradually giving way to more daring curatorial experiments. The first regional exhibitions attempted to encompass as broad as pos­ si­ble a geo­g raph­i­cal scope. Carib Art (Curação, 1991) was an UNESCO-­ sponsored initiative or­ga­nized in Aruba and Curação as part of the arrangements for the quincentennial of the “discovery” of the region by Columbus. Having no pre­ce­dents, the show turned out to be more an inventory of what was taking place by then in the region than a curatorial approach to that real­ity. The official backup somehow put creativity into a straitjacket: the list of artworks and artists was determined by the number of participants per country and by a limited understanding of the eligible artistic media. ­These ele­ments ­were contradictory: the show was restricted to insular territories plus Guyana and Belize, excluding the Ca­rib­bean continental basin and the diaspora. A maximum of five artists (each participating only with one artwork) was allowed per country and representatives of each Ca­rib­bean territory had to be included. Regarding the accepted creative media, t­hese ­were limited to “two-­dimensional forms like: paintings, drawings, e­ tchings and watercolors; three dimensional forms such as: sculptures and ceramics” (UNESCO 1991, 5). Th ­ ese constraints inhibited experimentation; the main outcome of the exhibition was the opportunity for Ca­rib­bean artists and curators to meet and share their impressions. The exhibition 1492/1992: Un nouveau regard sur les Caraïbes (1492/1992: A new look on the Ca­rib­bean, 1992) was also part of the commemorative frenzy of 1992.11 Or­ga­nized in Paris, the show traveled to the Ca­rib­bean in

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  27

the same year. 1492/1992 focused only on insular territories, which ­were grouped u­ nder a rather essentialist reading of the concept of créolité. The mixing of Eu­ro­pean, American, and African populations, argued the curator Pierre Bocquet, would differentiate the Ca­rib­bean from the rest of the continent, creating at the same time a permanent solidarity across the islands. Within that framework, creativity was almost a ge­ne­tic feature of Ca­rib­bean populations, whose expressions ­were about “sachons rester nous-­mêmes” (let us be true to ourselves) (Bocquet 1992, 5). External influences ­were invariably portrayed as threats of commoditization and discursive subjugation (the fact that the show was to a large extent a response to the expectations of a French audience was surprisingly not addressed in that regard).12 In curatorial terms, the show’s statement took the form of a group of colorful and exuberant art pieces, mainly painting and sculpture. More seriously, the binary approximation to the idea of creole aesthetics limited the possibility of other mixtures, including t­ hose produced in diasporic spaces (by extension, the conceptualization of the Ca­rib­bean as a diasporic space was also discarded). On the good side, the exhibition served as a pre­sen­ta­tion in Eu­rope of a new batch of artists, including Annalee Davis, Christopher Cozier, Tony Capellán, and Mari-­Mater O’Neill. 1492/1992 applied the quota system pres­ent in Carib Art, however adopting this system imposed serious limitations on the first Ca­rib­bean group exhibitions. It was understood that only by reaching the ­whole diversity of the Ca­rib­bean could art exhibitions capture “the true essence” of the area, but this position led to aesthetically unjustifiable se­lections and to a huge qualitative disparity. The philosophy of inclusiveness was defined at its best by Carib Art: “The second issue we had to deal with was the quota for e­ very participating country. Our philosophy from the start had been to give a fair chance and an equal opportunity to each participating country and to avoid especially that the more power­ful countries would take a dominant position” (UNESCO 1991, 5). More long-­lasting proj­ects such as the Ca­rib­bean Biennial, which also emerged in 1992, ­were also affected by the contradictions attached to this criterion: We insisted on the participation of the small islands that used to remain at the margins of international art meetings, even the continental ones. Despite the size of the Dominican Republic, we lack stronger criteria certain discrimination, happily ­every time less marked, in international events, in the level of the number of participants or of participation itself, of the designation of

28  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

juries, of consultation, of awards. We intended to solve t­ hose incon­ve­nient. Nevertheless, marginalization, along with the lack of proper structures, is so real than some islands, the stubbornness of the Galería de Arte Moderno notwithstanding, “did not know” how to participate. (Tolentino 1992, 20)13

This “not knowing how to participate” is extremely in­ter­est­ing, since it provides evidence of the disparity between the creative manifestations included in ­those first shows, where “intuitive art” coexisted alongside completely “modern” artworks, and where artisans showed beside artists who would be joining or the Venice Biennial in the following years. As a consequence of the contradictions related to the anxiety of defining “a Ca­rib­bean identity” as opposed to a Western “Other,”14 Ca­rib­bean art exhibitions would gradually move away from that inclusive position t­ oward a quality-­ based one. In any case, the connections made in ­those first experiments would help to generate a common concern for the renovation of artistic discourses leading to the inclusion of an increasing number of artists from the Lesser Antilles. Prob­lems related to the misrepre­sen­ta­tion of certain areas, however, would remain. Furthermore, the se­lections of some exhibitions would be limited to the Anglophone or the Francophone areas of the Ca­rib­ bean, generating controversial and questionable cartographies.15 Th ­ ose contradictions speak about the existence of multiple temporalities and contexts within the Ca­rib­bean itself, something that can also be applied to itinerancy.16 By the mid-1990s, while Ca­rib­bean art started to circulate in global framings, a group exhibition model was taking shape. During this de­cade, Ca­rib­bean art shows found a place in the United Kingdom,17 Germany,18 the United States,19 and Spain,20 rendering American and Eu­ro­pean publics familiar with specific discourses about the region. If before 1990 the presence of Ca­rib­bean artists in international venues was limited, from now on we observe more than one large-­scale regional exhibition being held each year. ­These exhibitions became surprisingly similar: they abandon itinerancy, settling in a single location; they opt to introduce an increasing number of installations, performative, and video art work; they include curatorial and theoretical symposia. Many case-­studies could be analyzed ­here: Karibische kunst heute (Ca­rib­bean art ­today, Kassel, 1994) was part of the IX edition of Documenta; Ca­rib­bean Visions: Con­temporary Painting and Sculpture (Miami, 1994) was a show or­ga­nized in Miami from a somehow “identity-­ based,” curatorial conservative perspective; La vida urbana en la región del

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  29

Caribe (Urban life in the Ca­rib­bean region, 1999) was orchestrated by the Centro Cultural Cariforo as an itinerant proj­ect. All of ­those experiences had their strengths and weaknesses, all of them offered situated Ca­rib­bean creativity within a par­tic­u­lar time and space. To end this de­cade, I ­will discuss Caribe insular: Exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso (Insular Ca­rib­be­an: Exclusion, fragmentation and paradise, Badajoz, Spain, 1998), a proj­ect I have recently focused on (Garrido Castellano 2016c) that developed this model to the limits while also, at the same time, questioning it radically. Caribe insular is the most ambitious exhibition to date curated by the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), one of the many art centers and museums created in Spain during the economic boom of the 1990s. The exhibition was a collaboration between the recently founded museum and the Casa de América in Madrid, and it was curated by Antonio Zaya and María Llüísa Borràs, two Spanish Ca­rib­be­ anists. Two interconnected ele­ments make Caribe insular an in­ter­est­ing object of analy­sis: the innovations of the curatorial approach and its insertion within a complex context, including previous approaches to Ca­rib­bean art but also local, regional, and transnational issues in play in the context where the exhibition was displayed. Regarding the first ele­ment, the exhibition attempted to break with pre-­established and exotic conceptualizations of Ca­rib­bean artistic practice. Caribe insular articulated a nuanced approach to the region and presented a daring use of the exhibition space and a more active notion of spectatorship. This approach included many curatorial advances, thus attempting to move away from the contradictions of “identity-­exhibitions” in order to challenge the locus of curatorship and to focus critical attention on the specificities of Ca­rib­bean real­ity and visual production. At a time when the repre­sen­ta­tion of the Ca­rib­bean in Spain was solely exemplified by the presence of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Caribe insular paid attention to manifold contexts within the region, challenging the prevailing identification of the area in Spain and acknowledging the complex postcolonial and geopo­liti­cal situation of the Ca­rib­bean. The show pioneered the exhibition in Eu­rope of the work of artists and collectives such as Los Carpinteros, Osaira Muyale, Carlos Garaicoa, Albert Chong, Belkis Ramírez, Jorge Pineda, Pascal Meccariello, Marc Latamie, and Tania Bruguera. Their contributions w ­ ere original in many senses, from the artistic media used to the strategies displayed: Charles Juhász-­A lvarado, for example, included in his contribution the work of many Puerto Rican artists who ­were not selected for the show. Caribe insular stands in all

30  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

re­spects as one of the key events in the search for a more aesthetically oriented embodiment of curatorial practices dealing with the Ca­rib­bean. At the same time, Caribe insular shows how “postcolonial” art exhibitions have played a central role in the configuration of the postcolonial present-­day Spain; that is, the exhibition engages with and reflects the contradictions of not only an image of the Ca­rib­bean but also of one of the “local context” in which it arises. During the 1990s, Spain became a privileged destination for the “cultural migration” of artists from the Hispanophone Ca­rib­bean, constituting, in the case of Cuba, an alternative to the Miami-­Havana binary.21 The expansion of Ca­rib­bean visual culture coincides with a moment marked in Eu­rope by a tense redefinition of its regional pres­ent and its colonial past (see Vanderlinden and Filipovic 2005). In the case of Spain, exhibitions such as Caribe insular came at a time of historical and social adjustment when the development and expansion of the Eu­ro­ pean Union was forcing many countries to rethink their role as peripheries and pushing many local identity practices, not exempt from a colonial background, to assert themselves within a new “expanded” terrain. In this case, the exhibition reflected the interest the museum has in presenting itself as the articulator of a three-­way relationship, with Portugal, the region of Extremadura, and Latin Amer­ i­ ca and the Ca­ rib­ bean as its members. MEIAC sought to create its own distinctive space within the already crowded pa­norama of museums and con­temporary art centers in Spain. In order to do so, it aimed to benefit from the specific characteristics of the frontier zone between Badajoz and Portugal and the controversial historical links between Extremadura and the Amer­i­cas, since Extremadura was the region that gave birth to most of the conquistadores, including Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Francisco de Orellana, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa. How should we analyze Caribe insular? To whose voices should we pay attention? Whom should we “trust” in judging the exhibition: the museum, the curators, the artists, or even the artworks themselves? ­These questions are hard to answer in re­spect of any curatorial practice. In this par­tic­u­lar case, although burdened by its status as a manifestation of Spanish regional, “postcolonial” anx­i­eties, and by its condition as a so-­called peripheral regional group show exhibited in Eu­rope, Caribe insular played a decisive role in configuring a curatorial practice based on the expression of the multiple agencies involved in cultural production. Conceived as part of a broad investigation into the genealogies of Ca­rib­bean art, in many ways Caribe insular signified a major step in challenging narrow identities and in insert-

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  31

ing a critical consciousness into international curatorial approaches to Ca­rib­ bean art. This consciousness would permeate (albeit in varying degrees and in dif­ fer­ent ways) the proj­ects developed in the 2000s. Shows like Latitudes (Paris, 2002–2007), Infinite Islands: Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art (New York, 2007), Kréyol Factory (Paris, 2009), Rockstone and Bootheel: Con­ temporary West Indies Art (Hartford, Conn., 2010), The Global Ca­rib­be­an (Miami, 2010), Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (Itinerant, 2010), Horizontes insulares (Insular horizons, Itinerant, 2010–2011), Vous êtes ici (You are h ­ ere, Martinique, 2010–2011), Wrestling with the Image: Ca­rib­bean Interventions (Washington, D.C., 2011), Who More Sci-­Fi than Us (Amersfoort, Netherlands, 2012), or Ca­rib­be­an: Crossroads of the World (New York, 2012) are evidence of the strength of Ca­rib­bean regional curatorship but also of the continuity of several pitfalls already pres­ent in the previous de­cade.22 ­There are, however, significant changes in the conception of ­these shows compared to t­ hose of the 1990s: acuity in the se­lection of artists and artworks, a greater knowledge of the dif­fer­ent Ca­rib­bean artistic scenes, and major diversification of artistic practices and scenarios. The most impor­tant transformation, however, is related to the fact of many of ­those exhibitions being curated by Ca­rib­be­ans and to the privileging of aesthetics over “issue-­specificity,” which was the organ­izing princi­ple that underlay group exhibitions in the previous de­cade. The autonomy of artistic and curatorial discourses emerges as a central objective of t­ hose exhibitions (again, not always with positive results), and the comparison with a Western mainstream counterpart we found in curatorial discourses of the early 1990s tends to fade within a porous conception of localized places and spaces. This has been summarized by Christopher Cozier, who justifies the se­lection ­behind the exhibition Wrestling with the Image: Ca­rib­bean Interventions in the following terms: Some of t­ hese artists w ­ ere born in one island and live and work in another. Some are born in the “Ca­rib­bean diaspora” and continue to investigate how that shapes their ways of thinking. For them, the Ca­rib­bean is also a site of memory, where they pro­cess f­ amily histories or the vast archives of former colonial powers. They may live in places like Japan, Austria or Germany, not traditionally located in diasporic mappings. Much of their work is inspired by one location, produced in another and presented yet elsewhere. It reflects the way Ca­rib­bean ­people have always been on the move. (2011, 7)

32  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Christopher Cozier identifies the most impor­tant advance as a concern with avoiding “being labeled” (6). In some group exhibitions, this concern takes the form of attempting to let artworks and aesthetics speak for themselves. Michelle Stephens, who has made an extensive analy­sis of the exhibitions emerging at the end of the 2000s, identifies in Wrestling with the Image (curated by Cozier and Tatiana Flores at the Washington Bank) an interest in exploring “not just [. . .] what Ca­rib­bean art represents—­timelessness, insularity, popu­lar urban spaces, myths, cultural crossroads—­but rather [. . .] what Ca­rib­bean art does” (Stephens 2013, 17). Paying attention to the “­doing,” to the heterogeneous voices pres­ent in curatorial practices, is a central objective that both Ca­rib­bean curating practice and thinking should follow. One should ask, however, ­whether group exhibitions are the best pos­si­ble way of materializing the escape from being labeled that Cozier seeks. Chapter 5 ­will broach this question. More than choosing between “good” or “bad” examples of curatorship, my interest lies in showing how curating works; to show how exhibitions appear as multivalent practices, in some cases generating spaces of exchange and negotiation.23 ­These exchanges imply the mobility of artists, artworks, cultural agents, and ideas across the Ca­rib­bean. We should not, therefore, condemn group exhibitions as a “bad approach” to Ca­rib­bean creativity: as with Caribe insular, any approach to ­these practices should take account of their ambivalence, paying attention to the multiple issues at in play in each show. In the following section I ­will explore what happens when ­those questions are framed through the permanent platform of Ca­rib­bean biennials.

An Exercise in Spatial Imagination: Ca­rib­bean Biennials The story of Ca­rib­bean biennials is one of perseverance and networking but also of overcoming obstacles and dealing with uncertainty. The Havana Biennial, the Ca­rib­bean Biennial of Santo Domingo (now Triennial), and the Poli/Graphic Biennial (also transformed into a triennial event) of San Juan have suffered the impact of economic instability, curatorial and po­liti­ cal divergences, and, in general, of variations from the proj­ects’ original agendas.24 New regular exhibitions in the calendar—­namely, the Aruba and the Martinique Biennials—­have also caused that instability.25 Ca­rib­bean art biennials and triennials arose at the core of Third World Biennialism, the Third Edition of the Havana Biennial being not so much the comple-

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  33

ment but rather the counterpart of Pompidou’s Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the earth) in 1989.26 The Ca­rib­bean emerged from t­ hese events as a central location for artistic thirdworldism and South-­South relations,27 attempting to generate an alternative to mainstream venues such as Documenta or the Venice Biennials. Some of the questions frequently arising within this framework are related to the effectiveness of ­those practices in subverting mainstream initiatives and separating from them. Is the outcome of ­those biennials dif­fer­ent in some way from t­ hose they try to c­ ounter, or do they end up producing the same results and operating in a similar way? What kind of audiences are targeted by ­those events? How do they interrelate with the local medium? The debates on Ca­rib­bean biennials have revolved around the question of ­whether they have become repeating platforms of globalized capitalism or, alternatively, w ­ hether they are still, to borrow Harvey’s concept (2000), spaces of hope (see Gardner and Green 2013, 454). Adriano Pedrosa (2012) points out that the contribution of the biennials taking place in the so-­called “periphery” of Eu­rope and the United States have been crucial in renovating what is understood by curating. In that sense, the Havana Biennial (especially in its third edition) or the Johannesburg Biennial would be essential in defining our artistic contemporaneity (Smith 2012b). This conceptualization of “South” biennials would reveal an alternative vision of artistic modernity, one decentering the usual correlation of power between center and periphery (see Smith 1974). Much has been written on that question, and I ­will not add anything new to the debate. Rather, my aim is to clarify the consequences of the artistic exchanges taking place during Ca­rib­bean events in the arrangement of mobile and ever shifting nodes and solidarities. In other words, instead of adopting a position from which to “detect” the “betraying” of the original ideals of “alternative biennials,” we should evaluate how ­those proj­ects work in the multilayered context in which they operate (see Papastergiadis and Martin 2011). The Ca­rib­bean Biennial was a proj­ect designed by UNESCO before 1992, when it was held in Santo Domingo by the time of the Columbus Quincentennial. Its first name was Bienal de Pintura del Caribe y Centroamérica, which illustrates two of its main features: the prevalence of “traditional” artistic discourses and the expanded notion of the Ca­rib­bean, including the continental countries. Initially an idea of Ca­rib­bean Community (CARICOM), the Santo Domingo of 1992 appeared to be the perfect place for its materialization. ­A fter several unsuccessful attempts, a proposal

34  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

was made in 1987 by the then Galería de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo. The Ca­rib­bean Biennial appears as the first regional periodical event (the San Juan Poly Graphic Biennial has a Latin American focus, and the Havana Biennial would opt for an intercontinental perspective). It also attempted to develop solid bonds with the artistic contexts of the continental Ca­rib­bean, something forgotten in many of the group exhibitions I have previously described. It was a large-­scale exhibition, with more than 300 art­ ere two ists from thirty countries in its first edition. Among its objectives w basic premises: to unite the artistic practice of the Ca­rib­bean region,28 creating a common framework within which exchanges could be made pos­si­ ble, and to promote con­temporary discourses within the region.29 Th ­ ose premises, however, ­were not f­ ree from contradictions: in the first case t­ hose ­were expressed by the use of a quota system that stipulated equal participation by artists from e­ very territory, Saba and Cuba having the same repre­sen­ta­tion in the event; in the latter, by restrictions on artistic languages such as installations, per­for­mance, and video art. The creation of a prize, selecting the supposedly best work presented in each edition, also contradicted the equality pursued by the curatorial program. Whereas some of t­ hose constraints would remain pres­ent ­until the pres­ent day (the prizes would be maintained), the event was opened to any artistic manifestation in the last edition, in 2010. Silvano Lora’s Marginal Biennial, a counter-­exhibition emerging also in 1992, arose in response to the “official” biennial. The proj­ect offers an in­ter­ est­ing use of curatorial tactics and biennial culture for alternative ends. Lora’s anti-­biennial took place in the Dominican context of cultural and media overexposure linked to the commemoration in 1992 of “Columbus’s arrival in Amer­i­ca.” The Marginal Biennial aimed to exhibit the artworks rejected by the Ca­rib­bean Biennial in 1992, including experimental artistic manifestations not subsumable into the ethos of expressing national identity. However, Lora’s anti-­biennial was not just a Dominican Salon des Refusés; the proj­ect also withdrew from the space of official institutions and moved the event to peripheral locations in Santo Domingo, denouncing the cultural spectacularization and segregation ­behind the official commemorative program set out by President Joaquín Balaguer. In this case, the act of withdrawal implied engaging a broader community, since the spaces of “national culture” ­were abandoned in order to insert art within an expanded public arena. The “real” Ca­rib­bean Biennial was conceived as repre­sen­ta­ tional (both in the sense of establishing a clear difference between specta-

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  35

tors and artists, and of “covering” the entire Ca­rib­bean region), and it was oriented to international audiences. Contrary to that logic, Silvano Lora’s anti-­biennial framed artistic production as a collective endeavor. The event included the production of murals designed and made by local communities and the organ­ization of workshops open to all kinds of audiences. The Marginal Biennial can be conceptualized as an example of “South” curating. It was based on the belief that the issues affecting the Dominican artistic context ­were shared all across the Ca­rib­bean region and the Amer­i­cas.30 In Lora’s initiative, the presence of artists coming from American countries was intended to foment contagious and expansive dynamics seeking to create an alternative geo-­cultural mapping. The Marginal Biennial was thus driven by a sense of critical regionalism. At a moment when Ca­rib­bean art was gaining international attention and being externally commoditized, the anti-­biennial reacted against the lack of contextual rooting of many events of that period, engaging location actively both on a local and a transnational level. Out of the three main Ca­rib­bean biennials, the Puerto Rican is the longest-­running, and also the most specialized, belonging to the domain of the graphic arts. It was created in 1970 ­under the name of Bienal de San Juan de Grabado Latinoamericano. The choice of graphic arts was motivated by the long tradition of graphic arts in Puerto Rico, by its proximity to the h ­ ere and now, by its anti-­elitism, and by its use as a vehicle for channeling demands for social improvement (Benítez 1983). The focus on Latin Amer­i­ca would fulfill a double role: first, it sought to counterweigh the influence of American culture in the island;31 second, the connection with the continent reinforced the links that Puerto Rican grabadores (printmakers) have forged with major continental artistic contexts such as Mexico or Argentina. For each edition, the biennial or­ga­nized two homage exhibitions, one dedicated to a Puerto Rican maestro of the graphic and the other to a renowned foreign artist. A quick glance at the selected artists gives an idea of the scope that was pursued: José Clemente Orozco, Joaquín Torres García, Roberto Matta, and Rufino Tamayo figure in the list of artists chosen along with Lorenzo Homar, Antonio Martorell, and Rafael Tufiño on the national side. Along with ­those names, the participation of artists such as Luis Camnitzer and Liliana Porter would be frequent. The geo­graph­i­cal definition of the biennial would be partially modified in 1986, when its name was changed to include a special mention of the Ca­rib­be­an32 and we find the first participation of Latino artists.33

36  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

The maintenance of a “committed” tone through this focus, however, would raise some questions: the number of works selected, the privileging of national-­representative criteria, the lack of theoretical approaches to the exhibited material (the cata­logs of the first eight editions ­were reduced to a list of artworks and names, with a one-­page introductory description of the curatorial stance b­ ehind the display), and the maintenance of a system of prizes ­were among the most pressing issues. Along with exploring the social dimensions of the graphic arts, the biennial’s main interest was visual and artistic experimentation, something that would motivate the transformation of the biennial into a triennial event covering a wider range of artistic disciplines in 2004 (see Trelles Hernández 2006). The last editions of the Poli/Graphic Triennial of San Juan are particularly in­ter­est­ing in curatorial terms. The inclusion of street art side-­to-­side “artistic” prints, the introduction of curatorial teams, the implantation of curatorial choices within a research-­based proj­ect, the inclusion of productive experiments that outlived the exhibition on display, and the intertwining of display, thought, documentation, and research can all be considered to be major innovations. The second edition, celebrated in 2008 ­under the curatorship of Adriano Pedrosa, Jens Hoffmann, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Julieta González, centered on publication instead of display, included the edition of several fanzines and alternative documents and took account of the strug­gles against the privatization of higher education that w ­ ere by then starting in the Universidad de Puerto Rico. The third edition, which took place in 2012 and was curated by Deborah Cullen, Antonio Sergio Bessa, and Úrsula Dávila-­Villa, was dedicated to collaborative creativity. ­Under the name of El panal/The hive, the triennial sat foot outside of the Cuartel de Ballajá, incorporating many other spaces in Old San Juan, such as the Casa de los Contrafuertes, where Charles Juhász-­A lvarado installed a coffee spot, a real hive and a collaborative scheme that developed a months-­ long program of exhibitions, concerts, and “exhibitions within exhibitions.” What is significant in this case is how both its main concerns and the “medium constraint” of graphic languages ­were turned into a broad experiment in cooperative creativity. Fi­nally, the last edition of the Triennial so far, celebrated in 2015, attempted to develop this premise even further by focusing on in­de­pen­dent orga­nizational practices and by spreading the event’s venues all over the island. To conclude this section, I ­will move briefly on to the case of Havana Biennial, undoubtedly the most discussed curatorial event taking place in

Being ­Here and ­T here  •  37

the Ca­rib­bean. Several aspects can be highlighted from the more than three de­cades covered by the event; in this case, I ­will focus on its pivotal role in promoting con­temporary practices from neighboring Ca­rib­bean countries and in consolidating awareness and recognition of the importance of artistic experimentation and critical discussions within and between Ca­rib­bean territories. It has frequently been pointed out that the Cuban capital has become a center for marginalized art practices. Now I wish to outline the porous and ambivalent character of the encounters that permeated Ca­rib­ bean artistic practices at the end of the millennium. Analyzing the influence of the Havana Biennial on Ca­rib­bean artistic practice requires close attention to multiple ele­ments, not all of them easily vis­i­ble.34 The biennial was created in 1984 with an explicit Third World, intercontinental vocation.35 The proj­ect gave shape to the cultural policy defined by the Cuban Ministry of Culture, which was created in 1976 with Armando Hart Dávalos as its first occupant. Hart attempted to c­ ounter the expansionism of U.S. cultural politics during the 1980s and to develop bonds of solidarity with Third World countries. The event was the maximum expression of that agenda. In fact, the history of the Havana Biennial can be summarized with reference to three dif­fer­ent axes: the attention given to Third World contexts, and the configuration of alternative approaches to globalism (see Enwezor, Smith, and Condee [2008]; García Canclini [2009]; Hanru [2003]; Wu [2009]); the intermixing of issues of globalization and postcoloniality; and the critical approach to modernity (Niemojewski 2010). To ­these, we could add a fourth ele­ment: the evolution of Cuba’s position within the international pa­norama. Although not a priority in the first editions, the connection with the rest of the Ca­rib­bean can be framed in this context. In the first two editions, the participation of Ca­rib­bean artists appears as part of the Latin American and Third World orientation of the event, with only some famous names being invited. This changed in the subsequent editions, where young creators appeared in edition a­ fter edition. The Fourth Havana Biennial would be crucial in that re­spect. Then, a curatorial team was established and made responsible for researching key “South” contexts. The Ca­rib­bean would be one of ­these. Although close in terms of space, ­little was known ­until then about the production of some territories, especially t­ hese of the Lesser Antilles. The early participation of artists such as Elvis López or Osaira Muyale from Aruba, Priscilla Monge from Costa Rica, Tirzo Martha and Nelson Carrilho from Curação, and Remy Jungerman from Surinam would operate

38  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

a decisive shift in the way their productions ­were conceived both internationally and locally. The coverage of continental Ca­rib­bean scenes would also be also abundant, with artists from Costa Rica, Belize, Guatemala, or Honduras joining e­ very edition of the event. In chronological terms, the biennials celebrated in the 1990s would include a greater number of Ca­rib­ bean artists; from that moment on, they would be a regular presence. Through ­these collaborations, the biennial strengthened relations with the continental and insular territories of the region, tracking new names while also encouraging dialogue with curators, art centers, and cultural agents. As José Manuel Noceda (2005–2006, 150), the member of the team in charge of the Ca­rib­bean, tells us, while the number of Antillean creators has diminished, so has their age accordingly: “By then some specialist that ­were working in dif­fer­ent department started conforming that work team, and t­ here is where I am asked to focus on the Ca­rib­bean and Central Amer­ i­ca. ­There begins my research work on con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art. I think it was another challenge, ­because if ­there already was a vast theoretical bibliography on the ­matter, on generic issues in the Ca­rib­bean, the lit­ er­a­ture on visual arts was scarce at that moment. . . . ​And yet already in the nineties a group of artists with radically dif­fer­ent poetics was emerging.”36 From the 1990s onward, then, ­there w ­ ill be a specific interest in reaching all the corners of the Ca­rib­bean, displaying the most daring work of young creators instead of that of artists already renowned in their own countries. To the generational shift we must add, then, a substantial transformation in the way artistic contemporaneity of the region was conceived. Therefore, the Havana Biennial promoted the most innovative proj­ects and manifestations, supporting artists that ­were not already fully accepted in their home ­ ill be based, then, on its capacity countries. The interest in the Ca­rib­bean w for experimenting and bringing in new forms of formal and social interaction with broader segments of the society. Something similar happened with the biennale’s theoretical platform, where Ca­rib­bean curators and intellectuals frequently found a place of international debate outside the constraints of national arenas. Havana, fi­nally, ­will act as a central point of convergence where Ca­rib­bean thinkers ­will meet their Latin American peers. ­These experiences would prove to be crucial in bringing Ca­rib­bean artistic thought to an international audience, something that would give rise to new opportunities for collaboration and exchange. This meant the prospect of discursive renovation, as the new names joining the Biennial would develop an interest in researching innovative proposals and languages. Partici-

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  39

pation in the event acted as confirmation of t­ hose experiences and experiments, which would strengthen their reformist impulse within their places of residency. This occurred with the group of Ca­rib­bean artists invited in the early 1990s who developed notable initiatives in the form of providing creative spaces and contributing to art criticism in their countries. For many of ­these artists, participating in the biennial would mean gaining visibility outside the Ca­rib­bean but also consolidating the proj­ects they w ­ ere developing in their countries. The case of Trinidad, which I ­will analyze in chapter 5, is paradigmatic in that sense.

The Emergence of a Ca­rib­bean Curatorial Class The shift from national to transnational spaces in which Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices ­were staged cannot be explained only by the “appetite” of “mainstream” art institutions for the art of the peripheries, nor can it be associated solely with the specific research interests of American or Eu­ro­pean curators. Rather, a pa­norama attentive to the exchanges shaping Ca­rib­bean visuality and a critique of the discourses producing a view of Ca­rib­bean cultural agents as passive entities is in order. Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover have cautioned about the problematic character of discourses that “emphasize its plantation genesis, portray Ca­rib­be­ans as peripheral subjects ‘consumed’ by ­others, as if the region, in­equality notwithstanding, has not itself a history of consuming other places in order, ironically, to reassert their presence through acts of creativity” (2009, 181). This warning sounds especially fitting when it comes to curatorial practices. In lieu of self-­ defeatism, of the “impoverishment” of the pres­ent (Benjamin 1999, 735), both authors urge locating creative practices within “the modern proj­ect of remapping the pres­ent—­resulting in the propagation of several marginalizations that gave rise to the manifold strug­gles for self, place, and presence and to spatial repositioning that constituted the basis of the cross-­cultural social and po­liti­cal pro­cess of creolization, ­here and elsewhere, even ‘over ­there’ ” (2009, 181). Applied to our examination of Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices, this “­here and elsewhere, even ‘over t­ here,’ ” is inseparable from the appearance of a Ca­rib­bean curatorial class. Names such as Gerardo Mosquera, José Manuel Noceda, Elvis Fuentes, Sara Hermann, Marianne de Tolentino, David Boxer, David A. Bailey, Eddie Chambers, Christopher Cozier, Dominique

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Brébion, Allison Thompson, Alissandra Cummins, Haydee Venegas, or Mari Carmen Ramírez, to mention just a few, although from very dif­f er­ent positions and with very dif­fer­ent aims, have been pivotal in the expanse of Ca­rib­bean artistic discourses, playing an active role in the configuration of a curatorial approach to Ca­rib­bean creativity. By looking at their participation in some of the most noteworthy collective exhibitions of the last two de­cades, we can see how a simplistic “inside-­outside division” is no longer pos­si­ble. The capacity to operate “­here and elsewhere, even over ­there” of a ­whole generation of Ca­rib­bean curators and cultural agents has largely permeated the constructive pro­cess of mapping and locating we find in art exhibitions. The incidence of this curatorial class, which did not exist before that moment,37 was decisive not only b­ ecause it translated “localized agendas” within transnational curatorial frameworks; they w ­ ere also actively involved in localizing transnational practices of modernity within their national landscapes. Nevertheless, we must remember that curators are not the only agents involved in the spatializing pro­cess we are describing. Artists w ­ ill frequently react against restrictive proposals, supplanting the role of the curators. The examples of ­those reactions are manifold thorough the period u­ nder scrutiny, and they include counter-­exhibitions, counter-­biennials, parallel exhibitions, and acts of institutional critique. Many of t­ hose practices emerge as an attempt to generate a more fluid interaction between creators and art centers. This is the case, for example, of Curador curado (Healed curator), an exhibition curated by the Dominican artists Fernando Varela, Jorge Pineda, and Quisqueya Henríquez within the Museo de Arte Moderno in 2001. Curador curado turned out to be innovative for several reasons: it challenged the authorial role granted to the figure of the curator in the Dominican context; it demanded a deeper discussion on how artists should take part in the definition of national public institutions; it revealed the urgent need to update the critical value of art collections; fi­nally, it laid emphasis on the unstable situation of Dominican artists, showing the imbalance between their public commitment and the scant control they had within the Dominican art system. Curador curado, then, was unique and somehow prophetic in the way that it envisaged the consequences of an art system where artists are driven away from decision-­making, their creations shown and moved around by third parties, while their ­careers are subjected to the worst side of a deregulated and precarious economic art system.

Being ­Here and T­ here  •  41

The intention of the show was defined by the professional and personal difficulties the three artists encountered in managing the mechanisms of internationalization of their production.38 Within the bureaucratization of the Dominican art system, it “forced ­people to study and think.”39 In that context, the exhibition was intended to look for responses within a shared situation and to urge reflection on how to create a more flexible context for alternative artistic discourses. Breaking away from the thematization of Ca­rib­bean culture, not having an “issue” outside the issue of being an artist in a Ca­rib­bean country, initiatives such as Curador curado speak as well of the vacuums caused any cultural institutions and cultural politics within national spheres, pointing out the need to fill them by informal means: “Through the last two de­cades, that absence has produced vacuums that cannot be filled and that even now affect the activity of the con­temporary creators who have tried to insert themselves in the international context without achieving a result that benefits them in developing their ­careers” (Karman Cubiñá 2001, 7).40 As we ­will see, t­ hose initiatives opened the way to demarcate artistic agency from exhibition-­making, creating the conditions for an artistic arena open to a variety of creative practices.

Conclusions This chapter has outlined a new way of approaching Ca­rib­bean curating, involving not only curatorial practices but also reflexive thought on them. Situating curatorship at the center of the analy­sis involves several ­things: recognizing the weight that curatorial practices have in defining and delimiting spectatorship and audiences, institutional politics and politics of repre­sen­ta­tion; acknowledging that curatorial activity (and specially exhibition-­making) bears an ele­ment of spatial imagination, one that is more or less accurate, more or less shocking; and fi­nally, problematizing the hierarchy and position of the agencies and voices pres­ent in each curatorial action. Ca­rib­bean art practices must be read and understood in the light of the dif­fer­ent strategies and routes transited by p­ eople and discourses. In that sense, curating jeopardizes the making of place(s) within a globalized, ever-­expanding Ca­rib­bean. How would a curatorial history of Ca­rib­ bean art look? What does curating mean in a Ca­rib­bean context? One is tempted to respond to t­ hose questions negatively by addressing what it

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does not look like or mean: a concatenation of mega-­exhibitions, a sum of national pa­noramas, an inside-­outside divide. Answering that question is a ­matter of determining which curatorial practices have a bigger impact, which voices are included or excluded, inasmuch as a ­matter of choosing the right position to confront them. I already mentioned that art exhibitions do not respond to a single ­will, nor do they portray a unique agency. ­There are always ­things resisting control. Concerning large-­scale exhibitions, we have seen how ­those are inserted in complex social and cultural configurations that determine their form and functioning. They also bring together vari­ous actors. ­These exhibitions form part of a complex network of cultural politics in which dif­fer­ent interests and dif­fer­ent regional, national, and transnational pro­cesses of identification and marginalization take place at the same time. In this chapter, I have attempted to tackle them from a critical point, detecting common strategies of visual reification and epistemic vio­lence, while at the same time focusing on their individual characteristics. Any reading of curatorial practices of Ca­rib­bean art developed abroad cannot be based solely on a rigid divide between “au­then­tic” approaches and “misleading” images. Rather, it is necessary to understand the spatial politics taking place within each show, in each institutional context. Regional art exhibitions are not (always) passive mirrors of a state of ­things; they can (also) be effective exercises on visual imagination. Fi­nally, biennials have been a key platform used as a testing ground by Ca­rib­bean artists and curators alike. The evolution of the three events I have described is driven in equal terms by the increasing interactions between Ca­rib­bean artistic practice within an international arena and by local strug­ gles and cultural developments. To maintain a level of aesthetic experimentation without dismissing the need to engage local audiences has been a common concern in the three cases, one that has been addressed in dif­fer­ent terms, with dissimilar results. The turn to the street and to “nonartistic locations” we find in the last editions of the Havana Biennial (2015) and the San Juan Poli/Graphic Triennial (2015) are good examples of that desire. In the following chapters, I ­will consider how art exhibitions and biennials are not the only strategies used to deal with issues of spacing and engagement.

2

Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere

In the first weeks of 2017, at the beginning of the Trump era, the artist and activist Gregory Sholette responded in the E-­Flux platform to an article by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian about the lack of social relevance of art strikes. The debate revolved around the January 20 art strike, a protest against the “normalization of Trumpism” consisting of the paralysis of art museums and galleries on that forthcoming historic day, in whose organ­ization Sholette was included. At play in that discussion was the potential of art and cultural industries as instruments and platforms of protest and mobilization. Whereas Jones is not opposed to the idea of peacefully resisting coming to terms with the United States’ and the world’s near ­future, he does reject what he sees as an inoperative and anachronistic action located in an elitist, marginal sector of American society. In that re­spect, he states that “­these eminent artists come across as p­ eople who are used to being listened to without having to try. Worse, t­ here is something nostalgic about the petition, as if this ­were the 1960s all over again. Some hope” (Jones 2017).

43

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Against this defeatist position, Sholette’s (2017b) arguments are based on the centrality of museums and art platforms in the making of a very much alive and con­temporary “cultural version of capitalism” and, hence, the importance of their activity as well as their status as vantage points from which to perform acts of noncompliance. Sholette argues that “Just as impor­ tant as the impact of art is artists’ grassroots organ­izing that accomplishes po­liti­cal and social justice. Such mobilization has the ability to generate discussion as much as disagreement and it frequently leads to longer-­term co­a li­tion building.” Sholette’s emphasis is not only on the capacity of art to serve as a locus of resilience but also on its ability to develop and strengthen unexpected bonds of solidarity and, fi­nally, on the centrality of strategic and tactical interventions in the configuration of our troubled contemporaneity. What is at stake in the Sholette-­Jones exchange is the cultural saliency of art institutions, their social impact, and artists’ ability to critically disrupt and operate within/against institutional life. Borrowing from that debate and transferring t­ hose concerns to a Ca­rib­bean context, this chapter explores a set of artistic practices that attempt to challenge institutional normativity. This movement back to the sacrosanct space of the museum or the art gallery could seem to contradict the plea for public art and site-­ oriented practices that has been made in the other chapters of the book. However, I believe that the critical questioning of institutionalism has been yet another field in which Ca­rib­bean creators have striven to define a space of their own. Institutions, it is impor­tant to remember, are not dead entities exerting their power over a detached artistic community. Rather, as in the film Night at the Museum starring Ben Stiller, they could also be sites where a multivalent set of forces and agencies can be set into motion in unexpected ways to produce unexpected results.1 By operating within this framework, Ca­rib­bean artists challenge the assumed neutrality of exhibition spaces, engaging the uneven economies of racial, social, and gender exclusions at work between the Ca­rib­bean and “mainstream” repre­sen­ta­tional and economic fluxes. At the same time, ­these artists are grounding criticism within specific time-­space coordinates, revealing the specific, heterogeneous ways in which institutional power operates. Thus, this action implies a continuous movement across the space of the museum and the art institution and that of the street. As we saw in the case of the last editions of the Havana and San Juan biennials, “the institutional” can

Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere  •  45

no longer be confined u­ nder the sanitized space of the white cube (something that raises the question of how Ca­rib­bean institutional power has operated historically beyond its spatial allocation in the first place2). In chapter 1, it was argued that curating was a key tool for negotiating inventive ways out of a “postcolonial exhibitionary complex.” Following this line, in this chapter, individual artistic interventions by Ca­rib­bean creators that choose to operate within, but also against, art institutions ­will be exam­ ill not be limited to a specific, chronologiined. In this case, the analy­sis w cally or geo­graph­i­cally limited set of practices. Furthermore, the agencies ­ ill not be restricted to the artistic referred to in the following examples w current defined as “institutional critique,” something that many artists find suspicious. Instead, this chapter touches on several artistic proj­ects, including installations, per­for­mances, art interventions, and mock institutional practices, that have emerged in dif­fer­ent periods and contexts. In order to do this, t­ hese initiatives are grouped (hopefully without conflating them) around interconnected sets of central con­temporary Ca­rib­bean issues and concerns such as race and racialization, institutional accessibility, audience engagement, or cultural saliency. One of the interests of approaching alternative institutional dynamics is that they force us to challenge the centrality of certain practices within stabilized genealogies or generational divisions of institutional critique.3 Despite a long tradition of critical gestures ­toward institutions, Ca­rib­bean artists rarely encounter their place in books or surveys on institutional critique. Nevertheless, many con­temporary artworks have been considered from an oppositional perspective, as I argued in the introduction of this book. To a ­great extent, critical examination of the consequences of display and audience engagement shapes con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art practice. The artists and the practices examined in this chapter refuse to be “confined” to the task of portraying any essential identity.4 Looking at the intersection between race and installation art in the context of the United States, Jennifer A. González uses the term “subjection” to describe how “race discourse produces an economy of visibility—­and simultaneous invisibility—by which group members are subject to a disciplinary gaze that operates to fix their position within a given social or po­liti­cal landscape through techniques of exhibition” (González 2011, 6; see also En­glish 2010, Powell 2008). As we ­will see, the artists discussed in this chapter recognize that this economy of visibility often manifests itself in subtle, discrete (but no less harmful) ways.

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At the same time, however, they strug­g le to stand apart from the most defeatist understanding of institutional critique. Approaching Ca­rib­bean art practices from the point of view of their capacity to articulate alternative views of institutional power offers several benefits. It helps to c­ ounter an interpretation of the Ca­rib­bean artistic landscape where artworks are stripped of “located” institutional pressures, exclusions, and vio­lence, as if ­those artworks ­were only unmediated responses to external forces. Acknowledging the practical ways in which artists negotiate within their institutional contexts turns out to be crucial to “ground” the critical potential of artistic initiatives. In many cases, the critical potential of Ca­rib­bean artworks has been defined by their ability to challenge globalization understood as Westernization. Whereas the ability of Ca­rib­bean creators to oppose heterogeneous forms of external exotification and commoditization cannot be questioned, this ability has also been essential in transforming and challenging the institutional framework operating within the island. The last section of chapter 5, which approaches some “longer-­term co­ali­tions” (to borrow from Sholette again), ­will develop this idea in more detail. The interest of Ca­rib­bean artists in pushing the bound­aries of art institutions has also been crucial in relativizing the weight attributed to the art market as omnipotent force minimizing any agency and possibility of response. In the works to be analyzed, ­there is a subtle equilibrium and a complex awareness of the multiple ways in which institutional power is exerted both internally and transnationally. Before starting this journey, however, it is worth remembering what happens when criticism becomes trapped and appropriated by the system it seeks to confront.

Nothing Now, just one more biennial d­ oesn’t ­really make a difference. JENS HOF F MANN:

MAURIZIO CAT T EL AN: Jens is right: it kind of dis­appears among the o­ thers, and disappearing is a good way to start working. —­Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann (2011)

Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere  •  47

What happens when critique becomes numbed in discursivity? It gets blunt. Criticism becomes criticality, a discursive approximation to its object, and the challenge of institutional normativity is overturned by what Andrea Fraser named as the institutionalization of critique (2005). In short, it becomes deactivated, and more than that, it starts working for the e­ nemy. A holiday visit to the island of St. Kitts ­will provide a good example of this. Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann’s Blown Away: The Sixth Ca­rib­ bean Biennial (also known as the Invisible Biennial) can be described as an event that did not take place. In 1999, both curators invited fellow artists Olafur Eliasson, Douglas Gordon, Mariko Mori, Chris Ofili, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, Tobias Rehberger, Pipi­lotti Rist, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to spend one week in a resort in the Ca­rib­bean island of St. Kitts, enjoying the paradise location and “producing nothing.” The biennial was advertised as a participative event, an open space for dialogue that would bring renowned international creators to deal with local audiences in St. Kitts. In practice, it ended up being a critique of participatory art and the biennial cir­cuit, where the pursued “relational engagement” (Bourriaud 2002) was con­spic­u­ous by its absence: artists did nothing, the contact with “the locals” was non­ex­is­tent, and the press was composed of a pair of colleagues. The initiative gave rise to a cata­log filled with critical theory; lots of pictures of Cattelan, Hoffmann, and the rest eating, partying, walking around, and ­doing other activities; confessions of Cattelan admitting that “he lied” about what he said in earlier pages; or statements declaring the biennial to be a crossroad between “freedom and prostitution” (Cattelan and Hoffmann 2001, unpaginated). In some re­spects, Blown Away was no dif­fer­ent from previous and subsequent initiatives produced by Jens Hoffmann and Maurizio Cattelan. The proj­ect can be related to Cattelan’s previous creative mockery of the art system, which included acts of disappearance, theft, and insubordination. It also connects with Hoffmann’s interest in redefining the functions of curators within the art system5 and in “recurating” previous exhibitions.6 The lack of a “real” show and the use of external forces and agencies on his own benefit recalls previous proj­ects such as Another Fucking Readymade (1996), in which Cattelan stole a ­whole exhibition in Amsterdam to pres­ent it as his own work; or the exhibition he or­ga­nized in 1997 in Paris at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, in which he literally copied a show taking place next door. Examining ­those initiatives, Massimiliano Gioni argues that: “This excess of visibility, then, might be said to function as an antidote, a desperate

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attempt to fill a vacuum in order to confirm one’s own presence, which would other­wise be condemned to anonymity, and eventually to invisibility” (Bonami 2003b, 173). The Invisible Biennial tackles the issue of visibility and repetition through what Cattelan (Cattelan and Hoffmann 2011, unpaginated) calls “managerial sublime.” Blown Away set out to critique temporary exhibitions as privileged curatorial manifestations, criticizing art biennials for being trapped in an economy of visibility and attention. In order to censure the lack of reformist potential they identify in the biennial form, Cattelan and Hoffmann empty that form, reducing it to a social event taking place in an idyllic context. The biennial format was also chosen as a mockery of the logic of postcolonial exhibition practices seeking to “discover” and “integrate” productions from not-­yet-­discovered exotic artistic locations, while at the same time spreading initiatives worldwide and circulating local productions (and small, privileged audiences) globally (Bonami 2003b, 141). The “negative” intervention the biennial represents is justified by the pressure imposed by an overcrowded art system that demands authenticity, originality, and commitment from artists. Giving up the possibility of solving t­ hose prob­ lems aesthetically or adopting a militant stance, the fake biennial is located outside the artistic domain in the realm of management and influence. The biennial, then, is reduced to its minimum ele­ments: a predictable list of artists and attention in the specialized media encapsulated within a temporal and spatial ­bubble. Artistic ­labor is precisely another, obvious dimension addressed in Blown Away. In the Ca­rib­bean biennial both curators set out to challenge notions of artistic privilege, the moral predicament of the art market, and the distance between the expressivity of the artwork and the more mundane pro­cesses ­behind it.7 Cattelan ironically defines his position in t­ hose initiatives as an intervention in the “economy of attention” (Cattelan and Hoffmann 2001, unpaginated). The main issues of Blown Away have been already analyzed in some detail in critical thinking on artistic ­labor, participative art, and biennialism. The proj­ect is also frequently considered in recent surveys of innovative curatorial practice. Paul O’Neill (2012, 74) categorizes it as a parody of “biennial art” and as “a self-­reflexive critique of the nomadic curator, increasingly responsible for seeking the new in far-­off places.” For Jenny Liu (2000), it was critical of the fleeting nature of artistic practice, an act of institutional critique (art being absent from it), and an evidence of the exhaustion of the

Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere  •  49

biennial format as artistic venue. Noah Horo­witz’s insights are more critical, pointing out how the negativity that drove the entire proj­ect “testifies to the po­liti­cally compromised status of art and exhibition making at the very moment of the art world’s globalization” (2011, 131). In his view, Cattelan’s and Hoffman’s experiment is a clear sign of the conflation of art biennials, cultural tourism, and financial capital, in which innovation and criticality ­will not be found. Fi­nally, Martha Buskirk focuses on Cattelan’s and Hoffman’s excessive posturing, highlighting how not only art but also spectatorship was absent from the event, and asking “how seriously should one take Cattelan’s prank-­filled practice” (2012, 266). She epitomizes Cattelan’s per­sis­tence in mocking the financial structure of the art system as part of a broader tendency of some artists (Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huygue, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick) to create a lifestyle around provocative experiences and participation-­based artistic proj­ects. But, she warns, that tendency usually ends up joining the art system rather than criticizing or transforming it (270–303). The prob­lem with that supposedly critical logic is that it depends completely on the neo­co­lo­nial deployment of contextual knowledge, an act that could be easily traceable back to past and pres­ent (post)colonial misrepre­ sen­ta­tions of the Ca­rib­bean. To put it simply, although ­these approaches highlight the critical potential of bringing a group of artists together to do nothing, they can do so only through repeating the act of emptying the Ca­rib­bean of any cultural value. When asked about location, Hoffmann makes the connection even more explicit: “The location was clear very early on. We wanted to find the biggest ste­reo­type of an exotic holiday place, a site North Americans and Eu­ro­pe­ans would dream of ­a fter a hard year’s work. Sometimes you won­der why some of t­ hese new biennials emerge where they do and I guess our choice of the Ca­rib­bean had a lot to do with that” (Bonami 2003b, 142). In other words, it is only through assuming the inexistence of the Ca­rib­bean that Cattelan and Hoffmann can implement their comment on biennials, spaces where, in Cattelan’s opinion, “nothing r­ eally happens” (Cattelan and Hoffmann 2001, unpaginated). ­Here the Ca­rib­bean emerges in the prank as a cultural vacuum populated by lazy individuals,8 susceptible to being filled with the expectations and needs of Mainstream’s, World-­art’s (in its worst version, in the singular and with a capital letter) agency. Are ­there other possibilities of critically engaging the art system? How have Ca­rib­bean artists dealt with similar topics?

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Far Niente (­Doing Nothing) Dealing with the reception of C.L.R. James by Italian anti-­work Marxism, Christopher Taylor (2014) pointed out how the international success of books like Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s Empire implied eliciting James’s influence and erasing the movements of fleeing enacted by slaves in the Ca­rib­ bean. Discussing Negri’s reading of anti-­work and the Grundisse, Taylor argues that “This hermeneutic of the tendency [. . .] evacuates the past of any effective futurity while it si­mul­ta­neously establishes a temporality of deferral for ­those spaces not yet incorporated into the ontological singularity of the ­future’s pres­ent” (4). In a similar vein, Sandro Mezzadra mentions the existence of an “collective imagination of flight” that can be traced back to the landscape of maritime trade and migrations of the eigh­teenth ­century and that establishes “a praxis of democratic-­radical secession that would remain alive within the experience of the modern exploited” (Mezzadra 2012, 73).9 Is this not similar to the pro­cess of selective oblivion we find in the Invis­ ible Biennial? Is ­there a way to make use of “­doing nothing” more productively, outside ethnographic, neo­co­lo­nial interests? Cattelan overlooked the fact that a w ­ hole history of exodus and aesthetic withdrawal already existed in the Ca­rib­bean. The examples analyzed h ­ ere stand along a vast trajectory of using withdrawing in productive, affirmative terms. They pursue a thorough transformation of the structures surrounding artistic l­abor in the Ca­rib­bean. In so d­ oing, they offer a good point for rethinking the histories of artmaking in the Ca­rib­bean. This genealogy encompasses tactical adjustments, movements of ideas and p­ eople, and active reconfigurations of site(s) and space(s), articulating what Michaeline Crichlow and Patricia Northover (2009, 215; see also Crichlow 2012) have defined in another context as pro­cesses of “fleeing” and “homing.” Th ­ ere are plenty of practices engaged in a problematization of ­those questions. Acknowledging this diversity, two of them ­will be examined h ­ ere. Although belonging to very dif­f er­ent sociopo­liti­cal contexts and temporalities, both share an interest in transcending the discursive appropriation of critique of initiatives like the Invisible Biennial. Cuban Art Dedicates Itself to Baseball, the first proj­ect we w ­ ill examine, took place in the last days of September 1989 in the José A. Echevarría Stadium in Vedado, Havana. Several Cuban artists, critics, and curators, including René Francisco, Antonio Eligio Fernández “Tonel,” Glexis Novoa, Luis Gómez, Gerardo Mosquera, and Iván de la Nuez, or­ga­nized a baseball game as a

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protest against the censorship that conditioned the Cuban artistic milieu of ­those years in dif­f er­ent ways.10 The motto of the event was: “Since we cannot make art, we ­will play baseball.” The game followed a worsening in the relations between artists and the state bureaucracy in the last years of the 1980s. Censorship did not have a single face; rather, it presented itself in a variety of ways, having an impact on the production of artworks, their se­lection, and the ways in which they ­were displayed. Self-­censorship was also frequent. In the years preceding the event, several artists had found their exhibitions closed or intervened by the country’s cultural authorities. Tomás Esson’s A tarro partido II (To a broken pot II), for example, was closed down in 1988 for displaying a painting where two bestial figures copulate ­under a picture of Che Guevara. ABTV Collective’s Hommage to Hans Haacke, an exhibition that sought to appropriate the ability of the German artist to lay bare the mechanisms of social and economic power, was closed by the collective itself ­after being photographed and documented. A cata­log including a critical statement exploring the situation of artists in Cuba was produced. Another censured proj­ect, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (­Castle of the Royal Force), consisted of a series of exhibitions displayed in the colonial fortress of that name. The initiative included several satirical ele­ments that made fun of symbols of the revolution. Within this context, fi­nally, some artists, dressed as American Indians, also developed a mock protest against the “colonizing” gesture of Robert Rauschenberg’s Roci Cuba proj­ ect, an itinerant initiative led by the American artist. The tensions reached its maximum with the imprisonment of the artist Ángel Delgado.11 The 1989 action brought together a local community of artists sharing similar repre­sen­ta­tional burdens. Occurring less than two months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuban Art Dedicates Itself to Baseball used withdrawal to reinforce a sense of artistic community, thereby productively and contextually repositioning the role of artistic agency and productivity in Cuban society. The consequences ­were far-­reaching: many of the players left the country thereafter, creating an impasse in Cuban art that was only eclipsed ­after several years and at the expense of a new shift in creative strategies. This event was part of a general phenomenon of withdrawal affecting Cuban artistic practice at the turn of the 1980s, a movement described by Rachel Weiss (2011, 158) as “an abandonment of the public—as site, audience, and aspiration; a retreat from an ethic of collectivism; a defensive restoration of the visual in visual art; shifting fortunes for the literal and the meta­phoric, shifting of artists’ self-­positioning relative to official institutions,

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and shifting of t­ hose institutions’ own evolutionary logic.” In this case, withdrawal followed an excess of po­liti­cal effervescence placed in discursive terms. It implied a change of strategy against the backdrop of the closure of exhibitions as a platform of expression. It also arose as a tactical and active occupation of the space of baseball, Cuba’s national sport. Choosing baseball was heavy with connotations. For instance, the game countered the popu­lar and spectacular tenor of baseball in Cuba, making explicit to the revolutionary establishment the situation of atrophy deriving from the difficulties of producing art in contexts of censorship. Furthermore, in the event the deployment of physical energy and the meeting of fellow artists was the main carrier of aesthetic value. The recent history of Cuban art is full of similar acts of withdrawal and insubordination against censorship and institutional control.12 Far from being allocated within any specific generation or historical moment, however, ­those acts have been a common yet still partially unexplored trend across the last three de­cades of Cuban art (see Álvarez n.d., “Tonel” 2006). During the experimental effervescence of the 1980s, in any case, tensions frequently arose between artists and the most reactionary sectors of state cultural bureaucracy. Although the discrepancies increased by the end of the de­cade, when actions such as Cuban Art Dedicates Itself to Baseball took place, by the beginning of the de­cade a so­cio­log­i­cal enquiry into the values and iconography of the revolution was already underway. Generally sympathetic about the evolution of Cuban art during the 1980s, Luis Camnitzer talks about how this movement was a consequence of and not a reaction against the modernist character of con­temporary Cuban art. In this regard, Camnitzer mentions the importance of the literacy campaign held in revolutionary times, and also the positive impact of having an “enlarged public” (2003, 118). In this context, censorship and self-­censorship emerge as a complex real­ity. With the last years of the 1990s in mind, he writes, self-­censorship in Cuba operates on two levels. One is in regard to the tenor of the ­actual creative work being produced; the other is what is said in meetings. Both modes do not necessarily happen si­mul­ta­neously. ­Until recently, discussions w ­ ere very open, and nobody seemed overly worried about making theoretical criticism and analyzing the situation. Th ­ ere is generally more insecurity about how far the artist can go with the creative work, but [. . .] it is more an issue related to where the pieces ­will be presented than to what the pieces are communicating. (132)

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It is impor­tant to note the multifaceted character of the artistic responses to t­ hose (heterogeneous) situations. This resilience went hand in hand with a critical awareness of the need to bargain with the institution. In that sense, the members of the ABTV affirmed in 1989 that: “In our context, sooner or ­later ­every artistic phenomenon is institutionally absorbed: ­those arising spontaneously, outside the established channels for the distribution of art, just as much as t­ hose attempting programmatically to withdraw t­ hose channels. Even t­ hose artworks attempting to criticize institutions—­including ours—­are immersed in the very pro­cess of institutionalization” (ABTV Collective 1989, unpaginated).13 Although statements like this seem to lead to a deadlock, we must not forget that even the artists who ­were b­ ehind this affirmation w ­ ere at the same time inventing innovative ways of confronting the institution again and again. To the names of José Ángel Toirac, Tanya Angulo, Ileana Villazón, or Juan Pablo Ballester, we must add t­ hose of René Francisco Rodríguez, Eduardo Ponjuán, Lázaro Saavedra (whose Detector de ideologías (Ideology detector), homage to Joseph Beuys and “humanized” portrait of Karl Marx became some of the most celebrated artworks of the de­cade),14 Antonio Eligio Fernández “Tonel,” Luis Gómez, and Aldo Menéndez. Soon, however, the impact of the art market and the international spotlight on con­temporary Cuban art introduced new ele­ ments into the mixture. During the 1990s, the criticism of institutions and the official bureaucracy (a quintessentially “pre-1989” proj­ect, as has been noted15) would be transformed, along with the very forces it attempted to target. As a consequence, new subjects (among them migration, memory) emerged, and some artistic criticism took the shape of a self-­aware approach to the current pa­norama of creative practices.16 Although the weight of the institutional apparatus in the Cuban case surpasses that of any other Ca­rib­bean context, situations such as t­ hese are not unique. Operating from a totally dif­fer­ent context and temporality, Joëlle Ferly’s L’ Art de faire grève (The art of striking, 2009) also tackles the issues of cultural institutionalism, artistic ­labor, and location. When invited to the opening of the collective exhibition Entre vues (Between gazes), held at the Fondation Clément in Martinique, the artist deci­ded to declare a strike and walked around on the opening night greeting ­people.17 The action was planned with the context of the Fondation very pres­ent, given that it is the main art center in the Francophone Ca­rib­bean, founded on the economy of a sugar plantation, and managed by the descendants of one of the richest families of France. Far from Fort-­de-­France, the audience of the Fondation

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is made up of a minority of bekés, the white population that descends directly from the original colonists. When displayed t­ here, the work of Guadeloupean and Martinican artists is thus inserted into an uneven economy of vision in which they provide artistic discourses on Ca­rib­bean issues without normally having any agency on how ­those discourses are displayed, commoditized, collected, and inserted into bigger narratives. Ironically, Entre vues was an exhibition about the gaze in Ca­rib­bean photography. Curated by Suzy Landau, Entre vues was intended to challenge the way that Ca­rib­bean photog­raphers approached real­ity. It featured the work of artists such as O’Neill Lawrence, Alain Pino, Cynthia Phibel, Steeve Bauras, Mónica Ferreras, and Elia Alba, well-­known examples of the youn­gest generations of creators interested in developing conceptual, nonrealistic engagement with the Ca­rib­bean landscape. In that context, Joëlle Ferly’s grève (strike) was not only directed against exhibitions or the Fondation; it was also about the politics of spectatorship and the institutional dynamics in which ­those exhibitions are embedded. Spaces such as the Fondation Clément have been essential in encouraging con­temporary artistic production in the Francophone Antilles. However, this has come at the expense of a reconsideration of the role of local populations in the cultural milieu, since it is still difficult to reach populations without prior training or t­ hose with an interest in con­temporary art. The economic divide between a small elite in control of most businesses and a huge population with French citizenship but living in precarious conditions is maintained and ever-­present in cultural activities such art. Ferly’s action also responded to a very specific conjuncture. In 2009, the Francophone Ca­rib­bean was the scenario of several demonstrations against social in­equality. Ferly’s act of protest took place a­ fter the creation of the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP) collective during the same year (see Bonilla 2015). In January 2009, during Nicolás Sarkozy’s presidency, the LKP or­ga­nized a general strike against in­equality and the excessive pricing of basic goods such as food or fuel. The greve, which quickly extended to other Francophone Départements d’Outre-­Mer (DOM), generated a major concern among Francophone Ca­rib­bean populations about the importance of achieving economic in­de­pen­dence and racial and social equality. Ferly sought to transfer LKP’s plea for sovereignty and strug­gle against metropolitan, “foreign” interference (which led to a forty-­four-­day strike between January and March of 2009) into the Francophone Ca­rib­bean cultural milieu. ­These events constituted the biggest protest movement to rise in the

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Francophone Antilles since they became a DOM. Having trained as an artist in Paris and London, Ferly settled back in Guadeloupe in 2008, and thereafter followed the po­liti­cal situation of the islands. L’ Art de faire grève set out to bring the crisis affecting the DOMs to the space of the art institution. In the proj­ect statement, Ferly not only makes reference to the 2009 strikes but also to how they w ­ ere emptied of meaning by the media operating in the “France hexagonale.” She is concerned with how the activist potential of local movements is compromised by opportunist movements taken up by the local and metropolitan public opinion, including the French left. Similarly, L’ Art de faire grève questions the extent to which discursive agency can be withdrawn when that agency is controlled and displayed chez le beké (within the space of the descendant of Eu­ro­pean settlers). Her attitude to the Fondation is, nevertheless, ambivalent, since she recognizes that the institution has been key in encouraging and disseminating Antillean con­ temporary practices. We ­will return to Ferly’s story in chapter 5. In the meantime, it is worth mentioning that many other examples could have been mentioned h ­ ere. ­These two examples ­were chosen ­because they explain the depth of a genealogy of anti-­work and artistic withdrawal in Ca­rib­bean artistic practice; one that channels and fuels issues, demands for institutional inclusivity and accessibility, and fi­nally highlights the currency of the issues foregrounded through ­those strategical procedures. What distinguishes ­these initiatives ­ ill to transcend the initial moment of from the Invisible Biennial is their w negativity and disruption in order to transform criticism into something positive. Withdrawing institutional space becomes, in t­ hose cases, an affirmative maneuver attempting not just to reveal how deep-­seated institutional pressures are but also to envisage potential ways out. This possibility, however, is not the only way in which Ca­rib­bean creators have engaged institutional power critically. The remaining sections of this chapter ­will pres­ent two alternative possibilities: the first one has to do with materiality, the second one with ghostly presences and haunted spaces.

Disappearing Ele­ments An installation by the guianan artist Audry Liseron-­Monfils w ­ ill serve as a connecting ele­ment between this current and what has been presented so far. In Cour d’air (Air yard, 1997), the artist enters an invisible structure,

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the upper part of his shaved head being the only part of his body that remains vis­i­ble. For the visitor, however, Liseron-­Monfils’s head is just an uncanny semi-­sphere located at the same height as his/her shoes. The artist interacts with the audience from his cabin, answering any question that he receives in the form of written messages. Cour d’air makes the artist’s materiality evident, at the same time linking this interpretation of materiality with direct, phenomenological experimentation. Fi­nally, the artwork (physically) inserts its criticism into the environment, establishing a continuity with minimalism and institutional critique’s interest in signaling the apparent neutrality of the white cube. In this case, however, it is not just the artwork but the racialized body of the artist that becomes embedded in and trapped by the objectivity of the exhibition space. In Cour d’air, Liseron-­Monfils c­ ouples materiality and presence (or, in this case, its lack thereof). In this section, I ­will touch on several installations that challenge the permanent condition of the art object, subjecting its materiality to a transient, shifting state.18 In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of the study of material culture associated with a greater ac­cep­tance of the senses as sources of knowledge, a development that can be observed in several disciplines.19 As several authors have pointed out, objects are not isolated. They shape our lives and our world, as we shape their form. They are “the very substance of our socie­ties” (Latour 1993, 4). Nevertheless, as Hodder (2012, 3) has pointed out, we tend to extract from them what we need, a par­tic­u­lar aspect of them, instead of considering that ­things have their own life and set of values and relations. According to him, both artifacts and natu­ral t­ hings—­and the border between them tends to blur—­ pres­ent themselves in ecosystems (4). Despite that, we are so used to some objects that we consider them part of the landscape, which enables us to relate to them in a nondiscursive way.20 This perspective confers an active voice on t­ hings. Each t­ hing thus has a biography. This biography, however, is an ever-­ changing, troubled one (Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006, 13). If we agree to confer on t­ hings a life of their own, then, how can we approach them? In this case, we have to consider implications of owner­ship, accessibility, consumption, and exchange. With regard to possession, collecting appears to be an act indissolubly linked to our approach to t­ hings. Chris Gosden (2005) has questioned, ­after W.J.T. Mitchell, what objects want, pointing out the existence of an inter-­artefactual domain that interacts with h ­ uman communities. Moreover, though s­ imple, everyday gestures such as eating and drinking imply

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a complex setting of power relations that regulate our position in relation to other h ­ uman beings. Agency, then, comes into the discussion (Gell 1998), allowing us to consider contact between cultures as subtle, long-­term maneuvers implying interdependence and “tactile” exchanges. In that sense, although constructed across situations of accessibility, in­equality, and privilege, objects and raw materials can also be approached as sites of divergence, difference, and contest (Dudley et al. 2012, Thomas 1991, Webster 2009). A good example of this is offered by Trinidadian artist Nikolai Noel. In one of his earliest and most power­ful compositions, entitled Night and Sugar and shown for the first time in 2011, a light bulb was covered in brown sugar, which colored and modified the light but also made the bulb blow ­after a while. Two main ele­ments conditioned the sensory perception of the visitors: the absence of illumination, since the light bulb was the only source of light, and the par­tic­u­lar odor of the sugar heating up and then destroying the bulb. In other untitled installations displayed the same year, Noel drew vari­ous silhouettes on the wall using sugar.21 The surface was intended to blur with the warming of the exhibition space caused by the arrival and the breath of spectators, leaving an imprint in the wall and, again, an olfactory trace. Sensory perception was both essential to the installation and impossible to ignore. The artist has also used sugar to fashion sugar machetes that deteriorated during the installations.22 Through the metonymic action of constructing the blade from the material it was designed to cut, the productive object became raw material and vice versa, conveying the interconnected and attainable character of Ca­rib­bean histories. In more recent installations created in 2012 (Some Kind of Vessel, The Sweet of My Brown, and untitled compositions), Noel placed fin­gers and h ­ uman jaws made of sugar on earth pedestals. Raised to the status of relics, they ­were “condemned” to a finite existence, which the public could contemplate.23 A cloying atmosphere akin to that created by Noel is employed by Bahamian artist Blue Curry. For the Sixth Liverpool Biennial in 2010, Curry exhibited a customized shimmering blue cement mixer filled with gallons of sun cream that was in continual operation during the exhibition. As the cement mixer spun, the sweet smell of the sun cream invaded the entire room at Greenland Street, Liverpool. As a contribution to another proj­ect, the artist silk-­screened a sun-­cream pattern cover design on to the exhibition cata­logue, giving it a sticky texture and the same olfactory sensation. He has also used sun cream painted directly onto the walls of the exhibition space to act as an ele­ment in his recent installations. This and other works of

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Curry offer a sensory appeal that makes it difficult to elicit a direct meaning. None of his works is titled; instead he lists the materials of which they are composed, and this is what reveals pos­si­ble interpretations. This lack of descriptive meaning, consciously a­ dopted by the artist, opens his works to a sensory approach, as noted by Thompson (2011). Two notes in her essay on Curry are specially revealing for my examination: In her analy­sis of this installation, she points out the way that sun cream appeals to several senses, for “[it] forecasts in a single whiff all the holiday pleasures one might consume, sensorially, visually, orally, sexually” (2011). Furthermore, she outlines how sun cream imprints a per­sis­tent albeit uncontrollable mark on bodies. To both sensory ele­ments we have to add the noise produced by the industrial cement mixer, something that gives the installation the appearance of a construction site. Sun cream is inserted into a transformative context, spreading its odor throughout the entire room. This feeling is the first ele­ ment that any person visiting the installation ­will perceive. Like sugar in the case of Noel, sun cream imposes its materiality to any pos­si­ble signifying pro­cess, creating an elusive and ironic presence that permeates the installation. As James has asserted, “culture remains pres­ent and essential in the work, but does not dominate the form as before” (2012, 34). The noise produced by the industrial cement mixer is also a significant ele­ment. As its smell permeated the space, sun cream was thus inserted into a transformative context, enacting a specific temporality.24 Apart from ­those issues, another level we need to consider at this point is intention. Artists intervene not only by choosing the t­ hings included in the installation, by positioning them and by establishing a temporal context; they also condition the ways we approach each artwork, setting up certain conditions that shape the implications of the work. Coming back to Noel’s installations, we can see how the ­human presence is objectified, since it is the multitude of spectators who heat the room and hasten the chemical reactions of the sugar melting. Regardless of ­whether they wish to do so, visitors ­will “destroy” the artwork, revealing its true meaning. This gesture can be read as a concern with artistic practice itself. Something similar occurs with Curry’s sun-­cream installation, where only the decision to activate the cement mixer reveals the nature of the proj­ect. Both Noel and Curry pose a challenge to all the categories implied in the regular dynamic of the artistic spaces where they operate. The direct interpretation of meaning is being called into question, as are the genealogies of memory in the past and their continuity in the pres­ent and the poli-

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tics of display of institutional practices. In both cases, t­ here is a sensation of loss when we look at visual documents, since the three installations considered ­here have a strong multi-­sensory vocation. Our closing section ­will examine the case of an artistic proj­ect that delves further into that sense of loss, embodying critique within ghostly presences.

Ghostly Presences Materiality is not the only way in which Ca­rib­bean artists have conjured the hidden continuities informing t­ hese pro­cesses.25 In other cases, they have resorted to the evocation of ghostly presences to expose the contradiction of institutional power and institutional space.26 Jamaican-­based critic Annie Paul extends this ghostly condition to the ­whole Ca­rib­bean, arguing that the Ca­rib­bean itself can be seen as a series of dubbed spaces or dub mixes of the Eu­ro­pean countries they once w ­ ere colonies or outposts of. Moving from island to island is like visiting a series of ghost towns where the distinctive En­glish, Dutch, French and Spanish architecture is now repopulated, recomposed and remixed into Creole versions of Eu­ro­pean cultures. (2012, 31)

Paul’s concern in that article is not with the past, however, but with the fertile transnational “hauntology” opened (­under her view) through the aperture represented by social networks and regional mobility. ­Those two ele­ ments would have given rise to a “regional hauntology, a series of poignant dubs by visual artists attempting to come to terms with the spectres, spooks and duppies lingering in the traumatic, troubled pres­ent of the Ca­rib­bean” (Paul 2012, 39). Specters undeniably populate Ca­rib­bean contemporaneity, enabling transit(ion)s across dif­fer­ent space-­times (we only have to recall the centrality of fukú in Junot Díaz’s prize-­winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). Following Derek Walcott’s brilliant affirmation—­“the sea is history”—­Martin Munro (2015, x) reminds us of the “haunted quality” of Ca­rib­bean creativity, pointing out how “ghosts are everywhere.” Several questions arise at this point: How are ­those ghosts to be confronted? How can we make that hauntology productive? How are Ca­rib­bean artists making sense of ghosts? The scope of ­these questions goes beyond the Ca­rib­bean. At the beginning of the 1990s, ghosts emerged amidst the supposedly demise of ideologies. Published in 1994, Jacques Derrida’s Specters

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of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Interna­ tional ­shaped that debate to a g­ reat extent. Derrida then asked about the possibility of decoupling the disintegration of the communist block from the promise of Marxist emancipation. His first step, then, was to “multiply” the ghosts of Marx and Marxism, claiming that the capacity of some of ­those to haunt the allegedly post-­ideological times of the 1990s was still very much alive.27 In d­ oing so, they attempted to define a “new internationalism,” a new universal compromise that could ground an alternative ­future in the form of an eternal promise of social change, one linked to, but in no way limited by, the “historical,” contingent failures of some of its former po­liti­cal materializations (Derrida 1994).28 Exploring Derrida’s concept of hauntology, Joaquín Barriendos (2015) points out how discursivity constitutes a pitfall in the theorization of the French phi­los­o­pher, the way in which Derrida transforms the black bodies of emancipated slaves into something belonging to “the enslavement of the mind.” According to Barriendos, “the materialist dimension of slavery—­the way in which Marx talks about the black revolts in the Ca­rib­bean as a liberating act of the body on the one hand, and the way in which he is devoted to give historical m ­ atter to the lordship/bondage dialectics on the other— is put aside in Specters of Marx” (2015). Recalling the insights of Susan Buck-­ Morss (2009) and Sybille Fischer (2004) on the Haitian Revolution, Barriendos (2015) concludes that “circumscribed to the liberating gesture of rereading Marx as the foundational myth of hauntology, Derrida circles back on the obscurity of the mind rather than on the dark side of modernity.” Some years ago, while visiting Jamaica, I found a very par­tic­u­lar case of ghostly presences.29 A Cultural Object was an installation made by Dawn Scott in 1985.30 A Cultural Object can be described as a labyrinthic, engulfing spiral holding a surprise at its center. At the entrance of the zinc spiral, we find a message stating, “Cultural Zone. Enter at your own risk,” which echoes the garrison politics of the period (Poupeye 2009). Despite this warning, the entrance is the most “playful” and “inviting” part of the installation, as it is decorated with posters advertising ­music events and references to dancehalls and popu­lar culture. The entrance gives way to a “darker” scenario as we face a narrow, dirty corridor, where advertisements for everyday consumer products and allusions to religion, politics, sexuality, and education share the repre­sen­ta­tional space. This part is not only crowded with messages; ­these become more explicit and acquire a more ominous tone, with references ranging from the Jamaica ­Labour Party (JLP) and Edward

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Seaga, to sexist attitudes ­toward the female body, and so on. The quantity of debris increases as we arrive at the center of the spiral, where the body of a d­ ying homeless man lies sprawled across the floor. Before reaching this climax, two adjacently situated messages demand our attention: the first one says, “Devon House,”31 while the second states, “Jimmy Leave in Space.” “Jimmy” is the name of the clay figure of a homeless person sculpted by Scott. Based on a model in her studio, the appearance of the carved figure aims to be as realistic as pos­si­ble. This realism, essential for the shock value the installation seeks to elicit, is the result of meticulous documentation of Kingston’s ghetto spaces (Poupeye 1985, 7). A Cultural Object is still one of the main attractions of the National Gallery of Jamaica, one that remains appealing for local and international audiences alike.32 The memories linked to A Cultural Object, brought together in the NGJ blog, are quite eloquent in this regard. In her analy­sis of the installation, Veerle Poupeye (2009b) categorized Scott’s work as “an instructive crack in the institutional armor of the NGJ.” Earlier in the same entry, she described the success of the installation among the Jamaican public, although she also recognizes some “undesired” effects: While A Cultural Object obviously resonates with Jamaican audiences, the public response has always had a sensationalist, anarchic edge. Visitors almost immediately started adding their own graffiti to the walls and while the artist initially accepted this de facto interactivity, the results have been unexpected and often disturbing. Most of the graffiti are simply juvenile—of the “Kilroy was ­here” variety—­but many o­ thers are obscene or po­liti­cally partisan and illustrate exactly t­ hose cultural attitudes Scott sought to critique. Even the “street person” sculpture has been vandalized—­one of its legs was broken, which sadly mimics the abuse street p­ eople sometimes encounter in Jamaica—­and the at times unpleasant smell illustrates that some even urinate inside the installation. (2009b)

Poupeye’s assessment of the installation highlights the interactive side of the proj­ect, mentioning the spontaneous responses to it as well as the tolerant and embracing attitude of the institution. The installation is taken as a pedagogical device, one that aimed to challenge the perception of the museum as an immaculate white cube. Nevertheless, the effects and affects motivated by the installation are not the desired ones: in her appreciation, they appear as an obscene supplement, a “disturbing” presence that betrays

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Scott’s “effective” act of criticism. Within this framework, A Cultural Object emerges as (national) heritage and the responses to it as excessive, uncompressible acts. While her text is highly emotional, as she locates the responses to the installation in an arc ranging from “sensationalist” and “anarchic” to “disturbing,” its conclusion is a rational condemnation of vandalism. It is as if that condemnation somehow relegated the feelings arising from the artistic experience to a secondary position, implying therefore a closure of the “instructive crack” in the institution posed by Scott’s proj­ect. In any case, Poupeye acknowledges the emotional potential of the installation: although “wrong,” the attacks to the figure, the act of urinating within the work, and the graffiti are spontaneous, “anarchist” responses sanctioned by the artist—­ and we have to add: tolerated by the institution—­only a posteriori. One of the first ­things that come to mind is that ­these acts do not take place in any other place within the National Gallery. Scott’s installation is thus somehow endowed with a more intense dynamism than the rest of the museum space. This dynamism implies a continuous revisiting and re-­ experiencing of the proj­ect, one that also materializes in unruly, undesired ways. ­There are, then, two opposing forces h ­ ere: the one that holds the installation (physically, epistemologically, and institutionally) in its place, as it is, such as a frozen presence, and the one that dynamically updates, transforms, enlivens, and rejuvenates it. A Cultural Object’s afterlife is the space where ­these two forces coexist. A Cultural Object does not only introduce a “popu­lar” subject into the museum, but it also makes its audience aware of what they can and cannot do and of what is and what is not allowed within museums and artistic spaces.33 Through experiencing the multisensorial itinerary of the labyrinth, our relationship with space primarily derives from a sense of entrapment. This sense is double: we are trapped within Scott’s labyrinth, as much as the labyrinth itself is trapped within the museum walls. The bound­aries of the museum (the physical as well as the ideological) become explicit as a totalizing, ravenous presence that even colonizes what remains outside its walls. But ­there is something repudiating that sensation. It is as if the installation itself wanted to flee from its locus. As we have seen, the installation not only serves as an “illustration” of the institution’s power to consolidate a canon and impose a corpus of affects, but it also actively asks for alternative occupations of the institutional.

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Conclusions This chapter has attempted to cover a broad range of creative practices that critically challenge and intersect institutional dynamics. Though they share some of the original aspirations of institutional critique (the public relevance of art institutions, the disputed condition of institutional space, the need to make the pretensions of neutrality of technologies of display and social relations explicit), they also go beyond the traditional interpretation of institutional power as a monolithic institutional set of forces, challenging not only a located set of rules but also institutional critique’s universality. In saying that, I am not trying to grant a greater degree of criticality to ­those practices. Instead, my objective throughout this chapter has been to identify a desire in many Ca­rib­bean creators for locating, grounding, and undermin­ ing institutional power. For that reason, t­ hose practices cannot be simply grouped u­ nder the label of institutional critique. At the same time, a Ca­rib­ bean reading of the relations between artists, criticisms, and institutions could offer very fertile ground to explore the potential of an “institutionalized critique.” The critical capacity of the practices covered in this chapter remains ambivalent: whereas many of the examples presented h ­ ere are site-­and time-­specific, making it difficult to reproduce and replicate the artistic experience, one won­der to what extent ­those mea­sures are effective in challenging institutional normativity. In any event, ­these performative and installative devices reveal an interest in “locating the e­ nemy”: in t­ hese practices, institutional power emerges as a situated set of power relations. Chapter 5 ­will reprise the debates on institutionalism, addressing the potential of collective, infrastructural practices to overcome the individual critical approaches analyzed above. Broaching the case of the Dominican Republic, chapter 3 applies this analy­sis to spectatorship in a set of performative interventions developed in public spaces.

3

Art Melting in Site-­Specificity Per­for­mance Art and Public Space in the Dominican Republic The nonspecialized audience and the passers-by caught by surprise showed interest, came closer, wanted to participate. What we did not feel at the beginning, was the receptivity of curators, art critics and art institutions, which understood per­for­mance art as padding, a warm-up for something real. We artists started showing quality in our work, and l­ ittle by l­ ittle the medium was accepted. —­Sayuri Guzmán, interview with the author (2010) It is not difficult to see how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy: emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ into bodily traits. —­Sara Ahmed (2004) 64

Art Melting in Site-­Specificity  •  65

The 27th edition of the Dominican National Biennial of Visual Art, which took place in 2013, turned out to be especially controversial. On that occasion, two per­for­mances by Joiri Minaya ­were awarded the first prize. In Metonimia (Metonymy), Minaya presented a two-­channel video. The left screen showed the artist dripping sand out of her breasts through a funnel; the right one presented a loop of the waves of the Ca­rib­bean Sea breaking on the shoreline. Satisfied, the second action, was the main subject of controversy. In this case, Minaya is sitting a ­table in her underwear while serving herself a cup of coffee. Afterwards, she dips a series of stuffed fabric forms into the coffee mug and a sugar bowl, and then puts each piece in her mouth. As a result of this action, Minaya’s mouth becomes full, which generates a sense of anxiousness and discomfort among the audience. A ­ fter eating all the forms and before emptying her mouth, Minaya cleans the ­table, arranges all the objects, and fi­nally leaves the room. The jury awarded both actions the major prize of the biennial. By this time, Minaya was living in the United States and was twenty-­three years old. A big debate ensued. Satisfied gave rise to an acute controversy that generated irate discussions and—­seemingly anachronistic—­debates on the preference for “new media” [sic] such as video art and per­for­mance over painting or sculpture; on the suitability of an action such as Satisfied to “stand for” the variety of practices brought together in the most impor­tant con­ temporary national art event; on the applicability of “subjective” criteria being used to award national prizes, and the like. Through a public letter, the Colegio Dominicano de Artistas Plásticos (CODAP) demanded the cancellation of the biennial, the sacking of María Elena Ditrén, the director of the biennial and head of the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM), and the intervention of the Dominican Ministry of Culture. The CODAP was created in 1977 with the intent of encouraging artistic production and integrating Dominican artists into a collegiate structure. Although it was following a demo­cratizing goal, the functioning of the institution would be limited by several obstacles, among them excessive bureaucratization and aesthetic conservatism. On this occasion, a first argument was the fact that, according to the CODAP, both per­for­mances had been previously shown. This was, however, the less serious (and also the less in­ter­est­ing) part of the accusation. Among the arguments employed by the CODAP figured the fact that the biennial was created to celebrate the painting, drawing, and sculpture of Dominican artists; the exclusion of the CODAP from the jury; and, fi­nally, that an artistic proj­ect in pro­gress was being awarded a prize,

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something that they argued impeded the possibility of verifying the result and its competitiveness in the prizes (Abréu 2013). Formal and informal emails by the members of the CODAP also outlined this position. For example, on August 21, a public letter was forwarded by a collective of artists in search of support, in which they request the “alteration and updating of the bases of the Biennial in order to make them express the sociocultural real­ity of visual arts in the Dominican Republic”1 (Rivera 2013). This updating, it was suggested, o­ ught to respond to the deterioration of the expected role of the biennial in identifying and encouraging national values. “We are,” they ended, “facing a ­great moment of crisis of sociocultural and po­liti­cal values in our country”2 (2013). Two official documents responded to that position. The first one was a letter signed by Ditrén, in which she justified the decision of the jury by saying that change and provocation are in the nature of con­temporary art.3 For its part, the jury, composed of Chus Martínez, Quisqueya Henríquez, and Bingene Armenteros, defended its decision by acknowledging Minaya’s audacity. In their view, “the audacity of [Minaya’s] work resides in a simplicity put at the ser­vice of an ambitious aesthetic and po­liti­cal intention. Her work denotes sensibility, firmness, capacity to understand the context from where she works and, at the same time, an ability to respond to it with a complex language, which is challenging to adapt to traditional institutional contexts. The award was granted unanimously”4 (Martínez, Henríquez, and Armenteros 2013). They also defended artistic experimentation and medium renovation, highlighting how both w ­ ere pres­ent in im­mense proportions in Minaya’s actions. The importance of the controversy surrounding Minaya’s per­for­mance goes beyond the biennial and the valuing of her per­for­mances. Ultimately, it triggered pressing questions concerning the Dominican Republic artistic contemporaneity, and dealt with, among other issues, the social relevance of the biennial format, the importance of emotions as vehicles for aesthetics, the centrality of visual arts in the national cultural debate and its connection with Dominican social values, the “suitability” of some media to portray national identity, as well as the weight of institutional means over artistic discursivity. Moreover, the relation between objecthood, materiality, and value was also ­under discussion h ­ ere, since one of the arguments of the CODAP was that painting and sculpture had been displaced by conceptual and “postmodern” practices as “the con­temporary.” But t­ here is something ­else. The outrage and support voiced by each side, which was dis-

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persed and incremented through social networks, constituted an unpre­ce­ dented collective response which propelled Minaya’s actions into the public domain. Both positions over her work ­were not just “positions” about art, per­ for­mance, or modernity but also emotional and performative responses to ­those positions. Beyond cultural policies and institutional wars, Satisfied was felt, and faced, as a public issue. In the pro­cess, the bound­aries between artist, artwork, art institution, and audience became blurred. We must not forget that the Dominican art scene revolved around two main princi­ples: art prizes and differentiation of media (which entail an unofficial hierarchy, with painting at the forefront followed by sculpture and drawing). Both the National Biennial, created as early as 1942,5 and the Concurso de Arte León Jimenes (established in Santiago de los Caballeros in 19646) relied ­until recently on both princi­ples; it was only in the 2000s that the separation of media (painting, sculpture, video art, e­ tc.) was fi­nally eliminated.7 Although both events updated the way they functioned in the 2000s by incorporating an international jury, encompassing recent trends in con­temporary art, embracing all artistic manifestations, and fostering artistic experimentation beyond stylistic and media bound­aries, the controversies around the model of biennials and concursos are still open.8 No ­matter how démodé and predictable many of the arguments of the discussion ­were, the controversy revealed a tension between two ways of understanding artistic contemporaneity in the context of the Dominican Republic. For both sides, the main argument was justified by referring to the capacity of their aesthetics to adapt to the ­here and now of the local context. Although economic, administrative, and even l­egal arguments ­were involved, the clash between two conceptualizations of art and contemporaneity was the main ele­ment at stake. More than that, it was surprising how many ­people “cared” about art and visual repre­sen­ta­tion, something that ­counters the assumption that biennials are initiatives receiving attention from only a minority of followers. The Minaya controversy was by no means new; nevertheless, its public impact, which reached even the Ministry of Culture, and the fact that all the discussions ­were taking place both in the streets and in the social networks, added in­ter­est­ing new ele­ments to the equation. In any event, it is striking how Minaya’s work was granted a large proportion of attention only to be then removed from the center of the debate. The aesthetic quality and the cultural implications of Satisfied, as well as the emotional transference enacted by the action, ­were soon forgotten as a subject of discussion. In the controversy, Satisfied stood si­mul­ta­neously for an

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individual artwork, an artistic genre, a modernist (“postmodern” [sic] for its detractors) attitude, a repre­sen­ta­tion of the partisan interests of certain institutional policies, and a rupture with a national artistic tradition. Much less emphasis was placed on the fact that Satisfied continued Minaya’s commitment to dismantling Dominican machismo across vernacular and “high culture” practices and scenarios. This interest was also informed by Minaya’s experience as Latina and part of a f­ amily of mi­grants in the United States. In her work, tropicality is commonly critically analyzed alongside mobility, sex, and sexuality and everyday body language. Some of her collaborative actions, for example Portrait Request, in which Minaya asked passersby to write down the assumptions they could made about her persona; or Prudencia (Prudence), where she identifies and cleans the shoes of the English-­speaking attendants while having a discussion in Spanish on migration and civil rights with the rest of the audience, generating “a space of discussion for how we felt about our identities and how they related to broader social and po­liti­cal structures,” deal specifically with how Dominicanness is experienced and lived at the pres­ent moment, something that contradicts the alleged “lack of engagement with the context” of the “traditionalist” side of the controversy (Minaya 2014). Metonimia and Satisfied simply continued that line of enquiry. That continuation, however, was somehow left out from the discussion. Significantly, Minaya ends her action cleaning the t­ able and leaving the room. The subordination of this gesture was somehow reinforced by the institutionalization of the debate over her artistic production and the disregard of the complex ways in which it interacts with the spatial-­temporal contexts in which it is performed. To some extent, this has been the destiny of most Dominican per­for­mance artists within wider artistic initiatives. In this chapter, I argue that the position of Dominican per­for­mance art has been a complex one, sometimes repudiated through aesthetic criteria, and in other cases not fully assimilated within the logic of the museum and artistic commoditization. At the same time, however, Dominican per­for­mance artists have offered some of the most daring attempts to embed historical enquiries and enquiries of identity into the h ­ ere and now of the public sphere. The evolution of Dominican per­for­mance art has been a direct response to that situation. By asking what it means to look at Dominican Republic contemporaneity from the intersection between performativity and the public sphere, this

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chapter attempts to see how t­ hose actions are redefining the links between national identity, embodied politics, artistic agency, and cultural audiences. Taking into account the issues outlined in relation to Minaya’s reception and bringing back the concerns on Ca­rib­bean art’s social agency expressed in previous chapters, this section ­will examine several performative actions carried out in the Dominican Republic over the last three de­cades in order to demonstrate how per­for­mance artists have sought innovative ways to increase the social repercussions of their praxis, to foster social engagement, and to overcome institutional hindrances.9 This w ­ ill involve addressing the following questions: What kind of issues are Dominican per­for­mance artists projecting into the public sphere? How are they d­ oing so? What is the social relevance of their actions? In which ways are t­ hose actions attempting to redefine the social utility of visual practice in the context of Dominican Republic? How do ­these confront homogeneous and straightforward views of Dominican national identity?

Touch and Object: The Dominican Performative Asking the questions above requires us to consider how per­for­mance art is integrated into the Ca­rib­bean artistic contemporaneity. As Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson have pointed out, a complete history of Ca­rib­bean art has been underrepresented in f­avor of another based on materiality and objectivity (Tancons 2012, 2014; Thompson 2012b). Performative proj­ects rarely appear in survey books, which still focus on painting and sculpture to a g­ reat extent, not on collective exhibitions. Although this pa­norama is changing l­ ittle by ­little,10 many obstacles remain. For many institutional and exhibitional proj­ects, per­for­mance is still contemplated as the “something ­else category” that one finds as the curtain-­raiser to greater events. Something similar happens with the aesthetic value and the contemporaneity of performative vernacular experiences such as carnival, one the many practices that could be grouped ­under the term fiesta, which Angela Marino and Manuel Cuéllar define as “kinds of cultural per­for­mances that are usually full-­day or multi-­day gatherings and that include theatrical manifestations of dance, ­music, and crowd gathering, sometimes food, a mass or ser­vice, a pro­cession or other form of devotional ritual or prayer” (2015, 123). In the case of the Amer­i­cas, Diana Taylor (2006, 70) argues, this exclusion is

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not so much the product of casual forgetfulness as an act of “strategically position[ing per­for­mance] outside of history, rendered invalid as a form of cultural transmission, in short made un-­and anti-­historical by conquerors and colonizers who wanted to monopolize power.”11 In the case of the Dominican Republic, per­for­mance art has been crucial in fostering aesthetic renovation and a more direct engagement of artistic practice within a transnational public sphere. The work of Dominican per­for­mance artists has been crucial in establishing a direct connection with audiences not used to con­temporary art discourses. They have also decentered the attention from Santo Domingo, incorporating other cities with very dif­fer­ent backgrounds such as Puerto Plata or Santiago de los Caballeros to the landscape of con­temporary culture in the country.12 Operating in a context strongly influenced by the weight of official art institutions, per­ for­mance artists have sought to create an idiosyncratic position within the plethora of visual practices and stimuli of the Dominican urban space. Emerging from that landscape, several voices have sought to redefine assumptions of Dominicanness beyond narrow understandings of it linked to national culture and to the national territory. Against the image of a Dominican identity still linked to the land, to tradition, and to a bucolic depiction of the country’s rural landscape, an alternative way of approaching Dominicanness emerged from per­for­mance, highlighting the centrality of visuality, spectacle, and neoliberal consumerism in the Dominican culture. Perhaps the best example of this transformation is embodied in the figure of Rita Indiana Hernández. Indiana (Santo Domingo, 1977) has become a cultural and social icon both within and beyond the Dominican territory. With complete freedom, her work mixes installation, per­for­mance, musical, and video production. The results of t­ hese mixtures usually circulate outside the channels of the ciudad letrada (lettered city),13 influencing urban trends and audiences with no previous interest in “high culture.” Added to this versatile character is an interest in mixing Dominican vernacular culture with transnational codes and references, including pop culture, videogames, and global consumerism (see Bustamante 2013, Vera Rojas 2011–2012). Indiana’s production, as Juan Duchesne Winter (2008) has pointed out, can be characterized in terms of spectacle, multilayered experience and unreality. At the same time, however, Indiana is always conscious of the challenges posed by the Dominican institutional landscape and of the risk inherent in the commoditization of urban cultural practices.14

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This visual and spectacular turn implies a performative condition which has also found an echo in the Dominican visual arts. In this renovated cultural landscape, Dominican per­for­mance artists have striven to define a recognizable voice, despite the inadequacy of institutional attention ­toward the medium. A first ele­ment of this position has to do with avoiding direct allusions to po­liti­cal issues. In 2010 I had a long conversation on performative practices in the Dominican Republic with the artist and curator Sayuri Guzmán. Discussing aspects related to her work, the conversation moved to the role of po­liti­cal and social transgression in Dominican per­for­mance art. ­A fter pondering on the question for a while, she answered that Dominican artists are more interested in exploring anthropological or personal issues rather than in developing politically-­charged actions. When they do, she affirmed, ­there is always a subtle way of dealing with them. “­There is no Dominican version of Tania Bruguera,” she said emphatically.15 This contention is easily confirmed by an examination of Joiri Minaya’s actions at the 2013 biennial. Indeed, the tense tone of the debates had a lot to do with not recognizing the subtlety with which Minaya dealt with the weight of heteronormative machismo (not to mention identifying it as a potential national threat) in defining Dominican identity. Along with subtlety, another feature binding Dominican performers together is social relevance. We can identify a desire to examine and embrace the current pa­norama described above as a means of challenging the limitations of artistic classifications and global consumerism. Dominican per­for­ mance artists frequently experiment with cultural actions and gestures of the everyday; at the same time, however, artists are aware of the dangers of over-­identification implicit in a repre­sen­ta­tional approach to subordination and marginalization. We must not forget that per­for­mance occupied a secondary place in Dominican art biennials, as part of the so-­called “categoría libre,” a loose category that included all of the displays without a defined prize. The fact that this category remained active ­until 2003 is a clear indication of the difficulties in overcoming a canonical model based on objectification. Despite ­those obstacles, per­for­mance art has had a strong impact on the conservatism of the Dominican institutional art system. Per­for­mance artists have introduced topics on cultural agency, urban exclusion, or outsourced ­labor into the Dominican art debates. In the same way, their work has been useful in generating a place of engagement and negotiation between vernacular practices and artistic creativity.

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Art as a Public M ­ atter The complex relationship between performative practices, art institutions, and public opinion evident in the debates over Minaya’s actions has a long genealogy ­behind it in the context of the Dominican Republic. Paradoxically, the debates on the public relevance of artistic practice gained ground in the 1960s, in the context of Balaguerism. In many aspects, the first government of Joaquín Balaguer implied continuity with Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. The po­liti­cal climate of the time was marked by the censorship imposed by Joaquín Balaguer’s “Gobierno de los Doce Años,”16 and, consequently, strongly conditioned t­ hese first performative actions. Balaguer’s interest in generating a stable atmosphere favoring sustained economic growth led him to use culture and heritage in order to calm any trace of leftist animosity. A turn t­oward Hispanic identity and nationalism took place, rejecting the openness that the Dominican avant-­garde had achieved before the dictatorship, from the 1930s. In this context, a conservative aesthetical position coexisted with a megalomaniac architectural and urban campaign. Art could not escape from this dichotomy. A contradictory situation emerged in which nationalism was expressed by a renewed interest in classicism that meant a refusal of twentieth-­century Dominican avant-­gardism and the importing of Spanish and Italian artworks of niche interest (de los Santos 2005, 12–13).17 The attacks on the avant-­garde ­were portrayed as an attempt to “pop­u­lar­ize” art by separating it from the individualistic interest attributed to it, and they developed into an institutionalized pa­norama that exorcized experimentation and artistic renovation, fostering favoritism and authoritarianism. A normalization of traditionalism was showcased as an equivalent of national identity, which involved the implantation of selective criteria that affected not only the pres­ent but also the past. Contradictorily, such restrictions turned art into a public issue. Art became a debatable subject, and artists had to find their way outside the institutionalized channels implanted by Balaguer’s government. De los Santos recounts a case that demonstrates the difficulties that artists faced when addressing official assignments. He mentions the case of a sculptural group made by Antonio Prats Ventós at the front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. In 1969 the sculptures ­were demolished on the grounds that they “­were ugly.” The Ministry of Culture wanted to replace them with a new set of sculptures purchased in Italy. What is striking ­here is that the debates that arose around the issue motivated a public enquiry in which the gov-

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ernment asked the opinion of 100 “educated families” and 100 “popu­lar families” on the m ­ atter (de los Santos 2005, 13). The results of the survey w ­ ere not as relevant (the Italian sculptures w ­ ere dispersed throughout the country, but Prats Ventós’s group was not restored to its original place) as the confluence of critical debate and public space. The magnitude of the urban interventions and the “cultural turn” that Balaguer’s government introduced brought art to the forefront of public debate and, in so ­doing, forced any response to the official politics to be as public as its counterpart. Artists ­adopted a more vis­i­ble role, engaging in po­liti­cal debates and interacting with other cultural agents. De los Santos’s account of how artists synchronize their agendas with ­labor u­ nions and cultural groups18 in exhibitions such as the Primera temporada de artes plásticas (First season of plastic arts), or the Salon des refusés, where the artworks that w ­ ere not chosen for the first editions of the Santo Domingo Biennial could be discussed publicly, or the cancellation and the postponement of that event19 and other exhibitions due to the fear of pos­si­ble riots, are good examples in this sense.

Leaving the T­ able The relation between art and the debates on Dominican citizenship and nationalism was ­shaped by concerns for the conditions regulating the national art system. If the artistic pa­norama of the 1960s was marked by the strategies devised by artists in order to negotiate with power and censorship, in the following de­cade some artists would adopt a more militant position. Per­for­mance art would be at the forefront of this movement, leaving the museum space in order to insert creativity into the streets. Its pioneers ­were key names in con­temporary Dominican culture like Silvano Lora or Geo Ripley, or movements such as Teatro en la Calle. It is in this context where the first per­for­mances, by artists such as Lora and Ripley, w ­ ere unanimously considered to be the first steps in the history of collaborative artistic actions in the Dominican Republic. Ripley, who was born to Dominican exiles in Venezuela in 1950, produced a strong body of work driven by Afro-­Caribbean spirituality and the search for the remnants of the native ancestry eradicated by the Spaniards. He created choreographic, immersive per­for­mances that aimed to enhance the audience’s senses through the combination of sound, smells, and visual stimuli. Anticipating in some ways the work of artists such as Juan Francisco Elso, Ripley’s artworks are surrounded by magico-­religious

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connotations emerging from a variety of sources, including Haitian vodun or Taíno culture. If the results of t­ hose approaches to the spiritual tradition of the Ca­rib­bean now seem too poetic or “identity-­driven” to produce an active engagement, they ­were impor­tant at the time, for they produced a turn ­toward a gestural and experience-­driven understanding of art practice, while also challenging the official canonical prescriptions of art and stimulating a more open understanding of the public domain. Ripley has had a direct influence over younger generations who have used the body to raise the visibility of certain issues within the cultural sphere. Silvano Lora, for his part, represents a clearer case of po­liti­cal compromise with leftist radical ideology and what we could call “postcolonial concern” for the revision of the negative consequences of the history of colonialism in con­temporary La Española. Trained in Santo Domingo and Paris, Lora was exiled to Panama in 1965, where he collaborated in several artistic initiatives, seeking to engage the population in cultural production. A ­ fter returning to the Dominican Republic in 1977, he became an impor­tant figure in the national cultural landscape both as an artist and as a cultural man­ag­er. The performative work of Lora is driven by a concern with class and geopo­liti­cal in­equality, yet that does not necessarily imply a direct challenge to the reification of the artist’s position. In some of his actions, for example, the artist participates by painting or creating within the w ­ hole ensemble; when action is outsourced, models are painted in the midst of a musical and scenographic spectacle à la Yves Klein, dancing in front of the mural that Lora himself paints, as in the first Havana Biennial, or destroying once brown paper curtains à la Gutai. The audience’s collaboration is sought and its creativity fostered in his actions, although the position of the artist within the creative pro­cess varies from action to action. His most noteworthy per­for­mance provides a perfect example of Lora’s interest in challenging the cap­i­tal­ist interests of the Dominican art system. In 1992, coinciding with the cele­brations of the quincentennial of the “discovery of Amer­i­ca,” in which a replica of Columbus’s caravel was brought to the Ozama estuary, Lora pi­loted a canoe and challenged the vessel. Dressed as an Indian, he and his assistants started shooting arrows at the caravel, trying to artistically sabotage the official act. At this moment, however, Lora was endangered by the waves caused by the motorboats used by the same Dominican government to provide security for the event, and the artist was about to fall. In fact, Lora’s per­for­mance became a symbolic restaging of the disappearance of the Taínos.

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The intended radicalism of Lora’s message was contaminated by the grandiloquence of the official cultural event, which engulfed the per­for­mance to the point of the “defensive reaction” being interpreted by the spectators as part of the commemorative spectacle. We should note that official cultural events took on a more raucous and theatrical character than ever before as a consequence of the 1992 cele­brations (see Viala 2014). During this year, several initiatives w ­ ere undertaken with the aim of consolidating the image of Santo Domingo as the capital of the Amer­i­cas, attempting to highlight the role of the capital of Hispaniola Island in the pro­cess of creolization and evangelization resulting from the arrival of the Spaniards in the New World. Among t­ hese events we can single out the visit by Pope John Paul II and the construction of a gigantic mausoleum to ­house the alleged remains of Columbus on the other side of the Ozama River, which led to the development of a monumental urban space and a light­house monument, a symbol of the strength of Chris­tian­ity in the Amer­i­cas and the unity of the American nations (the disparity between the objectives and the results of the action can be gauged from the fact that the light, which was the main ele­ment of symbolic value of the proj­ect, stopped working just a few months ­after its completion20). Returning to Lora’s 1992 per­for­mance, it shared the theatricality of other “postcolonial” initiatives of the same era, centered on revising the implications of the “discovery” by recalling the tragic disappearance of Taíno p­ eople. ­Here we can mention Coco Fusco’s and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña’s Year of the White Bear: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West and Freddie Mercado’s transformative walks in San Juan, to name just two con­temporary examples that portray the artists as impersonating the remains of a savaged past. However, to dismiss Lora’s action as in­effec­tive or as merely theatrical would be to misread much of it. First, we cannot disregard the note of uncertainty that the per­for­mance introduced: the success in the media of the arrival of the caravel modified the original tone of the action, but Lora in turn marred the celebratory tone of the commemoration in front of the audience. Spectators thought they ­were witnessing a spectacle but ­were unable to identify which ele­ments ­were planned by the artists and which ­were not. This interference had the effect of undermining the solemnity of the official discourse. Secondly, Lora’s work dug out conflict and dissent and made it explicit, opposing the positive tone of the celebratory mea­sures, of which the organ­ization of the first edition of the Ca­rib­bean Biennial was part. In that regard, its importance lies not so much in the results obtained as in the questions raised. With a poetic tone, its public repercussion laid out

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the presentness of the debates about governance, development, belonging, and citizenship. Fi­nally, the action sought to examine the responsibility of the artist as a public figure, promoting new paths to social engagement. Lora’s initiative acted as an interruption of the real­ity that the quincentennial was commemorating. The action emerges not just as a restaging of a par­tic­u­lar moment in Dominican or Ca­rib­bean history, or simply as a quest for justice against the erasure of the memory of the indigenous population; it also points to the contradictions of the cultural context in which this commemoration was taking place—­contradictions that invalidate any “other” engagement with history and citizenship outside the logic of nationalism and modernization. Indeed, many of Lora’s per­for­mances and initiatives sought to create a path through which other possibilities could be developed. This reading is reinforced by the management activities that Lora undertook around t­ hose years, resulting in events such as the Dominican Film Festival, a rural art museum, or the already discussed Marginal Biennial. Along with artistic management, the other key contribution of Lora’s per­ for­mance was the incorporation of p­ eople from outside the art world. The dancing figures that performed in front of the artist’s murals have been already mentioned; but t­ here are more complex proj­ects. For instance, La ruta de Hatuey (Hatuey’s route), also or­ga­nized in 1992, consisted of a journey replicating the voyage that Hatuey, a Taíno cacique, made to Cuba to warn the population of that island about the arrival of the Spaniards. Lora’s route revolved around recovering Taíno material and immaterial heritage and included collaboration with schoolchildren to reforest the country and decorate a story book. A huge canoe named Hatuey II a­ fter the Taíno chief’s journey was made by local fishermen and then used to undertake a parallel journey in which academics and craftsmen joined as experts in navigation, geography, crafts, and other fields of knowledge. Although the artist himself led the expedition, his presence was completed by incorporating many “nonspecialized” hands into the artistic pro­cess.

Blurring Community The blurring of the artistic position and the questioning of the limitations of the local art system w ­ ere to become the norm in the years leading up to 1992. We have already discussed some curatorial proj­ects such as Curador curado. Around ­those years, u­ nder the direction of Museo de Arte Mod-

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erno by Sara Hermann, performative and vernacular practices became frequent. Although the prize system was maintained in the National Biennial, installations, design, and per­for­mance became a fundamental ele­ment of Dominican artistic vocabulary. Media renovation was not, however, the only aim of the cultural politics of ­those years; the editions of the National Biennials of the early 2000s tried to open the way to collectively produced proj­ects, graphic design, and urban aesthetics that ­were ­until then detached from the artistic pa­norama. In some cases, t­ hese proj­ects incorporated an engagement with the everyday media, such as in Colectivo Shampoo’s D’ la Mona Plaza, presented at the Puerto Rican Poli/Graphic Triennial of San Juan. Artists and designers Angel Rosario and Maurice Sánchez posted an advertisement in a Dominican newspaper advertising the creation of an artificial island and a shopping center at the Mona Canal, which separates La Española island and Puerto Rico and stands as the crossing point for illegal migration. D’ la Mona Plaza intended to be a mall for yola (boat) passengers. The artists offered space for shops and entertainment, giving the contact details of a non­ex­is­tent enterprise to be contacted. Apart from the advert, a promotional video was disseminated showcasing the mall’s location, its conditions, and possibilities through architectural 3D software. Soon a­ fter, a local tele­vi­sion channel featured the proj­ect on a TV gossip show, asking ­whether it was a joke or not and showing part of the video. ­Those results, totally outside the artists’ agency, became the main part of the proj­ect’s outputs. Exploring the meaning and the cultural economy of falsification and customization would be a common feature of Colectivo Shampoo: La plástica dominicana (The Dominican plastic), a proj­ect presented in the 2005 National Biennial, emulated Brâncusi’s Endless Column by stacking up plastic chairs;21 El descubrimiento del 70 (The discovery of the 70), a Honda 70 motorbike embedded in an amber case symbolizing the fossils that can be found in the country, was outsourced to a group of mechanics specialized in tuning motorbikes and cars and to a group of producers of fake amber fossils. Colectivo Shampoo’s initiatives are irreverent and playful approaches to the Dominican vernacular. From that point of view, they amplify the notion of culture and cultural agents while challenging traditional visions of national identity. The collective introduces objects and experiences to the museum that ­were not supposed to be t­ here; they defy authenticity and connoisseur­ ship; they incorporate the know-­how of dif­fer­ent sectors of the Dominican society in the gallery space, “popularizing” a cultural space.

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This challenge of straightforward interpretations of the Dominican identity was not limited to the artistic community living on the Dominican side of the Hispaniola Island. In that sense, the history of Dominican per­for­ mance can be understood without taking into account the actions and initiatives produced in the United States. Artists such as Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Charo Oquet, Waddys Jáquez, and Josefina Báez have undertaken a similar questioning of Dominican-­A merican experience from a transnational position (see Durán Almarza 2010; Lockward 2006, 209–212). In their work, an exploration of personal experiences, cultural interferences, and alternative value systems intertwine in dif­fer­ent ways with vernacular ele­ments of Dominicanness lived and experienced from both sides of the guagua aérea (flying bus).22 Much could be said about ­those artists; h ­ ere, however, I would merely comment that debates over Dominican per­for­mance art cannot be fully appreciated without taking account of transnational pro­cesses of cultural exchange and mobility. In sum, in the 2000s we find a g­ reat diversification of the scenarios of artistic practice, which increasingly started addressing and engaging p­ eople from outside the art system. Many examples can be mentioned h ­ ere: Arte urbano Sarmiento (Urban art Sarmiento), a proj­ect from 2006 developed by Colectivo Shampoo’s advertising agency, involved Dominican artists decorating a set of billboards distributed throughout Santo Domingo; on another occasion, the colmados (small, popu­lar bars and shops located on street corners) ­were customized by artists who reconfigured the spaces into art places, setting up a tour of all the decorated colmados; in 2009, as part of the Basurama program, a huge tsunami made of blue plastic containers was created with the help of collective voluntary work in front of the Santo Domingo Malecón as a response to the state of neglect of the city’s coastal landscape. The following section analyzes two of the most significant initiatives linked to this trend: the Chocopop Festival and Performar.

Long-­Term Engagement and Decentralization Chocopop opened when per­for­mance artist Eliú Almonte negotiated with the authorities of Puerto Plata, a coastal town located in the north part of the island, for access to La Chocolatera Sánchez, an old choco­late factory owned by Trujillo. In 2000, when the Secretaría de Estado y Cultura (Secretary of State and Culture) granted the artists the right to occupy the indus-

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trial space, Almonte settled in Puerto Plata and started to remodel the old factory and run a per­for­mance movement. U ­ ntil 2006, La Chocolatera functioned as an art residency, workshop, and didactic space. While some of the artists deci­ded to s­ ettle in Puerto Plata, many o­ thers, along with critics and ­people from the cultural world, came regularly to view events, transferring part of the artistic activity away from Santo Domingo and Santiago de los Caballeros, the two main cultural scenes of the country.23 This was one of the major aims of the initiative: to encourage interaction with public audiences outside the art world and to promote a dif­fer­ent perception of Puerto Plata as a cultural location. The city, founded by Nicolás de Ovando in 1502, heads a province famous for beach tourism but also for overt sexuality, transnational relationships, and illegal migration (see Brennan 2004, Kempadoo 2004, Sheller 2004). Chocopop tried to broaden this interpretation. In La Chocolatera we can identify at least four kinds of “spectators”: the population of Puerto Plata, dedicated mostly to fishing and tourism; the cultural audiences who came from all over the country; the artists themselves, who also tended to move to Puerto Plata when something was happening; and the international artists and art professors who ­were invited to hold workshops and to collaborate in the design of the individual per­for­mances. Although actions remained largely attached to artist-­driven per­for­mances, the or­ga­nized initiatives, which used to entirely cover the three-­to four-­day period of each festival or workshop, settings such in public parks, cafés, and industrial buildings, implied a wider, collective experience. Through the three major per­for­mance festivals that took place e­ very two years, which ­were dedicated to dif­fer­ent features—­the last edition of 2006 covered “sonic performance”—­Chocopop used per­for­mance to launch debates on urbanism, citizenship, or cultural management. Th ­ ose debates, however, w ­ ere implanted in the practical actions and the day-­to-­day operations of La Chocolatera, and they involved all of the dif­fer­ent audiences mentioned above. The visual documentation of the festivals reinforces this overlap: although the performers appear at the front, crowds are also a significant presence, moving freely, talking among themselves, or sitting on the floor. Chocopop also acted as a bridge connecting Dominican and Latin American per­for­mance. Many of the names involved in Chocopop joined per­for­mance events throughout the continent during the years when the Puerto Plata festival held sway and afterwards. The presence of international artists represented a f­ actor of artistic renovation and essential support for

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La Chocolatera’s didactic aims. Between 2000 and 2006, Germans Helge Mayer, Marco Taubner, and System HM2T Per­for­mance Art Group; Puerto Rican Karlo Ibarra; Spanish Berta Jayo; and Polish Pawel Kwasniewiski gave talks, held events, and visited the Chocopop festivals. Chocopop reactivated the influence of Lora and Ripley, generalizing per­for­mance art as a medium of expression among the country’s artistic community. A focus on immediacy was pursued: as other locations and other audiences ­were incorporated ­ ere carried out by the sea in dif­f er­ent locations into the art cir­cuit, actions w of the island, imposing an active engagement with the events. If Chocopop implied a model of contextual coexistence based on developing a lasting social and pedagogical interchange, Performar is a clear example of how per­for­mance acted as a catalyst for artistic renovation. It was planned as a short-­term per­for­mance festival located in several coastal settings as a tribute to Silvano Lora’s La ruta de Hatuey. Or­ga­nized by Arte-­ estudio, a cultural management duo formed of artist and teacher Sayuri Guzmán and cultural agent Clara Caminero, the Performar program took place between April 20 and May 10, 2009. It consisted of three major initiatives: a series of workshops and conferences; an exhibition of documented per­ for­mances developed by American and Eu­ro­pean artists and coordinated by Mexican artist Antonio Juárez u­ nder the name of F.isura (Fisure); and fi­nally, the most in­ter­est­ing ele­ment, a series of performative actions developed by the sea over three days in dif­fer­ent locations in Boca Chica, the Malecón of Santo Domingo, and Haina. As in Chocopop, many of t­ hose per­for­mances involved participation, yet in very diverse ways: Regina Galindo had thrown herself to the ­water from a boat u­ nder the gaze of the audience, her body mingling with other packages. Proyector con Experiencia group presented members of the audience with glass b­ ottles containing food, a pencil, and a piece of paper. P ­ eople w ­ ere asked to write down their wish on the paper and to return it, keeping the glass as a souvenir. In Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel), David Pérez asked seven sanky pankys24 to create a h ­ uman tower inside the sea, forbidding them to use a common language, which complicated the task. Sayuri Guzmán’s own action (Sirenas [Mermaids]) involved the payment of ten prostitutes who worked in Santo Domingo Malecón to stand for twenty minutes as a military squad. The w ­ omen wore yellow scarves and w ­ ere ordered to stand ­under the glare of the audience. Caryana Castillo invited ­family and friends to spend a day on the beaches of the Malecón, a task that proved impossible due to the amount of trash and waste that had accumulated ­there.25

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Unlike Chocopop, the Performar Festival did not last long, nor did it aim to do so. Most of the actions w ­ ere produced in one day, echoing the theatricality and short duration of Lora’s per­for­mances. ­There lacked a common pattern in the conception of the audience’s role: it shifted from mere spectators to casual participants, hired performers, fellow artists, or passersby, and that variety made it impossible to analyze the actions as a w ­ hole. Rather than examine them one by one (while some actions ­were more poetic, ­others ­ ill be on the coorshocked the audience with their dramatism), our focus w dination of the event and on its continuity with former actions. Performar involved renowned national and international artists but also acted as a catalyst for younger generations of creators that w ­ ere starting to perform. If in some cases the actions could have been seen as a spectacle taking place in appealing locations, in o­ thers they represented continuity in the research and creative interest in exploring the consequences of a neglected coastal location on the lives of local ­people. The event sought, then, to problematize the social texture of the Santo Domingo cultural ecosystem, pointing to the variety of interpersonal relations taking place within the space of abandonment that the Malecón represents, but also delving into subterranean, complex nodes that are articulated from this point. Some of t­ hese relations have to do with the economic structure that makes the existence of this space pos­si­ble, and in that sense, they again take up the questioning on the medium that we observe in Lora’s per­for­mances. The sea is perceived as an ambivalent space, both a dangerous and intriguing place and an open path that allows a flow beyond insularism. More than describing ­those contradictions, the actions included in Performar delineate the complexity of everyday life within this landscape (Guzmán and Caminero 2009), trying to reveal the interconnectedness of the po­liti­cal, economic, and social forces configuring this medium. Among the actions included in the festival, some of the artists turned to outsourcing in order to reveal the bonds at work within this heterogeneity. This was the case of Guzmán, who has herself fostered the development of Dominican per­for­mance through the coordination of initiatives and the creation of links with other Latin American per­for­mance scenes. For example, Pancho López, lecturer and theorist of per­for­mance and driving force of El Museo del Chopo and Performagia in Mexico, has visited the island several times, remaining in contact with the Dominican per­for­mance scene, and is unanimously recognized among the Dominican per­for­mance community as decisive in the configuration of sophisticated collective initiatives

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and in the fostering of artistic interdisciplinary work. Performar also resulted in collaborations with the per­for­mance festival celebrated in Choroní, Venezuela, and with the Hemispheric Institute of Per­for­mance and Politics in New York. Fi­nally, in 2005 the arrival of Regina Galindo, an artist who was awarded the Golden Lion for her performative work in the Venice Biennial was also one of t­ hose links.26 In Performar, Galindo threw away several sand-­ filled figures resembling h ­ uman bodies, making them sink into the sea. Since her arrival, the Guatemalan artist has presented several events in Santo Domingo. For example, in Isla (Island) she lay naked in a reef of the Malecón, covered in her own urine; in Plomo (Lead), Galindo hired a Dominican ex-­ soldier in order to learn how to shoot with dif­fer­ent weapons; in Carnada (Bait), she sat, four months pregnant, inside a fishing net hanging from a tree. Although intermittent and short-­project oriented, Guzmán’s initiatives share a common interest in engaging with dif­f er­ent communities and challenging the social bonds existing within them. Her first per­for­mances expressed emotions through minimal gestures. In ­these proj­ects, participation was not as clearly expressed as it would be in the works she would develop in the following years. En bandeja de plata (On a silver plate) portrayed the artist carry­ing a pig’s heart from Máximo Gómez Ave­nue to Núñez de Cáceres Street in central Santo Domingo in a three-­k ilometer journey; Costura para un corazón (Sewing for a heart), developed the contrasting pro­cess through the weaving of that heart. In 2006, in San Cristóbal, Guzmán produced Alfombra roja (Red carpet), a four-­kilo­meter hand-­painted lane of mud crossing the city. From mid-2000, however, the artist began exploring more direct ways of public engagement. The personal tone of previous works is abandoned in f­ avor of an inquiry on the social conditions in which the artistic experience takes place. In ­those cases, the responsibility of the audience is compromised and its position disturbed. A clearer example of this is La ruta del per­for­mance (The per­for­mance route, 2006), an initiative in which a vast group of Dominican artists ­were asked to step on to public buses, perform an action, and then alight from the bus. A handmade information sheet was distributed at the bus stops and within the artistic community, scheduling the locations and timings of the actions. While the initiative “in­ven­ted” a community that followed most of the journeys (Kwon 2012, 130), participants w ­ ere involved in dif­fer­ent ways: from travelers who w ­ ere not aware of what they ­were witnessing, to t­hose who knew a per­for­mance would take place and sought to contemplate it, to ­people from the art world who wanted to “experience” the action.

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Despite being limited in time, Performar’s major achievement was in producing experiences of cohabitation which reframed the pre-­existing social relations and practices of citizenship within the derelict landscape of coastal Santo Domingo.27 The actions used ambiguity in order to disentangle the cultural and po­liti­cal medium of this ecosystem, revealing the pitfalls pres­ ent in it and proposing more equalitarian ways of reor­ga­niz­ing it. At the same time, they juxtapose the idyllic image associated with the Ca­rib­bean and the role of touristic sheltered isolation attached to tropical insularism. At the same time, all the per­for­mances w ­ ere cautious enough to avoid over-­ identification with the groups of collaborators that many actions enlisted.

Conclusions Con­temporary Dominican per­for­mance art does not follow a unique trend, nor do per­for­mance artists always share the same objectives. We have seen how performative actions evince a wide variety of responses that range from peaceful contemplation to uneasy confrontation. Per­for­mance has been, nevertheless, useful in producing a reconfiguration of the context where art takes place, heading a pro­cess that surpasses the limitations of the local art system, innovating artistic discourses, and fostering the debates taking place within the artistic world. Moreover, it has implied a rupture with mainstream views of nationalism and identity and a focus on the pres­ent lives of groups and individuals. The main interest of this chapter had to do with demonstrating that per­for­mance was useful at least in three senses: First, it has challenged the limits of the Dominican artistic medium, advocating for a more participative and plural real­ity and challenging the commoditization and marketability of artistic practices. Second, it has helped to produce contextual strategies of spatial intervention, challenging the logic of derelict and neglected spaces, revealing hidden interpersonal bonds, and problematizing citizenship. Linked to this, fi­nally, per­for­mance artists have questioned the logic of the historic pro­cess of nation-­building and modernization, revealing its implicit fractures and making the interconnecting colonial and postcolonial forces of “slow” vio­lence (Nixon 2011) and expulsion (Sassen 2014). One of the major achievements of Dominican tradition of performative practices involves the introduction of ele­ments of unpredictability and disruption into everyday situations. ­These are already pres­ent in Lora’s

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per­for­mance, and they reappear in some of the most discussed proj­ects of the former de­cades: Quisqueya Henríquez’s Helado de agua del mar Caribe (Ca­rib­bean sea ­water ice cream), a proj­ect firstly produced in 2002, entailed consuming a sea ­water ice cream in public places; the main result of the action was the strange sensation derived from the taste of salt. In Sayuri Guzmán’s Toda la verdad (All the truth, Centro León Jimenes, Santiago de los Caballeros, 2009), the artist lay on a stretcher ­after injecting herself with 3 milligrams of truth serum, asking the audience to freely formulate any question. In both cases, the result somehow escapes from the artists’ control; but what is more impor­tant is that the “failure” of the results (we do not expect a salty flavor in an ice-­cream; Guzmán’s accounts of her actions initially include the shyness of the audience and the lack of “problematic questions”) becomes a decisive feature of the proj­ects. The audiences brought together by both events are not an essential entity; rather, artists such as Henríquez or Guzmán encourage spontaneous, unpredictable reactions in each of their proj­ects. In a similar way, Performar succeeded in revealing the interweaving of colonial and postcolonial inequalities and vio­lence in the coastal Santo Domingo microcosm. The results of the proj­ects demonstrate the appropriateness of Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of ruination, which she defines as “an active, ongoing pro­cess that allocates imperial debris differentially” (2013, 7), to describe the pres­ent ecological and economic predicament of the Dominican Republic. Ruination places the emphasis on “the po­liti­cal lives of imperial debris and the uneven pace with which ­people can extricate themselves from the structures and signs by which remains take hold” (8). Stoler’s notion of ruination and debris is particularly useful in this case. Performar’s relationship with the coastal landscape of Santo Domingo exemplifies the resilience of ­those lives. The proj­ect’s engagement was less about showing difference and marginalization and more concerned with understanding and challenging a logic of neglect and a material landscape of waste that can be traced back to colonial pro­cesses of empowerment and dispossession. By choosing the public space as operational field, Dominican per­for­mance artists are questioning the w ­ hole distribution of l­abor and sexuality, aiming to define radical modes of citizenship. Rather than pointing to existing inequalities, artists have aimed to operate within the same landscape where ­these are at play. Along with amplifying and diversifying the framework in which art is discussed, per­for­mance has raised awareness of pro­cesses of dispossession, urban predation, economic and racial segregation, and the

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abandonment of public spaces through the modernization of the country. A double pro­cess of rewriting repre­sen­ta­tional canons and destabilizing both the position of the audience and of the artist takes place ­here. As Bishop comments on participatory art: “Authenticity is invoked, but then questioned and reformulated, by the indexical presence of a par­tic­u­lar social group, who are both individuated and metonymic, live and mediated, determined and autonomous” (2012, 237, emphasis in the original). Returning to Silvano Lora’s “postcolonial” actions, the per­for­mance in the Ozama River, shooting arrows at the Spanish caravels, offers a clear example of how its essence lies less in the ability of the artist to enact historical vio­lence and in­equality than on portraying a vacuum that cannot be filled in any repre­sen­ta­tion. In this par­tic­u­lar case, Lora’s per­for­mance manages to “keep alive a know-­how” that exceeds any nostalgic approach to lost and historical tragedy, to borrow Diana Taylor’s words (2006, 68). However theatrical the action may appear now, it was power­ful enough to transcend the binary encapsulation of the debates on the quincentennial, tainting the nationalistic grandeur and the hypervisibility of a Hispanic, heritage-­based Santo Domingo. Lora’s action, along with Chocopop and Performar, revealed the hidden fractures bridging past and pres­ent. One of the most accomplished examples in that re­spect has been provided by David Pérez Karmadavis’s reading of cultural and po­liti­cal relations along the Dominican-­Haitian border. Karmadavis has developed a long ­career as a per­for­mance artist, having been involved in the major collective initiatives discussed h ­ ere. Through his work, he has endeavored to challenge well-­ meaning discourses on the neighbor country, showing the historical depth of the politics of racism, xenophobia, and marginalization undertaken by the Dominican government and the limitations of occasional paternalist actions. However, his main interest lays not so much in pointing out the incompleteness or incorrectness of the Dominican Republic’s image of Haiti but rather in revealing the extent of the mutual misunderstandings and expectations between both countries. The importance of Karmadavis’s work in reframing nationalism, repre­sen­ta­tions of one’s own and “other” nations, and border relations has already been recognized and discussed (Fumagalli 2013). To end this chapter, his performative work ­will be analyzed from a less examined perspective, asking how each of his actions deals with external participation. Karmadavis’s per­for­mances outsource participation in dif­fer­ent ways, and they deal with dif­fer­ent audiences. Many of them involve the hiring of

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Haitian performers: Trata (­Human trade, 2005), one of Karmadavis’s most famous actions, involved hiring of a Haitian man to peel 500 sugar canes that the artist himself ­later tried to consume ­until reaching saturation point in front of the Alcázar de Colón in Santo Domingo. In Lo que dice la piel (What the skin says), an action also dating from 2005, Karmadavis tattooed his arm with the opinion, written in Creole, on the po­liti­cal relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic that he received ­after asking an Haitian individual. In Simétrico (Symmetrical), performed in 2006, the artist shared a ­hotel room for five days with an unknown Haitian man. Mano de obra barata (Cheap workforce) implied a more demanding outsourced activity, since it portrayed a Haitian construction worker who prepared concrete in ­ iddle of the gallery space in San Cristóbal. Fi­nally, Estructura completa the m (Complete structure), developed as part of the Concurso León Jimenes in 2010, involved a Dominican blind man and a Haitian w ­ oman with impaired mobility walking together. This was performed in the central Calle del Sol of Santiago de los Caballeros and showed how cooperation and the recognition of mutual limitations are indispensable. Now, it is worth pointing out that the Haitian population is not always portrayed, and when an Haitian actor does appear, they do so in many dif­ fer­ent ways: if in some of them their presence points to l­abor inequalities, exploitation, and subcontracting à la Santiago Sierra—­though without the cynical ele­ment of the Spaniard’s actions28—in ­others, the equal number of Haitian and Dominican actors (as in Al tramo izquierdo [On the left side, 2006]), where Karmadavis filled a complete side of a public bus in Santo Domingo, leaving the other to “incidental” Dominican travelers,29 or in Punto tangencial (Tangent point), where an equal number of Haitians and Dominicans created a common meeting point) provides the meaning. The position of the artist also changes from being the main actor (Isla abierta [Open island]), a collaborative figure (Trata, Simétrico, or a hidden presence (Al tramo izquierdo, Mano de obra barata, Estructura completa). In some cases, outsourcing implies an absence more than a presence; in o­ thers, a metonymical action. It is precisely this ambiguity that centers Karmadavis’s interests in challenging and defining a “Dominicanness which goes against and beyond xenophobia, raciological categories and pigmentocracy, and is forged in relation with and not in opposition to Haiti” (Fumagalli 2013, 433).30 As the same author has pointed out, the politics of documentation and the “work division” implied in works like Trata are essential in dealing

Art Melting in Site-­Specificity  •  87

si­mul­ta­neously with the island’s past and with ­human trafficking and repatriation within the post-­earthquake context (426). Participation in this case operates in two ways: by “softening” the notion of national community, usually bounded to an identification with a neutral “we” defined in contrast disenfranchised, isolated groups, and thus gifted with a coherence separated from real­ity; and by showing the urgency of developing a more critical practice of citizenship. Karmadavis revolts against any frozen image of “Haitian” and “Dominican” communities, refusing also the ste­reo­typical allusion to Dominican’s anti-­Haitianess. In so ­doing, he relocates La Española’s racial divide within a con­temporary conundrum in which economy, race, interbodily relations, and mutual expectations are s­haped within a scenario that transcends that of the island.31 What is impor­tant ­here is Karmadavis’s ability to question attitudes; bodily reactions of refusal, racialization, and othering are not embedded in ­either community but rather are constituted through continuous acts of contact, historical and pres­ent (Ahmed 2004, 7).32 ­These emotions, to continue borrowing from Sara Ahmed, do not just define otherness but also shape it, impressing it continuously onto the dif­fer­ent bodies joining each action (10). Through the multiple instances where participation is staged, the artist succeeds in demonstrating how cultural and po­liti­cal relations between both countries are ratified, legitimized, felt, and embodied, and how ­people invent, though not always efficiently, more innovative ways of transforming them.

PL ATE 1  Edith Medina, A la espera, performative action, Performar Festival, Santo Domingo,

Dominican Republic, 2009. Image courtesy of Sayuri Guzmán.

PL ATE 2  Dawn Scott, A Cultural Object. Kingston, National Gallery of Jamaica, 1985. Image

courtesy of Nakazzi Hutchinson.

PL ATE 3  Los Carpinteros, Conga

Revers­ible, Eleventh Havana Biennial, Havana, 2012. Photo­g raph by Centro Wifredo Lam, image courtesy of Margarita González.

PL ATE 4  Yoan Capote, Open Mind, Tenth

Havana Biennial, Fuerte de La Cabaña, 2009. Photo­g raph by Centro Wifredo Lam, image courtesy of Margarita González.

PL ATE 5  First Ca­rib­bean Triennial, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, 2010. Image courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno.

PL ATE 6  First Ca­rib­bean Triennial, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, 2010. Image courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno.

PL ATE 7  Exhibition opening at Alice Yard, Port of Spain, 2012. Photo­graph by Carlos Garrido Castellano.

PL ATE 8  Christopher Cozier (left), Nicholas Laughlin (top), Sean Leonard (­middle), Alice Yard, Port of Spain, 2012. Photo­g raph by Carlos Garrido Castellano.

PL ATE 9  Joe Winter, Big Chair, Third Ghetto Biennale, Port-­au-­Prince, 2013. Image by Multiversal Ser­vices,

photo­graph courtesy of Leah Gordon.

PL ATE 10  Grupo Proyector, Experiencia, detail of a performative action presented at the Performar Festival, Santo Domingo, 2009. Photo­g raph by Sayuri Guzmán, image courtesy of Sayuri Guzmán.

PL ATE 11  Audry Liseron-­Monfils, Cour d’air, mixed-­media installation and performance, India, 1997. Image courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 12  Sandra Ceballos, Museo de arte maníaco, solo exhibition, Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, 2012. Photo­g raph courtesy of Sandra Ceballos.

PL ATE 13  L’Artocarpe, Le Moule, Guadeloupe, 2011. Photo­graph by Carlos Garrido Castellano.

PL ATE 14  Nikolai Noel, Untitled, earth/soil, w ­ ater, cast brown sugar, 2012. Photo­graph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 15  Nikolai Noel, Member, cast brown sugar, salt, ­water, 2012. Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 16  Jean-­François Boclé, The Tears of

Bananaman, 2012. Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 17  Jean-­François Boclé, Banana Proj­ect, Liverpool, 2008. Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 18  Claire Tancons, Spring, detail, Marlon Griffith’s Runaway Reaction in front of Mario Benjamin’s Le Banquet, Eighth Gwangju Biennale, 2008. Photo­graph by Akiko Ota, image courtesy of Claire Tancons.

PL ATE 19  Silvano Lora, Per­for­mance in the Ozama River, 1992. Photo­g raph by Quisqueya Lora, image courtesy of the Silvano Lora Foundation.

PL ATE 20  Omar Obdulio Peña-Forty, Exchange Atelier, mixed-­media installation, Poli/Graphic

Triennial of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2012. Image courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.

PL ATE 21  Poli/Graphic Triennial of San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2015. Image courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.

PL ATE 22  Christian Bertin, Li diab la, Paris, 2008. Photo­graph by Luc Jennpin, image courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 23  Christian Bertin, Li diab la, Paris, 2008. Photo­graph by Luc Jennpin, image courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 24  Belkis Ramírez, Hasta que me guste, mixed-­media installation, Centro Cultural de

España de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2014. Photo­graph by Carlos Garrido Castellano.

PL ATE 25  Blue Curry, Untitled, customized cement mixer, sun cream. Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, 2010. Photo­graph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 26  Blue Curry, Untitled, customized cement mixer, sun cream. Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, 2010. Photo­graph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 27  Blue Curry, NN [Arbeitstitel], PL ATE 28  Alex Burke, La bibliothèque, 2009. exhibi­tion catalogue cover, silk screened sun Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist. cream cover design, published by Forum Stadtpark, 2011. Photo­graph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 29  Caryana Castillo, Poesía a un edificio sin techo, per­for­mance by Chocolatera Sánchez,

2006. Photo­graph by EdgeZone, image courtesy of Caryana Castillo.

PL ATE 30  Marcos Lora Read, Cinco Car-­rosas para la historia, variable dimensions, Parc de la Villete, Paris, 2008. Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 31  Workshop conducted at the Instituto Buena Bista, Willemstadt, Curaçao, undated. Image courtesy of Tirzo Martha.

PL ATE 32  Joëlle Ferly, Please Pass the Dark Choco­late Over, Before I Commit Suicide, 2006–2007.

Photo­g raph by Jean-­François Boclé, image courtesy of Joëlle Ferly.

PL ATE 33  David Pérez “Karmadavis,” Estructura completa, Santiago de los Caballeros, 2010.

Photo­g raph by David Pérez, image courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 34  Rodell Warner, Closer, Port of Spain, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist.

PL ATE 35  David Damoison, La ­rose est sans pourquoi, 2010. Photo­g raph courtesy of the artist.

4

Toward a Diasporic Counterstreaming Ca­rib­bean Imagination

In 2007 Steven Vertovec defined what he considered to be a new moment in the social sciences. Vertovec contends that our world is marked by an increasing complexity in the encounters between individuals and collectives, a “transformative ‘diversification of diversity’ [. . .] not just in terms of bringing in more ethnicities and countries of origin, but also implying ‘a multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom p­ eople live’ ” (2007, 1025). By looking at London’s multicultural history but also by extending the example to other Eu­ro­pean megalopolises,1 Vertovec is cautious about the difficulties of explaining con­temporary pro­cesses of mobility according to a single variable: “Observing ethnicity or country of origin (the two often, and confusingly, being used interchangeably) provides a misleading, one-­ dimensional appreciation of con­ temporary diversity” (1025). Consequently, a high number of exchanges between several indicators would shape the encounters that are at the core of (then) pres­ent day Eu­ro­pean socie­ties: “Such additional variables include differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent l­ abor market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns 107

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of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by ser­vice providers and residents. Rarely are t­ hese f­ actors described side by side. The interplay of ­these f­ actors is what is meant h ­ ere, in summary fashion, by the notion of ‘super-­diversity’ ” (1025; see also Vertovec 2009). One won­ders what would happen if Vertovec would have taken the Ca­rib­bean as the point of reference for his theorization. In that case, “super-­ diversity” would have emerged not so much as a recent consequence of globalization but rather as a long-­established consequence of the region’s historical pro­cesses of exchange and mobility. Instead of a present-­day phenomenon, the image projected by Ca­rib­bean histories of migration would seem more an interwoven set of displacements and entanglements. In his seminal essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall (1990) conceives of Ca­rib­bean cultures as being strongly associated with displacement and migration. He endows the act of imagining the past from an ambivalent perspective, transforming the narration into a foundational ele­ ment of the pres­ent: “such images offer a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas” (224). Hall’s point has been frequently used to explain a strong connection between Ca­rib­bean cultures and diaspora. Despite the centrality of this pro­cess in shaping regional social and cultural configurations, however, the focus on ­either nation-­based creativity or loose understandings of creative fluxes still prevails;2 Ca­rib­bean stories of diasporic creativity are frequently framed outside national art histories, only intersecting with ­these at a few, precise points. My main aim in this chapter is to examine the role of mobility in the configuration of strategies of defining and defying space and place. By so ­doing, I seek to locate the coordinates of a visual diasporic context that is s­ haped by a complex set of practices, one that sometimes goes beyond “dispersal and fragmentation,” involving groups of migrating persons, and completely redefines space and context. ­Here the productive loci of Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists ­will be examined in order to assess how mobility and diaspora have an impact on artistic production. With this aim in mind, I ­will analyze a set of per­for­mances, installations, and artistic interventions produced by artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe, exploring the resonance of ­these productions both in France and in the Ca­rib­be­an.3 This chapter sets out to explore the ties between diasporic mappings and Ca­rib­bean artistic practice,4 focusing on the consequences and the implications of diversity and displacement in determining how artistic practices at the same time respond

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and transform the dif­fer­ent contexts into which they are inserted. In order to do this, I w ­ ill conceive ­these practices not so much as experiences of loss and externality but rather as open-­ended, alternative spatial relocations that work as strategies of mimesis, assertion, and exchange, as “disturbances in the relations between personality and space,” in the words of Caillois (1984, 70; quoted in Bishop 2005, 84). Following this logic, diaspora would not only remain incorporated within national histories and mappings; it is the entire location itself where cultural practices take place that is contested and revised. In The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (2009), Juan Flores aimed to define a new way of understanding diasporic pro­cesses, using the term counterstream to denote the set of practices linked to the knowledge, experiences, and attitudes that Puerto Rican individuals and collectives living in the United States introduced to the island on their return. Flores’s notion of counterstream, understood as the cultural remittances brought back by mi­grant subjects who return temporarily or definitively to their “local” places, is useful for defining new forms of mobility based on continuous displacements and dismantling the nation-­diaspora divide. In this chapter, I want to explore the visual landscape of t­ hese “balancing acts” but, at the same time, also to expand their scope in order to consider them much less homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, gender, and class.

Beyond Diaspora Space In the case of France, the connections between the Antillean diaspora and its territory of origin are marked by a complex history of racial difference, contested citizenship, and cultural negotiations. Many Francophone Ca­rib­bean families are divided between the Ca­rib­bean and the metropolis; transatlantic journeys are frequent and ­there is a partially shared visual imaginary. ­There is, however, a substantial difference between “Ca­rib­bean” and metropolitan artistic reception of Ca­rib­bean art. In the first case, the presence of common referents creates no prob­lem in appreciating the artworks on show; in the second, many artists must purge the folkloric tone from their compositions in order to interact with broader audiences. In some cases, this leads to a “search for authenticity” within the Antillean part, in connection with a market unfamiliar with trends in con­temporary art, which are not shared by diasporic artists.

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Between 2009 and 2012 I conducted several interviews with Ca­rib­bean artists in France, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. A common observation in ­these conversations concerned the difficulties of being understood in the insular context when the identity referents are transformed. In fact, many artists stated that while language and form can be appreciated without prob­ lems, the distance in the intention creates a separation, which is becoming less accentuated since the artists who have settled in the Francophone Ca­rib­bean are increasingly exhibiting abroad. Another f­actor that they flagged was the need for Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists to compete in a more demanding environment, apart from the benefits and the dangers ­ ese issues also appear in the work of Martinican, of the local art system. Th guianan, and Guadalupean artists living in the Ca­rib­bean region. In the case of Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists living in France,5 they have managed to address both a French (Eu­ro­pean) audience and a Ca­rib­bean one, including references that speak volumes of experiences of a group of communities accustomed to shuttling back and forth between metropolitan and Ca­rib­bean territories. Born and raised in Martinique, Guadeloupe, French guiana, and Haiti and having settled in dif­fer­ent locations in France, some artists have tried to come to terms with contradictions of what Françoise Vergès (2002, 156) has called a “colonized citizenship.”6 Given the po­liti­cal link between France and the Outre-­Mer territories still attached to the metropolis, negotiation with the tradition of what we could call “French art” is not always easy. First, views on the art d’Outre-­Mer (a vague concept that includes the Francophone Ca­rib­bean territories plus the Pacific ones, prioritizing the maintenance of a po­liti­cal and economic link with the republic) are ­today still attached to an exoticism and lack of knowledge that extend to other aspects of Antillean culture. Furthermore, in institutional terms, no infrastructure exists to regulate the export of Antillean art outside the Ca­rib­bean territory, something that leaves many artists with the only option of the French market. ­These two ele­ments, however, have been successfully challenged by several Francophone Ca­rib­bean creators. Although belonging to dif­fer­ent generations from the 1980s to the 2000s, artists such as Alex Burke, Joëlle Ferly, Jean-­François Boclé, Christian Bertin, and David Damoison share an interest in questioning the position from which they create as well as the functions that their works serve both in international and Ca­rib­bean art contexts. By so d­ oing, they portray a sense of collective identity adapted to the situations of racism, exoticism,

Toward a Diasporic Counterstreaming Ca­rib­bean Imagination  •  111

and restricted citizenship that many Antilleans currently experience in France. Their approach to the metropolitan context, therefore, is dif­fer­ent from that of negritude but also from that of the generations of immigrants that arrived in France from Africa and the Ca­rib­bean a­ fter the decolonization of the African continent (Jules-­Rosette 2000, 40). All of them share a critical consciousness of the international art scene and a concern for the spatial politics of Ca­rib­bean communities, which has led them to establish connections with other locations and to include information and the everyday ele­ments as a key aspect of their work. In their case, diaspora is understood as a plural, polysemic term that embraces the diversity of black American cultures (Chivallon 2011, 186–190). Furthermore, dif­fer­ent generations of Antillean artists living in France have made a substantial contribution to the renovation of Ca­rib­bean artistic practices through counterstreaming experiences. They have introduced in original, critical ways central concerns on citizenship, sovereignty, and difference to “local” art audiences. In the case of the interviewed artists, interacting with Ca­rib­ bean publics has the appeal of eliminating the essentialism in some visions of race and identity emerging from both an Antillean and metropolitan context. On several occasions, they implemented dif­fer­ent strategies in order to disrupt a univocal interpretation of culture and belonging, eluding a direct response and inserting creative practice into a multi-­situated territoriality (Clifford 1997). This ambiguity is impor­tant, as it exerts a double effect: it distances Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists from ste­reo­types and expectations, while it also locates artistic debates within several contexts instead of a single one. Both ele­ments are redefining the pejorative notion of négropolitains, a term used to describe the lives of Antillean people who have lived for a long period in the metropolis. By questioning the ease of adaptation implied in the term but also the anxiety of authenticity and the unequivocal boundary between the h ­ ere and ­there that underlies the opposing visions, the analyzed artists are rebranding their experience as ­people subject to mobility, developing their work in several locations. If Robin Cohen defined the relationship between Ca­rib­ bean populations and the French state as a “Faustian pact” that drifts into the “abandon of Africanness and [the] embrace [of] M ­ other France” (1997, 147), Ca­rib­bean artists are providing alternative, radical ways of redefining that relationship. They are erasing the negative perception of négropolitanism associated with certain limitations (e.g., not being able to speak Creole,

112  •  Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

speaking it poorly, or not being familiar with the customs and features of Antillean life) in order to break the native/diasporic binarism and to propose a positive understanding of present-­day lives of Antillean communities within the metropolitan landscape.

David Damoison, Christian Bertin The work of the photographer David Damoison (1963), son of a Martinican ­father and a French ­mother, is eloquent on the real­ity of Antilleans living in France. One of his most recent series, Cane and Sugar, depicts the working of the last sugarcane plantation remaining in Martinique. Although located in the pres­ent, the series gives the impression of objectivity referring to a stopped time. It places the public in an uncertain time frame; only by paying attention to a few ele­ments—­industrial machinery, printed sacks, plastic masks—­can we determine that t­ hese scenes belong to the pres­ent. This apparent depiction of the plantation world, where signs of the past and the pres­ent are intermingled, is not a requiem nor a po­liti­cal plea; rather Damoison succeeds in presenting a real­ity in which neither the ­future extinction of a way of life and a profession, nor its pres­ent exceptional character, can hide the continuity of a certain vio­lence. Damoison has dedicated several photographic series to communities of African descent living in France. In La r­ ose est sans pourquoi (The r­ ose is without reasons), a series partially presented in Kréyol Factory, a mega-­ exhibition, he reflects ways of living, dressing, and interpreting dif­fer­ent spaces. Without specifying the provenance of the characters, the series portrays Antillean and Reunion Island individuals and groups in common places, emphasizing the relationship between ­those everyday contexts and the p­ eople who form a part of them. It is an ordinary approach to ordinary ­peoples, broadening the pa­norama associated with the diaspora to deal with a plurality of situations. Through ­these mechanisms, he also highlights the contradictions arising out of dif­fer­ent contexts of spectatorship. Among t­ hese artists, focusing on their par­tic­u­lar audiences has been a common approach. In 2008, the Martinican artist Christian Bertin (Fort-­de-­ France, 1952) started a per­for­mance called Li diab la (That devil ­there) in the streets of Paris. Together with a metal barrel (the bombe), Bertin wandered throughout the city, interacting with the ­people in culturally significant places in Paris such as the Tuileries, Nôtre-­Dame, and the Centre Pompidou.

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The action, which took place during Bertin’s art residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts,7 lasted for five days and was documented and taken back to Martinique in the forms of pictures and audio-­visual material and shown in 2010 at Fondation Clément. The motif of the barrel comes from previous works and can be traced back to 2002–2004. It included the most significant installations made by Bertin in Martinique, where many bombes w ­ ere arrayed, constructing towers a­ fter being painted black with acrylics. The barrels evoke the story of Ca­rib­bean communities, frequently including quotations from Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant. Before becoming an artist, Bertin worked as an electrician, as he likes to explain. It was Césaire himself who employed him for the first time, allowing him to pursue an artistic c­ areer. The barrels, in a Ca­rib­bean context, are used to hold rain ­water and allude to the poverty of low-­income communities on the Francophone islands, and, by extension, to the historic c­ auses b­ ehind such in­equality.8 In Bertin’s work, the bombes have been sometimes anthropomorphized by including a T-­shirt or some accessories recovered from the streets of Fort-­de-­France. In some installations, moreover, the connection with the conditions of displaced communities in Martinique is reinforced by references to the Trénelle-­Citron quarter, a deprived and popu­lar area where Césaire’s actions ­were most felt while he was the major of Fort-de France. Li diab la also points to other meanings. First, Le Diable is a subversive Mardi-­Gras character of African heritage.9 Secondly, the Creole title derives from an anecdote narrated by Césaire, who, while walking around in Croatia where he was visiting his friend Petar Guberina, was once called a diable ­because of his skin color. Remembering the solitude and the rejection that can be deduced from Césaire’s anecdote, Bertin poses a question related to ac­cep­tance and exclusion that surpasses the par­tic­u­lar characteristics and circumstances of Ca­rib­bean communities to reach the entire black population of Paris. By ­doing so, he stresses the way that some spaces exclude certain citizens, pointing out the need to generate an effectively inclusive society. The interest of Bertin’s work lies in its ability to portray the French context without losing the specific references attached to the Martinican pres­ ent and historical real­ity. Li diab la also deals with the specific situation of Ca­rib­bean and black artists living in Paris. Despite the critique implicit in the gesture of displaying the “Ca­rib­bean devil” across the Pa­ri­sian landscape, Li diab la possesses an open meaning, since the devil face becomes a

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carnivalesque, transformative act, detonating (the pun on bombe is not coincidental) an outburst that demands a social environment where the mask, the difference, should be the norm. While firmly connected to the theoretic thinking of Césaire, Glissant, and Chamoiseau,10 the artistic experiences of the ailleurs (someplace e­ lse) evoke and activate a plurality of referents. Proj­ects such as ­those designed by Christian Bertin are aiming to problematize the Antillean and the Metropolitan contexts together, linking the discourses to the debates and the cultural politics of difference within present-­day France.

The Cultural Politics of the Outre-­Mer The works I have singled out for attention reveal how Francophone Ca­rib­ bean artists are generating a broad critical concern about their situation in the world, demanding not only not to be viewed as second-­class citizens but also to setting out to explain the complexities of Francophone postcolonial mappings. They address the pres­ent situation of France, demanding an understanding of “the history of its presence in the world and the history of the presence of the world in its core before, within and a­ fter the colonial empire,” in the words of Mbembe (2010, 205).11 Dealing with the po­liti­cal economy of mobility and citizenship and dialoguing with dif­fer­ent audiences has helped Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists to produce a critical reading of their position in the world. We have seen how it is not just the artwork that travels; the artists themselves do so as well, and in that pro­cess, they challenge the expectations of postcolonial cultural politics demanding a specific kind of production from Ca­rib­bean artists. The diasporic mappings analyzed ­here are generating a concern on how Ca­rib­bean communities living in France negotiate race and ethnicity in broad public debates, everyday life, and cultural politics. Ca­rib­bean artists located in France face a dif­fer­ent situation from that of t­ hose who live in other Eu­ro­pean locations or in the United States. This situation is linked to the French law of February 23, 2005, which imposed, as part of the commemoration of Jacques Chirac’s France, recognition of “the positive role of French presence outre-­mer” in the educational system,12 as well as the strikes that took place in 2008 that mobilized not only mi­grants and racialized citizens but also the universities and vast populations in the French-­speaking Ca­rib­bean. For ­these communities, cosmopolitanism is an objective still to

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be achieved and not a given fact (Mbembe 2010). Despite the centrality of citizenship and cosmopolitism, however, ­there remains a tradition of placing the cultural production of the cultural subject in an ailleurs that is unattainable and completely separated from the national entity. B ­ ehind t­ hese conflicts lie the difficulties of defining an open concept of citizenship amid situations of exclusion, segregation, and restrictions of migration and mobility. It is this “problem-­space” (Scott 2004) that Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists are dealing with. Several art exhibitions showcasing Ca­rib­bean artists have recently attempted to tackle t­ hese situations. In many cases, however, the thematization and isolation of Ca­rib­bean artistic discourses has continued to be the norm. “Francophone Ca­rib­bean art” has often been relegated to an isolated locus, that of the Outre-­Mer territories, difference, race, and so on. Apart from showing the continuity of the Magiciens de la terre ethos,13 it reveals the difficulties that face artists when they speak about their situation within the République coloniale (Bancel, Blanchard, and Vergès 2003). It also shows how the vibrant production of several generations runs the risk of being simplified and tied to straightforward readings. Curatorial practices are eloquent when it comes to the difficulties and complexities of displaying Ca­rib­bean art in Eu­rope without falling into simplistic or reductive interpretations. For instance, Latitudes was a proj­ect commissioned by the Paris council and supported by the French Ministries of Culture and Communication and Foreign Affairs, consisting of six exhibitions, taking place annually at the Paris Hôtel de Ville, presenting the con­temporary art of the terres du monde (lands of the world). Curated by Régine Cuzin,14 the shows showcased in Paris the artistic production of “remote” territories in Amer­i­ca, Asia, and the Pacific. Surprisingly, or not, France and Eu­rope ­were not among t­ hese terres du monde. In the first show, dedicated to the Francophone spaces of Guadeloupe, Martinique, French guiana, and Reunion Island, the curator justified the se­lection of artists and territories by saying that “the Latitudes proj­ect seeks to adhere to the legitimate desire of artists to escape the coding of regional interpretations in order to associate with the aesthetic debates centered by alterity and l’ailleurs” (Cuzin 2002, 9). This idea of alterity and hyper-­diversity also emerges as the explanation for the other five shows, which presented the won­ders of con­ temporary art in Mozambique, Brazil, Haiti, New Caledonia, and Samoa for a Pa­ri­sian public. ­Under the excuse of plurality, Latitudes presented “non-­ Western art” as the artistic production of a group of territories united by

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seas and oceans that “create in this way undisputable links of intelligence, magic and freedom with other regions” (Cuzin 2005, 8). However, through this approach, the singularity of each con­temporary art genealogy was incorporated into a colorful, never-­ending succession of exotic places.15 In this re­spect, the positive contribution of a proj­ect that entailed displaying art from territories which had previously received scant attention in the French context was somehow countered by singling out and “labeling” that art as somehow outside con­temporary Western life. The next major proj­ect involving Ca­rib­bean art, Kréyol Factory, sought to portray the results of the expansion of creolization worldwide. Curated by Yolande Bacot, who had extensive expertise on the region, the exhibition took place in the Parc de la Villette in Paris and included sixty artists. Kréyol Factory identified the Ca­rib­bean with a laboratory, justifying the ability of Ca­rib­bean communities to escape external definitions and categorizations: “All métis then, mêlés, mestizos, métèques, kréyol, Créoles. We w ­ ill choose the term we want! All together versus the Bastilles of univocal socie­ties! The world is a ­g iant Créole Factory, it should not be forgotten anymore” (Condée 2010, 16).16 A section of the Kréyol Factory exhibition, which mobilized artists from all the corners of the Ca­rib­bean, United States, Britain, and the Pacific, was titled “Les Nouveaux Mondes,” and explained as follows: The ‘New Worlds’ are the countries empty of habitants—­truly empty as Reunion Island or emptied by the Eu­ro­pean colonizers—­where the meeting of cultures that did not belonged to ­those spaces took place. A creole culture has been built out of nothing or on the traces lefts by Amerindian civilizations, the result of continual pro­cesses of métissage, of hybridization, of fusion or syncretism. Creole aesthetics is that of the mixture: mixture of colors, flavors, sounds, types. . . . ​­Wouldn’t ­those constantly renewed inventions and creations be the best way nowadays of resisting to consumerism and its seductions?” (Bacot 2010, 130)17

Although stressing the originality of Ca­rib­bean artists, this extract from Bacot also exposes some of the prob­lems faced by the exhibition in capturing the new directions that Ca­rib­bean art was taking. Apart from eroding the conflictive and violent ele­ments at the core of many pro­cesses of creolization—­somehow equating creoleness with “a mix of colors”18—it pres­ents con­temporary Ca­rib­bean socie­ties as creole constructions that

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emerge from “encounters” within colonial socie­ties. The result of addressing this situation and the “preservation of creole society,” implies the formation of rich and enduring cultural traditions that are able to resist the pernicious influence of globalization, keeping their ethos intact. Creole cultures, in short, are global only through rejecting globalization; they must resist being subsumed into consumerism and loss. The se­lection of artists pres­ent in this section of Kréyol Factory challenged that viewpoint. It included Alex Burke’s The Spirit of Ca­rib­be­an, an installation constructed out of forty-­seven rag dolls made of fragments of ropes, envelopes, and other materials gathered by the artist along his travels. Burke’s work—he resides in France—is accompanied in the cata­log by a fragment of Chamoiseau, Bernabe, and Confiant’s Eloge de la Créolité (1989), asserting that “Créolité is our primitive soup and our prolongation, our original chaos and our mangrove of possibilities” (Bacot 2010, 134).19 Burke’s work, which is closely related to the artist’s interest in exploring the aftermath of slavery in our pres­ent time, is somehow reduced to an explanation of global creoleness, thus separated from the personal research interests of its author, who consciously located his reading of Atlantic society by intertwining the pasts and the pres­ent of Africa, the Ca­rib­bean, and France.20 In the same section of the exhibition, the Ré­unionnais artist Yo-­Yo Gonthier and the Mauritian photographer Pierrot Men are chosen to represent and to stand for the Asian legacy of the Outre-­Mer territories, completing the exhibition’s repre­sen­ta­tion of diversity. However, prob­lems arise when the context for the artistic practices that Ca­rib­bean creators are developing is disregarded. We could apply Ann Laura Stoler’s question to the specific field of art: “Why do we grant so much importance to remembering the ‘time-­space division’ that separates Paris from its provinces, not to mention the omnipresent po­liti­cal distinction even now crosses runs through archival resources, historiographical practices and the popu­lar memory of what constitutes ‘l’outre mer’ and France?” (Stoler 2010, 73; see also 1997 and 2009 for a broader conceptualization of historiography, memory, and truth).21 Looking from this point of view, it is impossible to explain the pro­cesses of configuration of spatial practices tending to erode the categorization of Outre-­Mer as a separate entity from which one can make statements without referring to France. Ca­rib­bean artists are contesting, rather than representing, images of creolization. They are discussing the constraints of a situation marked by racism, second class citizenship, and in­equality, each of ­these categories intersected by race but not

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limited to it. As clear as this may appear, however, t­ here still prevails a view stressing the complexity and hybrid character of Ca­rib­bean culture instead of delving into how that complexity has changed through the experiences of mobility of Francophone Ca­rib­bean communities. If we look at the work of artists like Bertin, Burke, or Damoison, it becomes evident that diasporic experience involves challenging the very terrain where artistic practice takes place. In the proj­ects discussed so far, the quest for an inclusive and critical practice of citizenship and sovereignty emerges as decisive in shaping the spatial politics of Ca­rib­bean communities, transforming and widening, too, the context in which art is discussed, exhibited, and commoditized. The next section provides an example on how fertile the grounding of that quest could be.

Nonsovereign Insubordination The work of artist Jean-­François Boclé (Fort-­de-­France, 1971) is s­ haped by a concern for dialoguing with Ca­rib­bean communities both in Antillean and Eu­ro­pean territories. Multifaceted and actively committed, Boclé has in the last de­cade developed a vast amount of work around racism, repre­sen­ta­tion, ste­reo­types, the Atlantic triangle, and past and pres­ent situations of in­equality. His first proj­ects reflect an interest in documenting not only the symbolic value of objects but also the qualities derived from their use and materiality, as well as the maneuver of appropriation and rethinking taking place in the everyday. One of Boclé’s most successful initiatives, which started in 2007, was called the Banana Proj­ect. On a raised white platform, the artist placed five black fabrics, each with the name of black footballers (soccer players) who had suffered racial slurs at some point of their ­career. In front of the fabrics lay the body of a superhero made of bananas. On the platform where this character was resting, a telephone number could be found. When it was dialed, a voice answered with the following message: “Yesterday, on the river bank of the Mississippi River, Strange Fruits ­were hung from trees; nowadays, in football stadiums, bananas and monkey noises are thrown at men.” The ambiguity of the artwork was linked to the fact that the purpose of the figure was not clear. Was this person a defender of the black community against racial aggression? Or was it a corpse? This proj­ect, open to interpretation concerning the cultural implications of racism in Eu­ro­pean sports culture, can be added to ­others with po­liti­cal and social implications, associated with the relationship between the French

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nation and its colonial past, and also the situation of the Antillean communities living in France and their repre­sen­ta­tions of a plural image of La Francophonie.22 The superhero conceived by Boclé lends itself to other readings. When he presented the proj­ect in Martinique, it took on a complementary meaning, being charged with po­liti­cal and historical implications. In that case, Boclé used bananas produced in Martinique that ­were cultivated with the help of a DTT pesticide C10 CI10 O, known as Chlordecone or Kepone. This product was banned in the rest of the French territory in 1990, but its presence was tolerated in the Antilles ­until 1993. Furthermore, it was used much more intensely in the Ca­rib­bean, and consequently its effects have remained ­until the pres­ent day. In his work, Boclé left the bananas to spoil, confronting local audiences with the persisting situation of domination that is linked to the status of the Départements d’Outre-­Mer. Thus, we again find an installation that pres­ents two completely dif­fer­ ent, yet complementary, meanings and that can be read in dif­fer­ent ways depending on where it is shown. The piece was presented in the space of the Fondation Clément, inserting its discourse into the criticism of the institution’s past. The Martinican installation included another ele­ment that is worth mentioning. Boclé places its action in the setting of an old Martinican plantation, introducing an export commodity into a productive scenario. At the same time, by presenting only the trash of a pro­cess, a material destined to dis­appear—in that case the action was significantly called “trashman” and included the hire of a person who was ordered to clean and periodically maintain the installation—­Boclé translates his critical attitude to the Martinican art system. In this way, he confronts not only universal repre­sen­ta­tional concerns but also issues of artistic ­labor, denouncing the precariousness of the local art scene and the weight of mainstream art centers in the configuration of cultural values. The stimulation of active ways of understanding belonging are ­behind several artworks by Boclé. In 2011 the artist was included in the curatorial se­lection of the Eighth Mercosul Biennial, entitled Ensaios de geopoética (Essays in geopoetics). While preparing the journey, Boclé received an email regarding the practical aspects of his stay in Brazil. Among the questions that he was asked was one concerning w ­ hether he had a French passport. If not, he would be required to apply for a visa. The ­mistake arose ­because of the impossibility of his using a Martinican passport. What could have been dismissed as a misunderstanding in fact gave Boclé the opportunity to

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develop a creative pro­cess in which he mapped travels and possibilities from this imaginary visa that appeared as a subtle geo-­historical dislocation of the Départements d’Outre-­Mer status. The proj­ect presented by Boclé on this occasion ended up being a Martinican passport joined by an email conversation with the biennial’s curatorial team in which an explanation of this situation was provided. The new passport emerged as a utopian act meant to bridge a gap related to po­liti­cal awareness of the Martinican nationalist proj­ect and, to a greater extent, to the position of Martinican communities while portraying themselves internationally. The open character of the pro­ cess made Boclé’s passport more flexible than any other, allowing the recently created document to be inclusive and to respond to diversity. As a result, it evidences not only recognition but also a dialogical understanding of hybridism. The same aim can be seen in another two proj­ects undertaken by Boclé between 2003 and 2004. Zones d’attente (Waiting zones), undertaken in dif­ fer­ent Pa­ri­sian streets, presented silhouettes that w ­ ere accompanied by geo­g raph­i­cal coordinates referring to a point within the Atlantic Ocean. While passing through the “scene of the crime,” p­ eople asked the artists what had happened t­ here, to which Boclé responded by saying that two million ­people had died and ­were thrown into the sea. Although the proj­ect clearly connects with the aesthetics of the black Atlantic, it questions not only the disappearance of slaves during the M ­ iddle Passage but also the visual contradictions concerning the visibility of black bodies in the pres­ent day.23 As they are symbols of a criminal scene, t­ hose silhouettes can also be read by the passers-by as absence. A similar message can be found in Tu me copieras (You ­will copy me), a proj­ect first presented in 2004. In this case, a screen with a pair of headphones dangling in front of it was placed before the spectators. Both ele­ments ­were connected by the same text: Le code noir (The black code), in force in the French American colonies, which conceived the status of “goods” on h ­ uman beings. The monitor showed Boclé writing out Louis XIV’s words on a blackboard, to the point where the white chalk lines ­were overwritten and turned the blackboard white. In this case, the reflection on the politics of memory and slavery is brought back to the pres­ent by the focus on the repetitive ele­ ment in education. Apart from offering a direct opportunity of knowing the ­legal code that declared slaves to be objects, the artworks oblige spectators to take responsibility for the perpetuation of ambiguous views of the

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past, emphasizing the weight that the politics of memory have in a common understanding of what it means to belong to an ethnically and socially plural society (Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage 2005).

Coming Back Boclé’s work is marked by his interaction with both Eu­ro­pean and Francophone Ca­rib­bean institutions. In a similar way, in recent de­cades many Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists have managed to escape from the shortcomings of limited definitions of local cultural arenas opposed to diasporic interests. Several generations of creators are aiming for a redefinition of the spatial framework where they develop their activity, an action that includes critical views of what it means for them to come back to or to move back and forth from their native land and other territories. For example, Joëlle Ferly analyzed in her early work what it means to be a second-­class citizen within postcolonial France. Images of herself carry­ing out everyday tasks, the French flag, and the insertion of text written by her and by authors such as Dany Laferrière mark the production of this de­cade. In 1999 Ferly moved to London, enrolling in a MA program in Fine Arts in Saint Martin’s School of Art, where she engaged with the Autograph ABP movement, with the ideas of Stuart Hall, and with the activity of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art) one of the most vibrant British cultural platforms advocating for “Black Art.” She shifted then to video and installation art, developing a more polished practice, mixing conceptualism and minimalism and addressing the preoccupations of “Black British artists” while trying to “create something that can have an impact, but reduced to the minimum expression.”24 With a strong sense of humor, Ferly’s work bridges the cultural distance between France and the United Kingdom, developing a comparative analy­sis of the experience of Ca­rib­bean populations in both countries. The relations between French and En­glish culture and the role of Antillean territories in the geopo­liti­cal historical situation and its consequences in the pres­ent day are b­ ehind such proj­ects as Cordialement vôtre (Cordially yours), exhibited in the context of the third edition of Latitudes show. ­Here, in the same discourse Ferly set two commemorations against one another: that of the Entente Cordiale, signed in 1904, which determined the partition of Africa in the context of imperialism, and that of the Haitian revolution

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in 1804. The piece consisted of a two-­video screen projection in which interviews with French and En­g lish ­people conducted by the artist ­were projected. In the conversations, the interviewees (including both Ca­rib­bean and “native” ­people) ­were asked how they perceived the population and the culture of the other country. In this exchange of information, the positions of black bodies, as well as the role of Haitian tragedy in the shaping of the pres­ent, ­were made problematic by the visual confusion of the Francophone and the Anglophone spaces. It is worth noting that what lies at the core of this new production is a re­sis­tance to being categorized not only as a black female artist but also as a Ca­rib­bean one. In choosing to show the complexity of the itinerary followed, Ferly (2013) posits that the “provincialism” detected in the predominance of some “Black cultures” over ­others also occurs in Britain with artists that do not fit comfortably into the curatorially sanctioned forms of creolization taking place in the United Kingdom.25 In more recent works, the artist has dealt with personal experiences of rejection. Please Pass the Dark Choco­late Over, Before I Commit Suicide (2006–2007) consisted of one video monitor and an interactive workshop. The video showed a series of short black lines bordering a white square. ­Those lines ended forming a black box that ­after a while we start to associate with the ones included in Equal Opportunity Monitoring Forms. As we heard the sound of Ferly “marking” the dif­fer­ent boxes, some sentences and words, although always incomplete, appear along with the common motto: “please specify:”; “scribe my ethnic origin as:”; “[ot]her white background”; “black British”; “Irish”; “Chinese”; and so on. ­A fter slowing the speed, the images go back to the Malevich and Mondrian like forms, and every­thing stops. The artist explains the origins of the piece as follows: This came up for a proj­ect designed for an impor­tant art gallery in London. I was applying to be part of the proj­ect as an artist, and I was shortlisted. Th ­ ere ­were only six ­people left, and I was one of them. I had an interview with eight ­people, including famous curators and critics, a huge ­table facing me. I started to prepare something, to outline my proj­ect. I had very good contact with every­body on the panel, I was very at ease when they talked to me, they made jokes. . . . ​When I came back I had good impressions, but then they wrote me back saying oh, I ­really enjoyed talking to you, but you are not selected. Then I went into internet to see who got it, and was a ­woman already working ­there . . . ​what stressed me up was that the only reason I was called into the

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interview was b­ ecause I was black. And they wanted to show that they ­don’t discriminate, and I was the black one. You have to say it b­ ecause it is compulsory . . . ​I was so furious, that I r­ eally had to say something about this mess and this was the result of it.26

In the conversations I had with the artist, she did not conceive the proj­ects only in terms of ethnicity; instead, she explained the work by saying that it helped her to say “I’m not that. I’m just a ­human being.” This is impor­tant since a narrow, restrictive definition would not do justice to the complexity of the interactions developed by the artist by linking several contexts and attaching them to multivalent experiences. This attitude also challenges the curatorial landscape of “diversity” in Britain, showing the contradictions implicit in systems of positive affirmation and the relegation of some discourses to a ghetto ­because race and ethnicity are overlooked. However, ­there is something more at play ­here: Ferly’s work negotiates a space beyond ethnicity and even beyond gender constraints, but it does so outside a single postcolonial real­ity, contemplating several scenarios at once. Although the situation of discrimination comes from a par­tic­u­lar location, her response differs from “the one of a Ca­rib­bean (West Indian) artist.” For the pre­sen­ta­tion of the proj­ect, Ferly provided a ­table where the public could sit and fill out original forms. The first event took place in France, where Equal Opportunity Forms are not common. What is surprising is how the artist documented a positive response to the action and how easy was for the Pa­ri­sian audience to understand the specifics of the pro­cess of filling the form. Ferly locates her work in a context where it is impossible to escape completely from the norms, but the impor­ tant ­thing ­here is that her response implies a reading of the limitations of the ­whole society, as well as an attempt to “give the system its stupidity back,” to borrow Ferly’s words. However, she also elucidates how not only institutions and public powers, but also communities, also classify individuals and “force you in a box.” By focusing on the po­liti­cal economy of difference, and not on a single categorization,27 Ferly reveals the complexity of the negotiations of her position as an artist. Operating justly as an artist, she is outlining the configuration of artistic and curatorial discourses dealing with racism and not only with fixed notions of race and ethnicity. Fi­nally, the proj­ect, designed from a specific experience and showed in more than one context and to highly heterogeneous audiences, underlines the need to find appropriate positions from which to analyze Ca­rib­bean art in order to recognize the interconnectedness of Ca­rib­bean artistic practice and avoidance of a linear trajectory.

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Ferly’s trajectory may seem aty­pi­cal, but it is surprisingly usual. If we look at the most exhibited Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists over the last two de­cades, we find parallel stories of displacement. Ferly’s case also epitomizes the interconnectedness of experiences of apprenticeship and mobility, dealing with more than two dif­fer­ent contexts, and the subversion of national restrictive views of what art is, both in the forms of discourses and cultural politics, and how it may be interpreted. What is impor­tant about ­these experiences of mobility is the impact they have on “local” Ca­rib­bean socie­ ties. The individuals involved in journeys of apprenticeship and mobility are playing an active role in cultural initiatives located within the Ca­rib­ bean region. The pro­cesses of mobility described ­here also promote new ways of understanding creativity, defy the limitations imposed by dif­f er­ ent canons, and generate discourses that are not easily classifiable ­under nation-­bound genealogies of creolization.

Conclusions This chapter has shown how several experiences of apprenticeship and mobility are reshaping the landscape of Francophone Ca­rib­bean creators. ­These experiences offer new ways to deal with poignant issues that lie at the core of both Ca­rib­bean and metropolitan spaces. We have seen how the recognition of super-­diversity cannot be bound to its location within “transnational cities” such as London or Paris. Rather, the trajectories of the artists show how crucial the pro­cesses of counterstream are in order to produce into initiatives taking place in Ca­rib­bean locales. This makes it impossible to articulate parallel stories of mobility and citizenship placed in the national and diasporic territories. For they are not only connected between themselves: they are part of a complex and shifting continuum operating across continents. Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art shares ­these references, and ­because of that it should be read from this perspective. To talk about “Ca­rib­bean art of the diaspora” is only pos­si­ble if we look at the intersections where experiences of mobility (which can take several forms, not only that of migration), repre­sen­ta­tion, and opacity, on the one hand, and transnational cultural politics on the other, meet in order to generate spaces of dialogue and dissent. The artistic endeavors analyzed above can be read as a questioning of territorialized identity. What is more, they broaden the concept of identity,

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producing a space for a two-­way imaginary. Th ­ ese proj­ects address an interest in changing the perception of citizenship in a wide audience, which includes Antillean communities but also other groups living in France. We have also considered how dif­fer­ent notions of spectatorship are challenged in t­ hose aesthetic pro­cesses. Per­for­mance is starting to be used as an artistic language among the creators of Antillean diaspora in France, aiming for a more direct connection with metropolitan audiences (a phenomenon that requires further insight).28 In that sense, a performative character (particularly evident in the way that each proj­ect seeks to provoke an active response from a clearly defined and par­tic­u­lar audience) is common among the artists that have been discussed. The artworks presented h ­ ere often generate a liminal space able to intersect the bound­aries of consolidated terrains. In this case, we find a dual attempt to transform both the real­ity of operating within a metropolitan framework and the real­ity of remaining linked to the ele­ments demanded of a Ca­rib­bean artist. That second sphere constitutes an evolving, relational context, where art becomes an interactive challenge, not only portraying the identity of Ca­rib­bean communities but also demanding the participation of that community, which is redefined. Another decisive ­factor in the artistic experiences examined involves rerouting po­liti­cal and cultural agendas both inside and beyond nationalism in a reform movement seeking a more heterogeneous and dialectic understanding of citizenship, identity, and the relation with power from an affirmative situation able to transcend, or at least partially challenge, the catharsis associated with some po­liti­cal attitudes of resignation of the Antillean territories ­toward their postcolonial condition of dominance. In this context, my examples can be seen as critically redefining the transnational condition proposed by Vertovec (1999, 447), in which “certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-­spanning yet common—­however virtual—­arena of activity.” We have seen how Francophone Ca­rib­bean artists include references coming from several contexts, opening the interpretation of the artworks to positions connected with new ways of defining identity and belonging to and of dealing with social and economic discrimination, po­liti­cal awareness, and racial/ethnic in­equality. Moreover, they force Ca­rib­bean publics to contemplate art from a position totally external to exoticism, presenting the prob­lems existing in the spatial continuum between the diaspora and the archipelago. This action, then, also contests the poetics and the politics of both Antillean and French nationalisms. The migration of meanings and imageries, in

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addition to the migration of persons, has led to a refashioning of the spatial politics of Ca­rib­bean art cultures, which can no longer be confined to a single national context. The importance of diasporic Ca­rib­bean visual productions is effectively enhanced by the fact that they break the bound­ aries between local art systems, allowing artists to establish a more flexible relationship with audiences from dif­fer­ent locations. In short, the proj­ects discussed ­here pertain to a historical time when nationalism was being fervently discussed with the interest of mea­sur­ing the participation of ­people from the former French colonies in the idea of citizenship defined ­after the abolition of slavery by the republic. Their personal experience engages the framework criticized by Vergès (2002, 156) when alluding to the official vision of La Francophonie as a Creole derivative of abolition and interpreted as a republican gift stirred a strong movement among Creole citizens striving to ­counter this position. This task implies a direct confrontation of the continuity of inequalities deriving from racial difference and colonial domination.

5

Subversive Alliances Collaborative Agency beyond Repre­sen­ta­tion New forms of collectivization might emerge out of ­those incomplete ruptures and alternative histories even if only as one more displacement or pause or negation as partial and scrawny as the first, as l­ ittle returns of the vast repressed past, as h ­ umble ­little creatures with only the intention to avoid extinction and survive within the horizon established by the dominant historical forces and tendencies of our day. It is ­here, in this space of thought outside the box, where the action is or where it ­ought to be, and it is ­here where the truth and beauty and consequence of our collectivist fetish is to be found. —­Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (2007) It has to start somewhere It has to start sometime What better place than h ­ ere, what better time than now? —­R age Against the Machine, Guerrilla Radio (1999)

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The pro­cesses and actions I have examined throughout this book w ­ ere carried out by a wide variety of actors playing dif­fer­ent roles and engaging in dif­fer­ent ways. Artist-­run spaces and collaborative, collective initiatives have been common in the recent history of Ca­rib­bean art. They emerge at times as a response to the limitations of national institutional infrastructures, as a challenge to national cultural politics, and, in o­ thers, as an alternative to the capitalization of art by international art markets. In some cases, they have provided a way of safeguarding and broadening critical debate. Artist-­ managed proj­ects greatly complemented and permeated the curatorial initiatives I have previously described. Seeking to act both within and outside the domain of con­temporary art, artist-­run proj­ects seem to offer a model radically opposed to the international interest in commoditizing Ca­rib­ bean visual practices. The focus on audiences and engagement contrasts, too, with the image that comes to mind when trying to represent con­ temporary Ca­rib­bean art, frequently likened to that of individual artworks or externally curated, large-­scale exhibitions. The extent to which Ca­rib­ bean art acquired a transnational dimension at the turn of the millennium has been frequently mea­sured by tracing the presence of Ca­rib­bean individual artists in the major scenarios and events of the international artistic landscape. It is my contention that this pro­cess is more closely related to the energy displayed by artistic communities and collectives (see Batia 1979). Privileging the collective over the individual, ­these initiatives are as much the muscle ­behind the international success of Ca­rib­bean art as national museums, art biennials, collectors, and art galleries. The main objective of this chapter is to explain how artist-­managed spaces have accomplished an alternative model of understanding art, creativity, participation, and engagement within the public sphere. Fin de siècle collectivism was essential in articulating the politics of space regulating the interactions of Ca­rib­bean creators all around the globe. Indeed, their interconnection and insertion cannot be understood without taking account of the ways in which artistic activity intertwines with collectivist modes of cultural and po­liti­cal engagement. Th ­ ese, in turn, are linked to the search for subversive, alternative means of participation within civil society. The theoretical background of all ­these proj­ects includes a focus on collaboration, conversation, and audience empowerment. Impassioned discussions and well attended meetings are at the center of the dynamic of ­those spaces, creating a nexus between art and society, between aesthetic

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interests and the need to incorporate “nonartistic communities.” ­Here, I ­will examine the politics of space put into practice by artist-­run, long-­term proj­ ects that seek to privilege collectivism over individualism, pro­cess over immediacy, pedagogy and engagement over distance.1 The practices I w ­ ill discuss do not (always) materialize in the forms of beautiful artworks or exhibition arrangements. They are, instead, platforms for other proj­ects, for somebody ­else’s creativity. They operate in society, touching on delicate issues and activating communitarian agency. Their main outcome is to make ­things happen, which holds a ­great relevance in itself. However, as we ­will see, “making ­things happen” can also be seen as art producing. The Trinidadian art scene provides a good example of that, offering a perfect start for our journey.

Learning from Trinidad My initial connection with the Trinidadian art scene came through Ca­rib­bean art shows and biennials. ­Because of that, nothing could have prepared me for the shock I got when I landed in Port of Spain in 2012 for a monthlong residence. I was aware of the success of Trinidadian con­temporary artists in producing fresh and adventurous work. The names of Christopher Cozier, Steve Ouditt, Peter Minshall, and Che Lovelace ­were familiar to me, as they ­were for anyone involved in Ca­rib­bean visual practices. I also knew about a younger batch of artists, many of them living abroad but still pres­ ent in the country, including Charles Campbell, Nicole Awai, Marlon Griffith, Jamie Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel.2 This was more or less what I had—­names and occasional references to some artworks and individual proj­ects.3 As I did in other countries, I prepared in advance the script of some interviews revolving around art exhibitions and individual artistic discourses. Big ­mistake. As the operating base for my fieldwork I stayed in residence in Alice Yard, a proj­ect initiated in 2006 by artist Christopher Cozier, writer and cultural agent Nicholas Laughlin, and architect Sean Leonard and located in Leonard’s grand­mother’s yard. My memories of that space and of the w ­ hole Trinidadian art scene are still linked to a par­tic­u­lar photo­graph. If I remember it five years ­later, it is not ­because the quality of the image (which is conditioned by my lack of any artistic talent whatsoever) but rather ­because of

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the naturalness and simplicity with which it reveals an exceptional situation. Leonard’s f­ amily yard is a modest patio with a second level on top of a gallery space, which takes the form of a small transparent cube where art exhibitions and works in pro­gress are displayed. Alongside this space, ­there is a soundproof room where local bands gather weekly to play ­music (in the month I spent t­ here, joining the prac­ti­tion­ers and liming was a temptation testing the urgency of developing “academic writing.”)4 The gallery over the rooms has a small ­table and is also used to host events and to bring together the many visitors joining Alice Yard’s soirées.5 The photo­graph I remember from ­those days frames ­those two spaces. It was taken during the staging of a travelling show I was co-­curating by then.6 It was a video-­art show, so ­there was not much to do as the room was already well prepared. However, a “talk with the curator” was scheduled that night, and ­there w ­ ere some practical arrangements to deal with in the yard space. My image did not capture this moment, but the previous one, in which Leonard, Cozier, and Laughlin deci­ded to help in every­thing and started frenetically carry­ing chairs and ­tables, checking cables, and ­running untiringly from side to side. I dedicated a few seconds to taking the photo and then, ashamed of having the entire Alice Yard crew collaborating in the assembly of my exhibition while I was just standing still, I rejoined them. As soon as I arrived in Port of Spain, it became clear that the Trinidadian art scene of the last two de­cades (to say the least)7 was not a ­matter of individual but of collective names. Alice Yard is the best example I know in the Ca­rib­bean of the potential of cooperation and “do-­it-­yourself” aesthetics. It also epitomizes the potential of creative collective agency for invigorating and transforming local arenas across the entire region. The proj­ect has a deserved reputation within the Ca­rib­bean as the stimulus for similar initiatives in other countries.8 ­There are reasons for this. Believing in admiration rather than hierarchy, investing in horizontality rather than in stardom, and never giving up experimentation and renovation, Alice Yard has achieved a de­cade of existence, something rather unusual in a pa­norama of coming and g­ oings and fleeting impetus. The Yard has acted as a cauldron for young talents coming from all over the region and engaging in unpredicted mixes that do not differentiate according to origins or media. Always open to improvisation, the proj­ect gathers and pools ideas and voices from many fields. As a researcher, I must acknowledge how much my insights from Trinidad (and to a greater extent my entire understanding of Ca­rib­bean art) owe to the collective enthusiasm of spaces like this yard.

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Alice Yard, Leonard’s f­ amily ­house from 1953, is located at 80 Roberts Street, at the center of Woodbrook neighborhood.9 The initiative attempted to transfer the relaxed atmosphere already existing in the h ­ ouse’s yard to the local cultural field.10 Trinidadian yards are spaces for hospitality and conviviality, where many p­ eople gather and share ideas and thoughts on relevant and ordinary issues. On carnival days, they become neighborhood headquarters where all the arrangements are discussed, agreed, and fi­nally made. The backyards ­were (and are) private spaces made public, places where authority is recognized and tradition is respected but also where knowledge circulates freely as a common good. Trained as an architect and an energizing force of community life, Leonard knew about the importance of keeping ­things circulating and conversation flowing. Looking back, the words of Alice Yard’s creators at the time of the proj­ect’s opening sound particularly touching ­because of their mix of enthusiasm and prudent containment. On September 13, 2007, one year before the establishment of the gallery space (the Yard was officially inaugurated in September 2006, hosting musicians and artist meetings, informal conversations, and band practice), Nicholas Laughlin wrote a post on the Ca­rib­bean Review of Books blog. With the advantage of temporal distance, “Opening Tomorrow: The Alice Yard Space” seems now an early confirmation of the values that Alice Yard has sought to promote since its inception. By then, however, achieving t­ hose values might have required a big effort. In the article Laughlin (2007) describes the proj­ect as “not a space for ­grand declarations, necessarily, but to show something that w ­ ill trigger a reaction, a conversation.” He also points out something crucial: the role of spaces like the Yard is “to ask questions, to use modest available spaces and resources, to generate a real conversation about the role and relevance of con­temporary art in the Ca­rib­bean” (2007). Simplicity, experimentation, collective endeavors, limitless imagination: that was Alice Yard’s message at its inception as it continues being now. If we allow a brief visual digression, among the documentation of the hundreds of activities developed at the Yard figures a photo­graph of Sean Leonard dressed as Actor Boy, a Jonkonnu-­inspired character with a costume designed by artist Charles Campbell.11 In this instance, Leonard was part of the work that Campbell produced while in residency back from Canada.12 Although I ­will not comment on the artwork, reading how the artist manages to frame this image and the entire proj­ect he produced in Port of Spain was a pleasant surprise for me. Valuing failure as a positive ele­ment is not frequent in con­temporary art.13 Experimentation is tolerated to a certain

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point, but then outcomes must follow. When I first read Campbell (2012) saying “that the real opportunity that Alice Yard offered me was the chance to fail publicly,” I did not know how to take his declaration. But then I began to realize that a large part of the potential of a place like Alice Yard lie in their capacity to transfer experimentation and collective creativity to the very core of artistic production. “Instead of a closed studio and access to equipment you get an open courtyard and access to ­people,” says Campbell. He also mentions that “ultimately the categories of success and failure ­don’t make a lot of sense in the context of Alice Yard.” Local p­ eople and informal network are “your studio, your support, your sounding board and your audience” (Campbell 2012). So t­ here we have Leonard bringing Actor Boy to life. The character was painted several times by Isaac Mendes Belisario, who is considered the ­father of modern Jamaican painting.14 In Campbell’s proj­ect, it was not a random choice. Actor Boy is a familiar figure both in the Jamaican popu­lar imaginations and art iconography, a character already used to mock plantation ­owners in the nineteenth ­century.15 However, beyond this ironic significance he also inspires re­spect and admiration. Actor Boy leads bands of musicians and dancers, serving as guide and object of emulation.16 He is at the same time part of the crew and its vanguard. Developing the Yard, in any case, was neither a natu­ral nor an easy choice. ­ ere involved in several other iniThe three persons who created the proj­ect w tiatives, undertaking intense activity in their fields. By then Cozier had been a renowned artist since the early 1990s, when he deci­ded to ­settle back in Trinidad. Leonard, for his part, had his ­career as architect, something substantially more practical and more profitable than opening an alternative art space. Laughlin, fi­nally, was (and is) tirelessly immersed in several proj­ects, among them the editorial coordination of the Ca­rib­bean Review of Books, one of the region’s most enduring periodical publications.17 Time, as is always the case, is short, and the demands of a proj­ect like Alice Yard are many. However, the need for action clearly outweighed any obstacle. In the absence of national support for con­temporary art in Trinidad (nor con­ temporary art museum or National Gallery, as in Barbados or Jamaica18) and the inefficacy of national infrastructural conditions, the tasks of transforming art into something that m ­ atters publicly has fallen on proj­ects such as the Yard. The artistic milieu of Port of Spain is dominated by art galleries that provide conservative collectors with a full array of “the national picturesque,” landscapes, thematic painting, and still life being the favorites. A group of “alter-­natives,”19 including Cozier, Laughlin, and Leonard, deci­ded to

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transform this situation, fueled by the w ­ ill of using art to generate a more vibrant public sphere. Alice Yard was not the first initiative of this kind emerging in Trinidad, although it has proven to be unique due to its mix of per­sis­tence, industrious ­wills, and allergy to conservatism and consolidation. Many of the concerns about space, interaction, conviviality, and social engineering championed by the Yard ­were shared by previous proj­ects such CCA7 or Galvanize. The first was an initiative led by the curator Charlotte Elias with the collaboration of artists Chris Cozier and Peter Doig. CCA7 operated between 1997 and 2003, offering a space for residencies and exhibition and a regular cultural programming that included weekly film screenings. CCA7 laid the groundwork for all the initiatives emerging in the 2000s, not only in Trinidad but also in the Anglophone Ca­rib­bean. Galvanize, on the other hand, was a proj­ ect that opened in 2006 with the following statement of purpose: “What is ‘Ca­rib­bean’ art? . . . ​What should it look like, sound like, feel like? Who decides? Who is paying attention? Is the work of con­temporary artists in Trinidad and Tobago ­really registering with an audience? Where? When? How? Or are ­these artists ‘visibly absent,’ there-­but-­not-­there, invisible to conventional expectations of what Ca­rib­bean art practice should be?” (Laughlin 2006). Galvanize attempted to develop an in­de­pen­dent artistic and creative six-­week program that could attract p­ eople with risky and uncompromised creativity. Tired of waiting for external aid or to looking at foreign points of reference, a group of young artists deci­ded to ­counter the official and straightforward program of Carifesta IX with more daring experiments. Carifesta was a regionally sponsored mega-­event seeking to represent Ca­rib­bean culture. Instead of focusing on repre­sen­ta­tion, Galvanize gave up identity definition and bureaucracy from the beginning, committing to the tougher and less comfortable task of giving art public relevance locally. Galvanize’s motto was “visibly absent,” a slogan that condenses a critique of the lack of interest of cultural authorities in experimentation and a plea for affirmation and cultural constituency even ­under highly unfavorable conditions. The visual language used to advertise activities, which replicated the handmade fete signs that can be found in Trinidadian roads hanging from trees or lamp posts to announce popu­lar musical soirées, was also in tune with the proj­ect’s personality. Many of ­those activities also sought an unconventional public for con­temporary art and visual creativity and took the forms of public interventions in tattoo shops and dancehall venues,

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graffiti, or poster-­making.20 What was at stake in initiatives like Galvanize was nothing other than agency. With Galvanize, Mario Lewis, Steve Ouditt, and the rest of the organizers wanted to spread the message that art should not be ensnared in never-­ending b­ attles about how Ca­rib­bean art was being made exotic and commoditized.21 The situation demanded more than that, more than a b­ attle for repre­sen­ta­tion. Initiatives like Galvanize or Alice Yard attempted to assert the potential of active agency and practice in all its levels. From the 2000s onward, optimism and collective creativity have permeated the Trinidadian artistic scene. The importance of t­ hese initiatives lies in the open questioning of what art can do. Alice Yard and Galvanize are exercises in “disarming hierarchies through cultural interventions” (Sommer 2013, 147). Their aim is not so much to create marginal space but to redefine drastically the artistic arenas in which they operate, challenging the notion of marginality itself and making emphasis on the need to create culture, not to represent it, as Cozier argues (Poupeye 1998, 183). In 1972, Robert Venturi (1977) learned the grammar of postmodernism from the architecture of Las Vegas. Almost half a de­cade ­after, learning from Trinidad means acknowledging the potential of collective agency in fueling visions of social engineering.

The Ca­rib­bean Infrastructural Trinidad is exemplary but not unique. The entire Ca­rib­bean is populated with spaces and initiatives like Alice Yard. My main interest in confronting ­those initiatives lies in analyzing how they develop a parallel flux opposing “traditional, representation-­based” approaches to con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art. I believe that proj­ects such as the Yard propose a ­whole new approach concerning cultural (nonexclusively artistic) practices. Ca­rib­bean art history is to a ­great extent a history of exhibitions and individual artworks. Less attention is paid to the ways in which artists or­ga­nize themselves creatively. Yet, as we saw in Trinidad, without that organ­ization, the former would not exist. What does it mean to analyze Ca­rib­bean artistic practices from an infrastructural point of view? Despite the importance of practices like Alice Yard, orga­nizational platforms attempting to define unconventional, collaborative, and collective modes of creativity appear underrepresented in the critical discourses on con­temporary Ca­rib­bean art. Much more attention

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has been paid to how the region has been rendered exotic, labelled, and commoditized.22 Although ­those insights have been crucial in order to dismantle inherited visual and cognitive apparatuses of misrepre­sen­ta­tion and commoditization of the Ca­rib­bean region, placing emphasis on the multiple ways in which Ca­rib­bean creators have striven to define and assert counter-­ representation, orga­nizational and infrastructural practices are still now scarcely analyzed in critical discourses. Terry Smith has recently defined infrastructural activism as one of the most salient manifestations of artistic creativity. Smith (2012b) integrates the term into con­temporary curating and argues that it implies the inclusion of activism, connectivity, and orga­nizational practices within the scope of artistic practice. This enhancement of curating also brings new spaces for art, new operational frameworks, and new modes of conceiving the institutional. Although the adscription to curatorship of the practices I am analyzing ­here is disputable, Smith’s insights on the centrality of infrastructural strategies in the pres­ent day remain completely relevant. Looking at Ca­rib­ bean infrastructural practices, we can state that they are not cut off from the cultural milieu where they operate. Rather, they pay attention to detail and connect multiple ­causes and agendas. This focus on orga­nizational production permits a critical arena where a more effective and more plural engagement with artistic experience can be mea­sured, allowing not only for repre­sen­ta­tional restrictions and limitations but making room for visual, intersubjective proj­ects and hopes. It is precisely in this terrain where the subversive action of collaboration can be mea­sured. When we say that infrastructural practices have been essential in generating the reformulated lexicon that Ca­rib­bean art is using to define its being-­in-­the-­world, its position in a larger, transnational scale, we are referring to a democ­ratization of the crucial task of art in challenging constrained locations. If ­those proj­ects have been relevant within the last de­cade’s pa­norama of Ca­rib­bean art, it has been ­because of their ability to practically and actively confront pro­cesses of mobility and connectivity but also deal with exclusions, limitations, parochialism, and marginalization.

Agency What do proj­ects like Alice Yard do? What do they produce? I mentioned before the idea of a “creative collective agency.” How should we interpret

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it? To put it simply, agency is what t­ hings, persons, or collectives do. My analy­sis of agency has a practical basis, and it demonstrates the ways in which dif­fer­ent proj­ects operate and points out the consequences of the decisions ­behind them. In the proj­ects I examine in this chapter, agency is intended to be long-­lasting. Anything prolonged in con­temporary art is a challenge: think of the economic and po­liti­cal conditions of many Ca­rib­bean countries, and durational outcomes would appear even more challenging, for duration has proven to be a phenomenal antidote against flash success and the volubility of the art market. Collaborative proj­ects in the Ca­rib­bean have been essential in staging and channeling the transformative capacity of creativity and the anx­i­eties of the multiple agents taking part in durable creative pro­cesses. Through the adoption of horizontal structures and the focus on educational initiatives, they succeed in aggregating multiple voices and embedding their demands within multiple ­causes. Through the incorporation of persons and proj­ects involved in constructing participative approaches to artistic practice, they have served as pedagogical forums, encompassing the demands and the inquiries for a more open enactment of citizenship. In a broader sense, artist-­run spaces have also transported Ca­rib­bean creators and individuals all around the region. They have also brought cultural agents from other latitudes, synchronizing the agendas and the interests of Ca­rib­bean creators within international alternative artistic mappings. In ­doing so, they are producing a “relocation of knowledges” (Mignolo 2000) in which the spatial logic of con­temporary influences, interests, and contexts are being reframed and dispersed. A new mapping of Ca­rib­bean art emerges when we consider the bonds of solidarity developed by collaborative proj­ ects. This map extends beyond the bound­aries of metropolitan territories in order to incorporate other territories such as Japan, South Africa, Germany, or Venezuela. The results of ­these networks cannot be mea­sured by looking at the participation of individuals in biennials or mainstream art events; rather, they involve a wider and more complicated set of cultural practices, such as shared proj­ects, art residencies, knowledge fluxes, interventional proj­ects, and so on. Furthermore, Ca­rib­bean artist-­managed initiatives do not only propose new spatial configurations or more active approaches to “underprivileged communities”; they reveal a completely holistic understanding of the public in which participation, spectatorship, and agency are reframed and nego-

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tiated.23 In that sense, as we ­will see, artist-­run spaces emerge as rooms where more demo­cratic forms of citizenship can be put into practice. Of course, this is not to say that art creates a new and fairer ­legal framework, facilitating a total empowerment of underrepresented and marginalized individuals and collectivities. Now, identifying collaborative creativity with a pa­norama of fully integrated and participative citizens would mean romanticizing art’s agency. By focusing on collectivity, spectatorship, and participation, this chapter aims to evaluate each proj­ect from the point of view of practice, shedding light on the positives and the negatives. Mimi Sheller’s warning (2012, 9) that “subaltern claims for po­liti­cal inclusion and attempts to exercise their rights are a double-­edged sword, since the expression of po­liti­cal subjectivity is also always a further inscription into the state order” is of par­tic­u­lar interest ­here. So too is her concern with a performative citizenship determining “how states and citizens applied a set of techniques and practices of differentiation that both united and divided a population along par­tic­u­lar lines” (21). In other words: collective creativity, spectatorship, and participation are not knock-on effects; rather, it w ­ ill be necessary to pay attention to the maneuvers taking place within the interplay that bridges t­ hose three levels of engagement. Ca­rib­bean collective art practices have thus generated new cartographies, promoting a “flight from the metropolis” and making pos­si­ble a dialogue across South-­South partners (the case of Guadeloupe, which I ­will discuss below, is exemplary in that sense). The solidarity developed by collectivist artistic practice, thus, accomplishes a dual function: first, it reveals and offers alternatives to the artistic mappings of the regions (see O’Gorman 1972, Dash 1998, Mignolo 2009); secondly, it broadens and enhances the effectiveness of local agencies, providing an enlarged “space-­time for the effectuation of latent possibilities” (Holmes 2007a, 279). In this regard, it continues a tradition of subversive cartography through a dual pro­cess of construction and deconstruction. This by no means implies accepting that exhibitions or artworks are deprived of any agency. However, in the last de­cade Ca­rib­bean creative agents have given a master class unparalleled in any other part of the Amer­i­cas, struggling with issues of autonomy, precariousness, civic engagement, citizenship, or orga­nizational agency. This chapter attempts to pay tribute to that strug­gle.

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You Name It Once we recognized the importance of infrastructural, orga­nizational proj­ects like Alice Yard and perceive how agency works, several questions arise: How to confront t­ hose initiatives critically? What is the proper name for dealing with them? Should we consider ­those initiatives as a  mere platform for the production of creative and cultural practices? Looking at some of the examples I have provided in this chapter, this does not seem to be the case. On the contrary, social interaction and artistic production are indissolubly linked, not as two concatenated phases but as part of a single pro­cess. Critical appreciation of that pro­ cess would require us to consider all the effects and affects it elicits. Yet, the question remains: How, and from what position, do we carry out that critique? To be sure, this is not a debate exclusive to the Ca­rib­bean. In the last de­cade we became familiar with a kind of work that operates poststudio, that seeks public engagement and active change, and that places art in the position of cultural and social catalyst. Artists have responded to all the thorniest issues haunting our era, including economic crisis, segregated socie­ties, gender rights, racial inequalities, and social isolation and marginalization. We know what art can do, yet we do not have a single name for it. Relational aesthetics, new-­genre public art (Lacy 1995), socially engaged art, collaborative art, participatory art, and social practice are just some of the ways in which proj­ects of this kind are designed. Although the names we choose for ­these proj­ects should not be the central concern of critical approaches to them, the disparity of practices encompassed by this debate makes it a ­matter of urgency to establish a methodology. This is not a ­matter of excluding or including proj­ects, nor of distinguishing between “good or bad” examples, but of knowing what we are looking at and from what position. Art historian Grant Kester states: ­ ese shifts have significant implications for the critic or historian who Th writes about this work as well. In par­tic­u­lar, they require new methodologies and new ways of thinking through modes of reception and production. I’ve found that it’s often difficult for conventionally-­trained critics to address what we might broadly term social or engaged art practice with any analytic clarity. (Kester 2013)

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“Clarity” ­here means, among other ­things, attention to detail and interest in practice and contingency. Kester complains about how common the use of “theoretical shortcuts” without a deep engagement with t­ hose authors’ ideas has become. He is keen not to criticize theorists, nor to campaign for an allergy to aesthetics but to warn of the laziness of drawing on them as predefined formulas. In place of decorative usages of theory, he argues in ­favor of looking at how proj­ects evolve with interest and from close quarters. This does not in itself constitute a methodology, but it certainly provides a positive starting point for oblivious art critics. The evident reaction to this demand for proximity is that it may cause a sort of critical myopia. By asking for direct engagement with what art does instead of focusing on intentions, discourses, and repre­sen­ta­tions, are we not at risk of losing ground and identifying too much with the object of criticism? How are we to appreciate the aesthetic part of each proj­ect if we privilege a practice-­based, realist approach?24 Kester’s answer to this question is just one among many o­ thers, but it offers in­ter­est­ing ele­ments for my purposes h ­ ere. For him, the main obstacle to valuing and appreciating t­ hese practices is linked to the enthronement in con­temporary art of an aesthetic of disruption and shock that comes right from the core of the avant-­garde.25 Following that logic, only through a negative and unfulfilling confrontation with real­ity can the spectator obtain an aesthetically enriching outcome. Any social or po­liti­cal ele­ments ­ought to capitulate to this negativity, being incorporated as discursive ele­ments and therefore denying any possibility of “real” collective change.26 The work of artists such as Santiago Sierra, who usually compels audience and outsourced actors to experience traumatic situations in “controlled environments” such as museums or art galleries, would epitomize this position. ­A fter dedicating de­cades to bringing p­ eople together in artistic and editorial proj­ects and writing about similar practices,27 Kester acknowledges the importance of not just defining such artistic initiatives but also of questioning the position of the “outsider” art historian who transforms practice into critical analy­sis and consequently elaborating a methodology to tackle them.28 His books have played a central role in defining and expanding socially-­engaged art, granting recognition to many daring and courageous proj­ects in locations as varied as Argentina, India, Peru, Senegal, and Myanmar.29 For example, he coined the term “dialogical art” to refer to work that “challeng[es] fixed identities and perceptions of difference. At the same time, they conceive of the relationship between the viewer and the work of art quite

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differently; not simply as an instantaneous, prediscursive flash of insight, but as a decentering, a movement outside self (and self-­interest) through dialogue extended over time” (Kester 2004, 84–85). Duration and collectivism (that “movement outside self”) are especially germane to the Ca­rib­bean initiatives I discuss in this chapter. The ideas I have just outlined belong to a debate that has now become “trendy,”30 and that “trendiness” constitutes an unsurmountable object that ­ ere is, of course, much should be pres­ent in any analy­sis of the subject.31 Th more to discuss. Artistic ­labor, autonomy, engagement, intention, infrastructure, occupation, intervention, fill thousands of pages of art books and journals and have become common currency not only to t­ hose who are engaged or interested in social practice. Narrowing the focus of this discussion, I ­shall now explore a variety of Ca­rib­bean practices that are characterized by curiosity, engagement, and experimentation, in the Puerto Rican context.

El Arte de Bregar (To Strug­gle with Real­ity) The kinds of initiatives I have analyzed in the Trinidadian context are not new in Puerto Rico. A long tradition of alternative spaces began in the 1960s with Antonio Martorell’s Taller Alacrán32 and the Taller Alma Boricua (see Taller Alma Boricua 1990), consolidating in the 1970s and 1980s through artist-­driven initiatives such as Casa Aboy, the Liga de Estudiantes de Arte, Casa Candina, and MSA. At the turn of the c­ entury, as happened all over the Ca­rib­bean, Puerto Rican alternative spaces and socially driven proj­ects gained momentum and international attention in a context of po­liti­cal and economic instability. Contrary to what could be expected in the circumstances, the first de­cade of the twenty-­first c­ entury was marked by a burst of alternative spaces and socially-­engaged proj­ects.33 Their impact in defining a public sphere in Puerto Rico has been crucial: many of them have managed to survive in years of debt crisis and po­liti­cal volatility, providing artists with a space for affirmation, debate, and creativity. Concentrated in San Juan but in no way limited to the capital, socially driven and orga­nizational initiatives have inundated the island. It comes as no surprise that they have actively engaged most of the po­liti­cal and economic ­causes the country has gone through in the last de­cade, from the conflict of sovereignty in Vieques

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Island to the strikes against the privatization of university education in the late 2000s.34 Bold and restless, Puerto Rican creators have found no issue too challenging to tackle. As well as trying to configure and energize of their platforms, artists have also become involved in developing long-­term interventions intended to mend a battered social fabric (see Cullen 2004). The education that many of them received in fields such as design, per­for­mance art, or cultural industries facilitated that decision. Some committed actions arose as responses to the local artistic context: in 2007, for example, many of the artist-­led in­de­pen­dent spaces spotted across the island reacted in ironic ways to the creation of CIRCA, an art fair attempting to showcase Puerto Rican creativity to a community of mostly foreign collectors.35 Artists ­were also driven by a heated po­liti­cal and economic situation: cases of corruption, U.S. interventions (including the withdrawal of the U.S. Marines from Vieques Island in 2003 and the assassination of Filiberto Ojeda in 2005),36 and the university strike of 2010 give a picture of what was a difficult de­cade.37 This situation could not fail to have a direct impact on Puerto Rican cultural debates within and outside the island. Visual artists ­were no exception, and they did not hesitate to engage in successive conflicts in all the forms they could think of. Organ­izing and intervening proved to be good ways of achieving their objective. Chemi Rosado’s intervention in El Cerro became one of the best known socially driven artistic proj­ects produced in the island, and it offers a good example of that sustained commitment. The El Cerro proj­ect started in 2002, when Rosado began to collaborate with the municipality of Naranjito, an eco­nom­ically deprived small town on the outskirts of San Juan. The city stands out on a dense green mountain that gives the location a clearly recognizable shape. Noticing the rotundity of the natu­ral landscape, Rosado offered to paint the inhabitants’ ­houses in the shade of green they preferred. This action extended in time for more than a de­cade, thus covering maintenance. El Cerro built on consensus and sustainability, opting for a mode of intervention totally dependent on the wishes of the local community. At first, many of the inhabitants did not want to paint their h ­ ouses; some of them even negotiated with the artist to repaint other parts of their properties. Decisions w ­ ere made over time individually, with Rosado solely responsible for the task of painting. In another well-­k nown proj­ect developed four years ­later, he provided La Perla neighborhood in San Juan with a

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skateboarding bowl right in front of the ocean, which became a community swimming pool on weekends. In this case, the space was built collectively, responding to an existing wish of the inhabitants. Located outside the walls of Old San Juan, La Perla was famous for crime and drug trafficking. Among other creative proj­ects, La Perla Bowl countered the neighborhood’s negative image and projected the neighborhood internationally. As in the case of El Cerro, the bowl follows the topography of the area, fitting naturally into the local landscape. ­Here, location is impor­tant in two dif­fer­ent senses: first, the choice of La Perla was a deliberate attempt to counteract the image of an historical neighborhood that, although close to the tourist zone of Viejo San Juan, usually remains outside many cultural itineraries. Second, and more significantly, the bowl constituted a tool of empowerment and urban imagination, offering the local community the opportunity to decide how to occupy their own public space. This had a special resonance in a neighborhood associated for many ­people with illegal activities and insecurity. El Cerro and La Perla Bowl are examples of sustained engagement and locally fueled interventions, getting away from opportunistic curatorial and artistic parachuting. Although both proj­ects received a big amount of international attention, this did not change the focus on covering local needs, encouraging collective decision-­making, and populating public space. The rest of this section ­will explore how ­those three objectives have also been pursued through orga­nizational means. One striking example is BetaLocal (see Garrido Castellano 2018). The proj­ect was created in 2005 by Puerto Rican cultural entrepreneur Michelle Marxuach and artists Beatriz Santiago and José “Tony” Cruz. They refurbished a single-­floor building owned by Marxuach in Old San Juan to serve as an art residency, exhibition space, and meeting point. For this purpose, they used the network created in previous years through the organ­ization of M&M, a biennial event funded by Marxuach. M&M brought to Puerto Rico a wide range of top-­tier artists and curators (including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Hou Hanru, and Adel Abdessemed), and has exhibited the work of Linda Montano, Gilbert and George, Marina Abramovic, and Vito Acconci. ­A fter the third edition of M&M, the proj­ect was dissolved and transformed into BetaLocal. M&M was not a conventional biennial, however. The Puerto Rican artists who participated in the three editions of the proj­ ect worked in groups, usually extending their proj­ects beyond the time span of the event.38 The two proj­ects of Chemi Rosado mentioned above ­were initially developed as a participation in dif­fer­ent editions of this event.

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Since its beginning, BetaLocal has aimed to engage with nonartistic audiences, taking up po­liti­cal c­ auses and fulfilling specific social and cultural needs.39 Its timing has also differed from the more periodical biennial system. The reason for this change lay in the constraints they found while organ­izing the M&M biennials. Although ­these w ­ ere or­ga­nized as a private initiative, exempt of the need to represent any single country or institution, they relied on the “traditional” scheme of biennials, intending to “insert” local creators into an internationalized art scene and to bring internationally renowned artists and audiences to Puerto Rico. BetaLocal has sought to embody a dif­fer­ent model. Initially conceived as an alternative library and archival space that was open to all, it soon evolved in order to incorporate other features and programs.40 Among ­those, the first or­ga­nized was La Práctica (The Practice), an immersive collective research program open to artists, researchers, and cultural activists. The program, defined as a “horizontal, peer-­taught” experience,41 consisted of the annual se­lection of up to five p­ eople with the aim of developing cooperative practical, on-­site research while also collaborating with all the other activities fostered by BetaLocal. La Práctica offers a residency space and encourages the fellowship recipients to devote a number of hours per week to collaborating with dif­fer­ent artistic and nonartistic communities. Th ­ ese collaborations result in ongoing joint ­ nder this scheme, the research initiatives, talks, and reading sessions. U invited persons are not considered “specialists”; rather, they are specifically sought out in response to the requests made by the vari­ous groups who regularly visit BetaLocal. What is impor­tant is that all the ­people who are involved in ­these actions participate on equal terms in the research pro­cess, with the results aimed at addressing and responding to collective expectations and desires. Residents are therefore compelled to decentralize their own positions and transform their original ideas into cooperative productive action.42 Chronologically, BetaLocal’s second initiative was La Ivan Illich, which expanded and extrapolated to Puerto Rico the model of The Public School.43 Conceived as a “de-­educating,” curriculum-­free educational experience, the program asks anyone who is interested to propose a par­tic­u­lar lesson which she or he wants to receive or teach. BetaLocal provides the space for ­those exchanges to take place and seeks to satisfy the requests that are received. Fi­nally, The Harbor represents the most conventional long-­lasting action developed by BetaLocal, functioning as a more traditional art residency for international guests. The space’s orga­nizational model can be explained by

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alluding to three interrelated ideas: flexibility, authority, and horizontality. Each program has its own guiding princi­ples and is directed ­toward dif­fer­ent audiences. They may include nonartistic sectors, experienced artists, and/or curators alike. This approach seeks to c­ ounter the isolation of artistic practice from social imagination. Whereas “alternative” cultural events abound in the Puerto Rican cultural landscape, in many occasions they are directed ­toward a limited “art-­educated” audience. By diversifying their initiatives and making them more flexible, BetaLocal aims to transcend this situation, although, as the proj­ect’s found­ers have stated, this has not always been achieved.44 What sets BetaLocal apart, in any event, is the combination of flexibility with a direct challenge to specialization-­based authority and hierarchical organ­ization. The potluck dinners or­ga­nized to cover the expenses of some of the visitors who cannot afford travel costs also reveal some of the difficulties. Potlucks usually precede a residency in the La Práctica or an edition of The Harbor. Since they are not linked to any of the proj­ect programs, they bring together heterogeneous audiences, ranging from “­people from the art world” to participants in La Iván Illich, area residents, and international visitors. The charging of an admission fee helps to offset the financing of BetaLocal’s fellowship programs. In turn, a­ fter developing their residency, the interns often or­ga­nize another event to generate funding for the next fellowship, residency, or lecturer. It goes without saying that fundraising and potlucks have a widely known artistic genealogy. To mention only its most recent and readily identifiable layers, we may consider how the library clearly resembles Thomas Hirschhorn’s “monuments.”45 The image of Rirkrit Tiravanija,46 who achieved fame in the art milieu for cooking in museums and biennials, comes to mind when considering BetaLocal’s potluck dinner, as do, for example, Superflex’s fundraising events.47 Having t­ hese pre­ce­dents, it is in­ter­est­ing to focus on how ­these activities work ­here in a dif­fer­ent way. The durational character of both actions separates both proj­ects from collaborative proj­ects such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s monuments or Tiravanija’s cooking. Hirschhorn’s “participatory proj­ects” also rely on the gathering of local knowledge and the generation of spaces of coexistence in specific contexts during the time of the exhibition or biennial (see Kester 2011). The timing of each proj­ect is also contingent upon the general event they are part of. Similarly, the “locality” of the “participants” is determined by the artist, while the space of the exchange depends on the major structure of a biennial. Con-

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cerning the target audiences, in the case of BetaLocal, the public is not “convened” by the promise of participating in a singular experience designed by high-­profile artists. Instead, the potlucks are ­imagined as periodical platforms for social interaction. Far from being universal—­they share the same difficulties in gathering “nonartistic” audiences BetaLocal finds on other occasions—­they form part of a platform of activities that reaches (again, with limitations) across artistic and nonartistic spheres. Fi­nally, another difference comes in the form of function. At BetaLocal, it is impossible to detach the configuration of the library and the potlucks as social, sup­ portive activities from the framework of “more valuable” artistic practices. They are—­and they are meant to be—­part of a totality. Furthermore, they intend to be part of an orga­nizational, functional structure. Another key function of the BetaLocal involves operating as a backdoor through which many individuals not interested in con­temporary art, or not belonging to the “art audience,” enter the artistic space and interact with other initiatives. BetaLocal’s directors emphasize the importance of the proj­ect as a “way in”—­that is, as a tool for bringing together heterogeneous audiences: “­There are ­people who appropriate the space in dif­fer­ent ways. Some stay and join other activities; some ­others ­don’t.”48 Since many of the lessons take place in other locations outside the BetaLocal space, in t­ hose places where the demand is expressed, La Iván Illich serves as the proj­ect’s main decentralizing tool. It is significant that La Iván Illich does not oppose other educational models; rather, it attempts to fill the gaps. In fact, the state of opposition is the antithesis of the initiative’s main objectives. It does not attempt so much to fully reject artistic expertise as to appropriate it as part of BetaLocal’s tactical repertoire. Something similar can be said concerning the “undoing” of Puerto Rico’s nonautonomous condition. Although the program does not address it directly, it does address the social conditions, the deficiencies, the desires, the anx­i­eties, and the margins of artistic practice within the island. However, the proj­ect cannot be seen as a “relational space” f­ ree of conflict; a neutral scenario for exchanges. Being an exercise of social imagination, it is more reflective of situations of exclusion and lack of communication than the unlimited exchange outlined by the theoretician of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002, 14). For Bourriaud, the development of modern cities and the fluxes of globalization generated “the experience of proximity,” which would lead him to consider artworks and art exhibitions as “social interstices” (15–16). Many t­ hings set the activity of

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BetaLocal, and particularly La Iván Illich, apart from t­ hose interstices. While Bourriaud’s model is based on the (more innocuous) temporality and spatiality of the exhibition space, in our case we find a structure seeking to expand beyond “artistic spaces.” In order to achieve this, initiatives such as La Iván Illich appropriate and overlap the “communication zones” and resources that are locally available. This imbues the proj­ect with a certain contingency, one that depends on the specific needs of par­tic­u­lar groups and communities. Indeed, the initiative’s main concern is not with generating aesthetic exchanges and durational experiences; rather it is about exposing and countering the misunderstandings and deficiencies generated by the Puerto Rican cultural and academic infrastructures. Th ­ ese aspects are part of BetaLocal’s active, generative role. Puerto Rican “official institutions” have not hesitated to take advantage of the effervescence of alternative spaces, using their potential. Unlike Trinidad, where artist-­run initiatives have taken over an artistic scene depopulated of con­temporary art agents, in Puerto Rico proj­ects like BetaLocal coexist with a century-­old tradition of cultural institutions. Mentioning just the case of San Juan, we can count three active museums dedicated to con­ temporary art: the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR), the Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). The last-­mentioned constitutes a perfect example of the permeability, created by artists, that dominates the Puerto Rican cultural milieu. This porosity across levels continues to the pres­ent day: in 2015, in the last edition of the San Juan Poli/Graphic Triennial, the traditional headquarters of the Cuartel de Ballajá shared attention for the first time with in­de­pen­dent, artist-­managed spaces all across the island.49 This edition of the triennial was or­ga­nized by Abdiel Segarra Ríos, another untiring example of energy and commitment. Before joining the direction of the Fine Arts Department in the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, the equivalent of a ministry of culture, Segarra was involved in two major in­de­pen­dent cultural proj­ects: Conboca, an alternative cultural platform and a newspaper offering support to produce other artists’ collaborative artistic proj­ects; and Area: Lugar de Proyectos in Caguas, a dynamic space that has animated the local cultural arena. When Segarra “changed sides” and took charge of the organ­ization of the triennial, he just did what he knew best: encourage p­ eople to work together, organ­izing and improvising in equal parts. If the main lesson of Trinidadian in­de­pen­dent spaces was that collective agency can break isolation and transform cultural are-

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nas, in the case of Puerto Rico we find a continuous bustle of energy from the official side to the unofficial and vice versa—­a briega in permanent transition that does not, however, abandon strategy and organ­ization. If bregar is, according to Díaz Quiñones (2000, 20), “another order of knowing, an unobtrusive, diffuse method for navigating con­temporary life, where every­ thing is extremely precarious, shifting or violent,”50 or “acting, working with skill and experience, meeting expectations” (21),51 recent Puerto Rican art has given a master class in the subject. The following lesson, focusing also on autonomy, precariousness, and colonial interference, would be delivered by L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe.

Sheltering and Nurturing With regard to the construction of a museum in the (still-­dependent!) space of Ré­union, Françoise Vergès recently asked how an institution operating in such a context can contribute “to the emancipation of individuals, that is, to their capacity of imagining new ways of living, of being citizens, of being curious, of creating” (Vergès 2007, 455).52 Shifting from museums to artist-­managed spaces, the question still remains valid. To what extent do such initiatives frame ­these questions differently? Or, if we wish to consider this issue from a more negative stance: What would be the role—­and what would be the nature—of any institution that fails to achieve ­these subversive goals? With ­these questions in mind, L’Artocarpe opened in 2009 as the first artist-­managed institution in Guadeloupe. Founded by Joëlle Ferly, a Guadeloupean artist trained in London and Paris, L’Artocarpe seeks to ­counter a situation of institutional nonexistence and social isolation which diminish social interaction and prioritize production and commoditization in detriment to discussion and exchange. When Ferly came back from Eu­rope in 2008, she tried first to c­ ounter ­those obstacles through individual means, making use of per­for­mance and video art.53 L’Artocarpe represents both the expansion and consolidation of ­those earlier efforts and the ascertaining of limitations. Located in the municipality of Le Moule, the space has sought to define itself as a trade-­union-­like structure geared more ­toward production, experimentation, and dialogue than exhibition. Its structure consists of a federation of members, most of them artists, who are allowed to use the space to develop their work and exchange impressions.

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L’Artocarpe is also an art residency that encourages international visitors to interact with local creators through a range of activities that include open discussions, workshops, and studio visits. Visitors are not obliged to transform their stay into a perfectly finished product, such as an exhibition. Rather, they are invited to use the space and the structure of L’Artocarpe to advance proj­ects in pro­gress and conduct practical research. They are also encouraged to engage in multiple talks, colloquia, and open conversations ­ ese initiatives seek to connect the community of Guawith local artists. Th deloupean artists with other territories besides France, thereby loosening dependence on the metropolitan space and its art scene. The geo­graph­i­cal distribution of the interns speaks volumes in this regard: artists and academics from the Dominican Republic, Saint Martin, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Haiti, E ­ ngland, and the Netherlands have stayed for extended periods in Le Moule. Th ­ ese fluxes intend to downplay the dependence of the Guadeloupean artworld on the French metropolis, to “get away from the French enclave” as Ferly (2013) puts it. This constitutes a major transformation in the cultural life of a town of approximately 23,000 inhabitants. By positioning itself alongside process-­oriented, long-­term creativity, the residency allows constant feedback and international exchange despite the cultural oblivion motivated by the orga­nizational distribution of the Ca­rib­bean Départements d’Outre-­Mer (DOM, French Overseas Departments). L’Artocarpe seeks to emulate the original significance of the tree from which the initiative derives its name. A huge Artocarpus (breadfruit tree) is planted right beside the art building. As its director states, the choice of an arboreal location not only carries a power­ful symbolic charge but also endeavors to implant social strug­gles over citizenship, cooperation, and collective agency within a liberating agenda that can be traced back to plantation society: “Bread fruit trees have historical bearing: their fruits w ­ ere eaten by runaway slaves escaping bondage. T ­ oday, the trees continue to feed poor families and artists who are struggling with the high costs of living on an island ­under the growing influence of French mono­poly and [neo]liberal economy.”54 ­Bearer of a long historical tradition in the stories of freedom and emancipation, the use of the bread fruit tree for art and organ­ization work ­here as a symbol of the commitment of artistic practice to ensure in­de­ pen­dence and to contest the uses and the negotiations of the public space. As Ferly states, the enclave at L’Artocarpe somehow resuscitates (not symbolically, but factually) the sense of “collective conspiracy” of former times (2013). If some years ago, she declares, it was common to hear statements such

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as “I ­don’t want to show my work b­ ecause I ­don’t want ­people to steal my ideas,” now she notices a major interest in artists helping each other, developing cooperative proj­ects, being innovative in their work, following up on international currents, and exchanging ideas. The placement of the proj­ect draws a direct lane between emancipative proj­ects in slavery and post-­slavery socie­ties, and demands for cultural openness, in­de­pen­dence, and assertion over the urban landscape. It updates and evidences a broad understanding of the possibility, outlined by Sheller, of “track[ing] the competing ordering, reordering, and disordering of the Ca­rib­bean landscape and the social strug­gles that came to be materialized in that landscape—­a kind of citizenship from below the ground itself” (Sheller 2012, 193). Besides operating as a place for artistic production and art residency, the third function of L’Artocarpe is directed ­toward the local community. It is intended to improve the visibility of Guadeloupean art abroad. While Ca­rib­bean art has been exhibited worldwide over the last two de­cades, t­ here has been a disparity with regard to the participation of some territories. The Lesser Antilles have, by and large, been underrepresented in large-­scale exhibitions and cultural initiatives both within and outside the region (See Bailey et al. 2012, Cullen and Fuentes 2012). ­There are vari­ous explanations for this, some of which pertain to the disproportion in size between the islands or to the historical development of cultural institutions in the Spanish-­speaking Ca­rib­bean. ­These “official,” historical structures are to a large degree still lacking in many Ca­rib­bean territories. It was not ­until the last years of the twentieth ­century that some artists began to be included more regularly in regional and international cir­cuits. Since its foundation, L’Artocarpe has managed and accompanied proj­ects of Guadeloupean artists for international events such as the World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) in Dakar and the Havana Biennial, thus including Guadeloupeans in ­those forums for the first time. This ­factor is especially relevant for three reasons: first, it puts up re­sis­tance to the cultural isolation of Guadeloupe both regionally and internationally; second, it provides Guadeloupean artists with an artistic experience that they would not other­wise have due to the lack of local infrastructures for ­those purposes; and, fi­nally, it deals with an institutional and po­liti­cal vacuum that concerns not only art—in 2014, L’Artocarpe managed to persuade the French Embassy in Cuba to fund the participation of the Guadeloupean Henry Tauliaut alongside metropolitan French artists represented in the 2015 edition of the Havana Biennial.

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The Guadeloupean archipelago lacked the most basic institutional structures for the development of artistic production, despite the fact that “con­temporary” artistic production has existed since the 1950s. The reason for this is intrinsically related to the orga­nizational scheme of the DOMs. The territories of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique are highly centralized, with Martinique functioning as the main cultural center. It is common for many students and art prac­ti­tion­ers to move e­ ither to Fort-­de-­ France or to the metropolis in order to develop their ­careers. In any event, even in Martinique artistic practice is oriented t­ oward production and display. What prevails is a disseminated landscape in which artists living in the region have their workplaces in their homes and focus on their own productions in order to then participate in the French art market or collective art exhibitions abroad. Production, furthermore, has to cope largely with the expectations of the metropolitan scene, which frequently takes the form of the creation of a niche of “other art” that is rarely positioned on equal terms alongside French production. “Con­temporary artists,” nevertheless, only represent a minimal percentage of the region’s artistic population, with a much larger number of amateur paint­ers devoted to satisfying the needs of the visiting tourists. Th ­ ese difficulties are further compounded in French Guiana and Guadeloupe. The union-­like structure of L’Artocarpe can be seen as the proj­ect’s main engagement with artistic l­abor and its main response to its immediate context. The benefits L’Artocarpe provides to its “federation” of artists are directly related to isolation and market-­oriented individualism. The task of “feeding” and “freeing” subjectivities suggested by the space’s name is continued by artistic means: L’Artocarpe brings together artists (both trained and amateurs) residing all over the island. It provides a meeting point, acting as an open place that can be occupied by several activities. Although such spaces need the approval of the organ­ization’s board, encounters are spontaneous and unpredictable in terms of audiences, impact, and participation. Placing the organ­ization outside Pointe-­à-­Pitre reinforces the idea of providing an innovative location and stimulating mobility and personal relations between artists, national and international visitors, and the population of Le Moule.55 ­There are, as always, some contradictions. The “alternative global mappings” L’Artocarpe generates are not necessarily any freer from cap­i­tal­ist, market-­oriented determinations than the French context they seek to challenge (many of the collaborations managed by L’Artocarpe culminate with the participation of individual Guadeloupean artists in biennials). More-

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over, L’Artocarpe was the second place to clearly label itself as a “con­temporary art” space within the Guadaloupean landscape.56 Back in 2008, such a term was totally rejected by most Guadeloupean artists, who saw it as a new way to impose outside conceptions that did not reflect the “local art” productions. The first insights on L’Artocarpe described it as being the place for “Guadeloupeans who want to do like foreigners.” Less than five years on, other structures have now gradually a­ dopted the term seeing the interest it has received from national institutions. Struggling for a renewed and more open vision of the con­temporary and the aims of artistic practice has thus been part of the objectives L’Artocarpe has pursued since its foundation. Participation in events such as the Dakar Biennial, the maintenance and the increase of the artistic network supporting the organ­ization, and the intensification of international participation, can be seen as a decisive step not ­toward a “mainstreaming” of artistic practice but one oriented to the promotion of a w ­ hole orga­nizational model based on voicing dif­fer­ent and divergent agents involved in art pro­cesses and on artistic renovation.

Autonomy and Coloniality Both L’Artocarpe and BetaLocal are immersed in a situation in which the restrictions imposed by a nonautonomous and dependent standing generate new needs and new functions that are only attainable through cooperation and collaboration. In the two contexts, the side of “opacity” and “antagonism” is already taken by individual repre­sen­ta­tional practices that deem themselves oppositional ­toward vaguely defined cap­i­tal­ist, (neo)colonial forces. By moving beyond repre­sen­ta­tional criteria, cooperative practices can challenge the limitations of such a model on two fronts: First, they are able to address the material conditions of artistic production. Second, they portray an institutional potential, that is, a capacity for generating an alternative framework for action. This potential reacts against what Brian Holmes (2007b) has referred to as the “governmentality of failure,” a situation in which “the subject can do no more than contemplate his or her own psychic prison, with a few aesthetic luxuries in compensation.” Being unable to change both countries’ po­liti­cal real­ity, ­these proj­ects have developed the capacity to fill in some of the gaps left by other institutions and thereby generate social pro­cesses of interaction, discussion, and cooperation. As I have explained, t­ hese pro­cesses channel heterogeneous agendas

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and operate with variable audiences, to the extent that they create, in some cases, discomfort and discrepancy (the heterogeneity of the associates of L’Artocarpe and the interaction of the participants of BetaLocal’s dif­fer­ ent initiatives are good examples of this). The activity of BetaLocal and L’Artocarpe is dependent upon such values as duration, flexibility, horizontality, innovation, exchange pro­cess, and connectivity. ­Those ele­ments can be seen as functional values, yet, as we have seen, they are also b­ ehind aesthetic decisions. If both spaces share an orientation ­toward collective praxis, they seem to be prone to pursuing opposing paths in terms of their understanding of artistic practice. On the one hand, BetaLocal aims for a deregulation and despecialization of cultural interaction and creativity; L’Artocarpe on the other hand, has become a “herald of the con­temporary.” In any case, we have seen how some of their activities ultimately converge ­toward the same system they seek to challenge. Examples of this can be found in L’Artocarpe’s turn ­toward the “con­temporary,” in its linking artistic advancement and international participation; or in BetaLocal’s inability to withdraw from the “exclusivity” of art audiences. To some extent, the limitations of both proj­ects are the inevitable consequence of the most limiting features of the nonautonomous cultural milieu from which they arise. If the potential of collaboration is reduced to ­these ele­ments, then collaboration would work as an appealing yet in­effec­tive practice unable to generate a significant shift from the inherited nonautonomous cultural dynamics pres­ent in both territories. I have attempted to show that such an evaluation is incomplete. To be fair, something e­ lse should be added to this. We have seen how both proj­ects create and consolidate alternative social bonds and platforms for action. Th ­ ese undercut the spatial imagination at play in both scenarios. If we consider the same examples from this vantage point, we can see how L’Artocarpe’s structure reinforces an open public sphere that crisscrosses the colonial bonds of Guadeloupe by establishing connections with other art scenes. This sphere is not the “local side-­effect” of the proj­ect’s international activity. Rather, both levels are intertwined. Something similar can be said of BetaLocal. Its interest in “de-­educating” the overspecialized, overexposed, and highly sophisticated Puerto Rican artistic milieu situates its sphere of activity between that of artist-­managed spaces and nonprofit organ­izations. It is the porosity across audiences, programs, and spatial levels that fuels Beta­ Local’s most innovative outcomes. In sum, both L’Artocarpe and Beta­ Local act as orga­nizational yet flexible structures, thereby aiming to expose

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the artistic and social structures operating both in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe and to break with the precariousness dominating the artistic scenarios in which they operate. Arising from two very dif­fer­ent contexts, which, nevertheless, share a nonautonomous status, the two proj­ects offer in­ter­est­ing examples of collaborative agency and its ability to trigger an alternative social imagination. They are fueling tangible transformations that touch upon orga­nizational and structural conditions of artistic practice, while also relying on collective, local agency as a driving force for change. In the next section I ­will analyze how this pro­cess is closely linked to a plural understanding of community that takes form in the personal, and even in the corporeal. My last example takes us back to Trinidad to see how tangible change can be.

Dissenting Textures and Participative Bodies Artist-­managed proj­ects have been essential in fostering renovation, laying out and relocating knowledge and ideas, and interconnecting alternative agendas. As I have shown, this has an impact on the way artistic experiences are projected within the public space. By focusing on participation, networking, and cultural exchanges, artist-­run spaces tend to congregate p­ eople and to transform this congregation into the head of the artistic experience. This focus on collectivism can be seen as a means of resisting the elite-­ oriented dimension of some cultural practices, but its reach goes far beyond that. Collaborative proj­ects bring ­people together in shared initiatives. But we must ask: Which ­people? How? To what end? Since, as we have outlined, ­there is an intrinsic prob­lem in subsuming any notion of community within a single, individualized image, a plural landscape often emerges as the only possibility. That is, communities are composed of individuals and, no m ­ atter how stable or structured, collectivism w ­ ill imply some difference and dissensus (Rancière 2013), materialized through the capacity of inscribing the corporeal experience in dif­fer­ent normative ­orders. The negotiation and per­ for­mance of difference within the subjective and the corporeal o­ rders appear as the framework and the condition of possibility of grouping, of being united. Far from being a negative f­ actor, this indetermination is what renders pos­si­ble the shaping of subversive modes of citizenship through collective art proj­ects. Dissensus emerges as a merging of possibilities that complicate our understanding of space and the politics that define it. Translated into

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practical terms, it implies granting a voice to occluded and nonhegemonic racial and sexual options but also transforming them through practice. In this sense, Ca­rib­bean artist-­run spaces are not only recovering silenced parts of “popu­lar culture” but also enabling a pro­cess of what Sheller (2012, 4) calls “enacted agency,” in which individuals can develop personal forms of involvement within the public sphere.57 This was the case of the Erotic Art Week or­ga­nized for the first time in 2009 in Port of Spain. It was the first event of its kind to be celebrated in the Ca­rib­bean. The Erotic Art Week emerged from the collaboration of designer Richard Rawlings,58 architect Terry Smith, artist Chris Alexis, and curator Dave Williams, and over a period of ten days it reshaped the “normality” of the Woodbrook area with a ­whole range of activities, from public readings to artistic interventions in six hot spots of the quarter. One of the most celebrated actions, or­ga­nized by photographer Rodell Warner, came in the form of an erotic photo booth in the Alice Yard space. The camera was available for every­body who wanted to use it over the course of the Erotic Art Week, without restriction. The audience controlled e­ very detail of the shooting: whose body was portrayed and how, what was to be shown, and what was to be concealed. The visual experiments taking place within proj­ects like this extend and challenge the limitations of the performativity of being sanctioned by national and gender values. In this case, dissent is channeled through the publicized body, revealing that sexual and material exchanges are a zone of negotiation where the racial and gender economy of Trinidad can be deconstructed and transformed, as can the construction of “stable” notions of the black male body, the Indian female body, the lesbian ­couple, and so on, for the snapshots of the event ­were not controlled nor constrained by any institutional power. By focusing on fostering the public exhibition of corporeal identities, artistic collectivism managed to disrupt the normative order regulating the everyday and the policing of alternative engendered and racialized options, making room for them within the public space. At the same time, the repre­sen­ta­tional character of the proj­ects, involving photography not only by the organizers of the Erotic Art Week but also by participants, spectators, and onlookers reveals how Ca­rib­bean collective art proj­ects are oriented t­ oward the generation of a pro­cess of contextual agency which contributes to the revelation of the coloniality of the gaze and the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion (see Hallam and Street 2000, hooks 1996,

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Kaplan 1997, Pratt 2007). By installing “noncontrolled” repre­sen­ta­tional devices within key spots of Port of Spain, they enable the opportunity to frame the body in ways that can escape the ste­reo­typed and picturesque ideal built by tourism (see Urry 2002), imperial travelling, and science. By ­doing so, the opportunity of “returning the gaze,” as Sheller puts it, and “rendering the viewer as vulnerable as the photographer” is also presented (Pinney 2012, 110). What ­those images reveal is not sexual and corporal heterogeneity but embodied options of participation and dissent. The importance of artistic proj­ects like the Erotic Art Week lies in the way they provide tools that allow the body to inscribe critical concerns within dif­f er­ent coexisting and competing moral and social regulations. It is striking how this initiative emerged with no direct intention of criticizing national politics. The proj­ect was not the product of a single need or interest but an attempt to foster new options for the per­for­mance of personal and collective identity. By seeking to “unearth a community spirit and a new kind of art/business collaborations” (Draconian Switch 2009, 29) it challenged the repre­sen­ta­tion of the naked male and female bodies as obscene. The solidarity created by the Erotic Art Week did not only propel ­people into the artistic experience, it also challenged moral and social restrictions as well as the ambivalence of a cultural divide that makes the erotic body unproblematic and available for the external and festive gaze during the carnival.59 In effect, it provided a place for nonproper and nonrepresentative practices outside the “high-­culture” art world more oriented to the consumerism of a bourgeoise class that wants a more “aesthetic” identification with the nation’s landscape and community. Contesting not only repre­sen­ta­ tion but also the performative role of citizenship, the event established a remapping of the politics of place of the Woodbrook area through an encouragement of other choices besides liming and business. This redefinition of public spaces through the participation of the (erotic) body continues a tradition of self-­organized actions that defied coercive racial, class, and gender classifications and proposed a new per­for­mance of erotic subjectivities (Gill 2010 and Sheller 2012). We can find examples of this early in colonial times, as in the case of Beryl McBurnie, who began research on West Indian folk dances in the late 1930s and opened, in 1948, the first L ­ ittle Carib Theatre in a shack situated in her own backyard in Woodbrook, a middle-­class suburb in Port-­of-­Spain. ­Here she or­ga­nized

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and presented folk dances based on Trinidad and Tobago’s rich multi-­ cultural heritage, jeopardizing her standing in the city’s colored ­middle class (to which she belonged by birth) by her active participation in African dances and her co-­operation with young dancers of all ethnic backgrounds. (Bereton 1981, 223; quoted in Harney 1996, 14)

Testimonies like this illustrate how cultural nationalism was derived from a complex ­whole in which the creative actions of individuals and collectivities played a decisive role. Far from being straightforward, t­ hose encounters ­were diverse and implied heterogeneous—­and unequal—­voices and stories. They show how personal and domestic spaces and spatial logics ­were incorporated within what Harney (1996, 13) calls “the history of the nation’s creative imagination.” More than asserting the constructed character of the nation, in the sense that Anderson (2006) or Hobsbawn and Ranger (2012) do, stories like Beryl McBurnie’s reveal the importance of contextual practices being shared and located within contested everyday spaces. Collectivized forms of artistic practice are therefore essential in order to elicit alternative ways of participating and engaging within the public sphere. Proj­ects like the Erotic Art Week overcome choreographed multiculturalism in order to provide critical and contextual enactments of locating and living.

Looking Back, Looking Forward Although the emergence of spaces like Alice Yard, BetaLocal, and L’Artocarpe can be linked to the upsurge of orga­nizational, po­liti­cally engaged, and infrastructural practices across the world and especially in the Amer­i­cas (see Craven 2006, Mosquera 1996, Thompson 2011), it also continues a long tradition of socially engaged art pres­ent in both countries. I have already described the long tradition in orga­nizational experiments in the Puerto Rican case. In the Francophone Ca­rib­bean, we also find artistic collectives seeking to transcend the colonial heritage and dependence t­ oward the French metropolis. The Ecole Negro-­Caraïbe, founded in 1970 by the painter Louis Lauchez and the sculptor Serge Hélénon, attempted to challenge the influence of academic artistic education and the hegemony of an unproblematic and ste­reo­typed vision of the Ca­rib­bean tropical landscape.

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Driven by a Pan Africanist ideology, L’Ecole sought to reinforce the link between the Francophone Ca­rib­bean and Africa (see Fall and Pivin 2002; L’Etang 2007). ­Later on, in the 1980s, the collective Fwomajé would concentrate on defining a militant vision of creolité, attempting to insert artistic practice within the local insular real­ity (Tiburce 1994). Similar trajectories and equally vibrant genealogies can be found in other Ca­rib­bean contexts, dismantling the idea of social practice as a new phenomenon. At the pres­ent moment, initiatives like Fresh Milk in Barbados;60 Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín (LASA), Espacio Aglutinador, Cátedra de Arte y Conducta, or Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP) in Cuba;61 and the Instituto BuenaBista in Curação,62 to name just a few, are key in promoting alternative approaches to creativity and embedding nonartistic audiences in cultural pro­cesses. They have also promoted artistic mobility within the region. Through long-­term actions, they have opened up a space for discussion and organ­ization, countering the dynamic of market and prestige-­driven platforms. Something similar can be said of transnational platforms such as Ca­rib­bean Linked, Tilting Axis, ARC, and Small Axe, which function as platforms encouraging artistic dialogue, exchange, and collaboration. It is worth remembering that many of ­those proj­ects operate interconnected, fostering the emergence of new initiatives across the entire Ca­rib­ bean. The influence of artist-­run spaces in constructing the genealogies of Ca­rib­bean modernity has been decisive. Many of the most successful artists emerged from the arena of experimentation and debate provided by ­those spaces. In this sense, collectivism, solidarity, and engagement within “local” participatory proj­ects provide the backbone of Ca­rib­bean artists’ curricula just as much as professional training and international involvement, though in a significantly less vis­i­ble way. Artist-­managed spaces have acted as a quarry from where new generations of artists have emerged, revitalizing artistic scenes, fostering intergenerational debate, and expanding the borders of national cultural dynamics. The proj­ects I examine in this chapter have developed lasting cultural bonds, subverting existing cultural mappings. Collectivism has also transformed the ways in which concepts such as “con­temporary,” “avant-­gardist,” and “traditional” are produced. Ultimately, ­these experiences force us to reinterpret the meanings of terms such as originality, innovation, genealogy, influence, or individualism. A dif­fer­ent landscape emerges when we look at collective and cooperative dynamics. Apart from being a point where several initiatives take place,

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and t­here are vari­ous ways of engaging with them, t­hese proj­ects have admitted and promoted incipient Ca­rib­bean artists, providing a space for apprenticeship and dialogue. In many cases this assistance has been crucial since it has involved a constant support that official institutions and the market fluxes have not always managed to offer. The participation in artist-­run institutions creates a network that allows more fluid flows of information, access to transnational initiatives, engagement with more extensive audiences, and the widening of the discussions that art undertakes. Working in dif­fer­ent ways and from dif­fer­ent contexts, the dynamic of t­ hose spaces are ­behind the renovation of Ca­rib­bean artistic practice. ­These connections are not driven by economic needs or nationalist agendas. They occur b­ ecause of personal efforts and the interests of par­tic­u­lar individuals and collectives. Moreover, they incarnate a model of transnationalism that challenges the North-­South divide, binding together Ca­rib­bean artistic arenas and individuals in more demo­cratic, participative ways. In the 1990s, insularism was a popu­lar artistic topic that many artists embraced. In the 2000s, the consequences of insularity for cultural practices stopped being a discursive motif and became a graspable issue that could be dealt with in more practical ways. New resources and knowledge emerged all over the region, providing a network of durable platforms and establishing a dialogue among islands. Through ­those experiences, ideas, persons, and knowledge are incorporated not as external or “other” but as possibilities to assimilate and reuse. In so ­doing, they question the legitimacy of the aim of repre­sen­ta­tion of the “community” staged by national museums and cultural institutions as well as their capacity to define what is modern and to determine the interests of art markets. Artist-­managed spaces reveal themselves to be essential in networking, synchronizing, broadening, and updating individual and collective agendas and developing alternative mappings.

Conclusions Ca­rib­bean collaborative and infrastructural practices produce a fluctuation among dif­f er­ent ways of looking and acting and allow the possibility of conceiving more spaces for subversion. Such spaces provide better opportunities for many individuals and communities, a more fruitful working environment, and a wider network but also generate more demo­cratic forms of participation and nonmarketable experiences. As I have shown throughout

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this chapter, the reach of the analyzed proj­ects lies in the subtle ways they ensure spaces and channel agency for empowerment, repre­sen­ta­tion, translation, and dissent. In other words, the achievements and the steps t­ oward interconnectedness and enhanced audiences pres­ent in t­ hose proj­ects are indissolubly linked to a renovation of the gaze and the focus on shared experiences that artist-­managed proj­ects drive. Through the examination of examples from Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Guadeloupe, I have attempted to show how t­ hose proj­ects’ spatial politics go far beyond a mainstream-­ alternative or modern/nonmodern binary division. When asked about the role of the Ghetto Biennial in connecting dif­f er­ent contexts within the “global south,” curator Leah Gordon answered that the Port-­au-­Prince event is above all about class (the Biennial Questionnaire 2013).63 Similarly, a proj­ ect like the Port of Spain Erotic Art Week can only be recognized as an alternative to national canonical aesthetic insofar as it is an experiment in performing sexual citizenship within a transnational arena. The focus on the collaborative side of events like the Erotic Art Week is not about bringing p­ eople together and “showing subalternism” but rather about revealing and transforming the logic of insiderism that shapes the continuities and discontinuities between the local and the global, between the national and the transnational. From this point of view, ­those communities are interrelated by the need to ­counter the logic of provincialism (Smith 1974, 54), as well as a more complex relation between discourses and agencies constantly shifting between localized scenarios and transnational networks. Artist-­ managed spaces are not simply a “resistant” outsider response to a depressed national cultural dynamic or to the politics of misrepre­sen­ta­tion within global visual culture; their strength lies in the possibility of confronting and encompassing personal, embodied modes of conceiving and acting citizenship. In t­ hose initiatives, traditional artistic media such as painting or sculpture are not abandoned but merged within a wide variety of strategies and resources. Chemi Rosado’s proj­ects made use of formalist variations to improve the social conditions of two neighborhoods. The Trinidadian Erotic Art Week combined an interest in confrontational and dis-­sensual participation across bodies placed in the public space with studio photography and selfie culture. L’Artocarpe’s outcome is both material artworks and conversation. Ca­rib­bean social practice is thus not seeking to reject classic artistic languages but to enhance them and to give them public relevance. This logic of empowering dif­fer­ent ­causes, besides the establishment of a narrow model

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of artistic modernity, is a common feature of t­ hose proj­ects. Some other examples could be added h ­ ere: from the promotion of creole and “low-­tech” and recycling creativity by the Atis Rezistans collective and the Ghetto Biennial (see, Savage 2010)64 to the focus on the “domestic” and the personal by Espacio Aglutinador in Havana.65 Created in 1994, in the ­middle of the Cuban Período Especial (Special Period), Espacio Aglutinador is the first art space in Cuba managed by artists and in­de­pen­dent from the government. The activities in Espacio Aglutinador escape the organ­ization of “conventional” art exhibitions and include the commission of curated proj­ects to fellow artists from multiple generations,66 the creation of art residencies, and the cele­bration of noncommercial meetings. Repre­sen­ta­tion appears as another central concern related to media experimentation. Many of the initiatives I have examined are antirepre­sen­ ta­tional, a stance epitomized by Cozier’s call to create culture, not to represent it. But what does that mean? Are not “conventional artworks” also creating culture? In this chapter I have attempted to show how active agency has been essential in countering the repre­sen­ta­tional logic associated with the commoditization and exoticization of the Ca­rib­bean region. Although ­these insights have been crucial in dismantling inherited visual and cognitive apparatuses of misrepre­sen­ta­tion and commoditization of the Ca­rib­bean region, placing the emphasis on the multiple ways in which Ca­rib­bean creators have striven to define and assert counter-­representation, I believe that collective and collaborative artistic practices offer the possibility of taking the debate one step farther. Besides responding to very dif­f er­ent contexts, all my examples have been useful in expanding and diversifying the contexts and the audiences of con­ temporary artistic practice. They operate by inserting art into domains not traditionally connected with it and dismissed by more “regular” cultural institutions and civic powers. As I have pointed out, they have faced many hindrances, obtaining good and bad results. In many of the cases though, perseverance and duration have been crucial in strengthening the connection of each initiative with the medium where it takes place. Orga­nizational and infrastructural strategies have proved to be an effective vaccine against “the economy of attention” I discussed in chapter 2. Durable initiatives mean more accurate po­liti­cal and social interventions as well as stronger strengthening of ties of cooperation. Instead of locating and targeting a single issue, many of the works and proj­ects I have analyzed operate across dif­fer­ent levels

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and media. BetaLocal, for example, spreads its action across several domains, bringing together heterogeneous audiences and experiencing the refreshing effects of t­ hose unexpected encounters. This dispersion is also geo­graph­i­cal, involving an abandonment of the comfort zone of one’s own space and an engagement with other contexts within and beyond Puerto Rico.67 Operating in the public sphere comes with some costs and risks. Charles Campbell’s realization of how liberating it could be to fail publicly is especially revealing. Many of my examples consider improvisation, experimentation, and risk-­taking as part of their aesthetic vocabulary. The syntax of ­those ele­ments often fuels more than artistic agendas, engaging with a wide variety of issues, including precariousness, marginalization, po­liti­cal inefficiency, artistic conservatism, and cultural isolation. The situations confronted are both pressing and socially relevant, and this urgency is a central ele­ment in each proj­ect. In this re­spect, some artists engaged communities already immersed in the search of real transformation (Alice Yard) while in some o­ thers community needed to be constituted (L’Artocarpe, for instance). Throughout this chapter I have tried to mea­sure the peculiarities of the mapping whereby collaborative practices take place, highlighting the importance of decisions and actions as much as that of the restrictions, ­whether they derive from dif­fer­ent local and transnational sources. Ca­rib­bean artist-­ run spaces offer an assertion of shared experience for a wide variety of actors. The per­for­mances, workshops, residencies, and involvements facilitated by ­those spaces interconnect individuals and voices without occluding differences. Their capacity for provocation lies in providing the tools to translate across agendas and subalternities. Translation, then, is about the possibility of encompassing cultural and po­liti­cal agendas but also about revealing “the horizontal and relational nature of the con­temporary economic, social, and cultural pro­cesses that stream across spaces” (Ong 1999, 4), and, ultimately, about the emancipative condition of collective agency. The histories—­and we must say, the ­futures—of Ca­rib­bean art are very much grounded in this possibility of generating aesthetic experiences capable of escaping reductive classifications, commoditization and moral predicaments. Experience arises as a counter-­discourse of pessimistic readings of globalization and external meddling, revealing the possibilities of spatially engaging in alternative ways. In this chapter I attempted to show how

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another Ca­rib­bean art history is pos­si­ble, one centered on collective initiatives. Artist-­run spaces provide a source of innovation and renovation, dismantling the homogeneous image of community, creating forums of dialogue and negotiation, producing new aesthetic mappings, and providing the conditions for a reframing of the practices of citizenship.

Coda Artistic Agency, Space, and the Praxis of Ca­rib­bean Studies

Optimism tends to be paired with prematurity and lack of critical criteria. Attempting to ­counter that presupposition, this book’s main intention is to examine Ca­rib­bean artistic creativity from the contingent yet fertile standpoint of spatial agency. Arising from a long history of po­liti­cal and economic subjection as well as a future-­less pres­ent, the main characters of the story we have related face a difficult challenge, to say the least. Without underestimating the daunting dimension of that challenge, in this book I have opted for agency instead of commoditization, of affirmation instead of negativity. Nowadays, artistic practice (especially in its collective, engaged form) has become a regular, recomforting—­yet not comfort-­loving—­beacon for optimism. To be sure, the worst side of artistic practice’s connivance with transnational capital is always ­there, more pres­ent than ever. But the fact remains that the existence of alternatives and con­temporary aesthetics outside that model is more than ever-­present. To some degree, it has always been ­there.1 Raising the possibility of an academic discipline in Ca­rib­bean cultural studies, Aaron Kamugisha proposes that the right question to ask is 163

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“What might constitute Ca­rib­bean cultural thought as a body of critical scholarship, a terrain of activism, and the key to emancipatory f­ utures for the Ca­rib­bean?” (2013, 50). Grounding that terrain in the tradition of Ca­rib­ bean radical thinking represented by authors such as Antenor Firmin, Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Richard Price, Jean Price-­Mars, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, he argues for a critical engagement with culture, one able to make productive use of the rich tradition of anti-­colonial and radical praxis that exists throughout the region. “Ca­rib­bean cultural theorists from the early twentieth c­ entury,” he contends, “unlike their peers in much of the Western acad­emy, understood that culture cannot be seen as being shared in any s­ imple sense among a community’s members but that socie­ties are fundamentally divided by class, race, and ethnicity” (49). Th ­ ose ele­ments, then, should be pres­ent in any analy­sis of cultural manifestations, determining not only the object of study but also the ways we approach that object: “our quest may well be for a Ca­rib­bean radical thought and Ca­rib­ bean studies rather than anchoring it as an adjunct to a sometimes allied but differently conceived proj­ect of cultural studies” (56). What can con­temporary artistic agency bring to that proj­ect, when thought in relation to space? A first, tentative answer to this question is that more than ever before art is disclosing the multiple ways in which dominance and marginalization are pres­ent in the Ca­rib­bean postcolony. Although concerned with the influence of a gaze imposed on the region from outside (influence, we must add, that manifests itself as much in the form of discourse, in the constitution of a repre­sen­ta­tional gaze as in the articulation of curatorial and infrastructural structures, in the foundation of uneven systems of influence, power, and privilege), many Ca­rib­bean creators have also questioned the (less) evident ramifications of that gaze at work within the Ca­rib­bean space, omnipresent in the constitution of the postcolonial nation-­state. A second strand of the discussion relates to the way Ca­rib­bean artistic practice has rethought experience as the core of creativity. Many of the cases studies in this book refuse easy categorizations and therefore are difficult to be summarized and captured. Their aesthetic value frequently lies in the ­here and now where the artistic experience emerges. This experience entails a critical conceptualization of the dif­fer­ent stages (creation, research, exchange, display) involved in artmaking. Th ­ ose stages are usually conflated and brought closer; when that is not the case, the radical value of each proj­ ect is framed with all t­ hose dimensions in mind. The consequences of this

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movement are manifold: the focus on experience multiplies the agencies involved in art pro­cesses, helping to unsettle the class and racial hierarchies that operate in Ca­rib­bean cultural landscapes; the connections between several voices and the diversification of creative manifestations (which I attempted to frame by referring to “the Ca­rib­bean curatorial” and “the Ca­rib­ bean infrastructural”) pose a direct challenge to the adscription of con­ temporary art practice to commoditization and consumption as a privilege for an elite, putting a strain on the bound­aries of cultural industries; creative pro­cesses have become more aware of how dif­fer­ent power dynamics are contextually materialized and made pos­si­ble, revealing and rehearsing alternatives. ­Those alternatives are inappropriable and irreducible, solidly grounded in the ideas and experiences of Ca­rib­bean critical thought, and not subsumable by or “standing for” any simplistic interpretation of global phenomena. The use of the Ca­rib­bean by foreign thinkers as a world laboratory, where the dif­fer­ent interpretations of modernity and globalization attempt to discover, in a nutshell, the ancestral roots of con­temporary pro­cesses, has been a common trend in critical theory that has been kept alive ­until the pres­ent moment. The uses—­and abuses—of creolization as a world-­modelling value are just one example of this pro­cess. The histories—­ and we must say, the f­ utures—of Ca­rib­bean art are very much rooted in the possibility of generating aesthetic experiences able to elude reductive classifications, commoditization and moral predicaments. Experience arises as a counter-­discourse of pessimistic readings of globalization and external meddling, revealing the possibilities of engaging spatially in alternative ways.

Acknowl­edgments

This book is the result of never-­ending and enjoyable conversations along several years, so it is hard to thank all the colleagues and friends who helped me write and develop it. I would like to give special thanks to O’Neill Lawrence, Veerle Poupeye, Annie Paul, David Boxer, Michael Elliott “Flynn,” Petrona Morrison, Ebony Patterson, Renee Cox, and the colleagues at Edna Manley College and UWI Mona in Jamaica; Sheena Rose, Allison Thompson, and Annalee Davis in Barbados; Chris Cozier, Sean Leonard, Nicholas Laughlin, and the p­ eople hanging out and making a proj­ect such as Alice Yard pos­si­ble in Trinidad. In the Dominican Republic, Polibio Díaz, Tony Capellán (wherever he is now), Jorge Pineda, Belkis Ramírez, Pascal Meccariello, Raquel Paiewonsky, and Sayuri Guzmán ended up being almost a ­family for me. Thanks also to Danilo de los Santos, Sara Hermann, Marcos Lora Read, Fausto Ortiz, the staff at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and the Centro de Arte León Jimenes in Santiago. In Puerto Rico the help of Laura Bravo, Abdiel Segarra, Carlos Ruiz Varalino, Fernando Paes, Beatriz Santiago, José “Tony” Cruz, and Awilda Sterling was more than appreciated. The list is also long in the case of Cuba, and it includes Lidzie Alvisa, Donis Figueroa, Margarita Sánchez, Margarita González, José Manuel Noceda, Dannys Montes de Oca, Jorge Fernández Forres and the rest of the staff at the Wifredo Lam Center, Lázaro Saavedra, Eduardo Ponjuán, Stephanie Noach, Yolanda Wood, Sandra Ceballos, Luis Gómez, Antonio Gómez Margolles, and José Toirac. In the United States, special thanks to Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Josefina Báez, Terry Smith, Greg Sholette, 167

168  •  Acknowl­edgments

and Grant Kester. In the United Kingdom, thanks to Blue Curry, Roshini Kempadoo, Leon Wainwright, and my hermano Conrad James. In Lisbon, thanks to Fernanda Gil Costa, Fernanda Mota Alves, Marta Pacheco, Everton Machado and my colleagues at the Comparative Studies Center, and my hermano Santi Pérez. In Spain, thanks to Esperanza Guillén and my colleagues at Granada, to Aurora Alcaide and the colleagues from YoSoyElO­ tro and Península. In Ireland, special thanks to Helena Buffery, Nuala Finnegan, Yairén Jerez, Pedro Fernández, Eugenia Bolado, Ana Siles, Paula Teixeira, and all the colleagues at UCC. Thanks also to Iván de la Nuez, Luis Camnitzer, Tirzo Martha, Jean-­Ulrick Désert, Regina Galindo, Jean-­ François Boclé, Alex Burke, David Damoison, Gerardo Mosquera, Edward ­Sullivan, Paul O’Neill, Juan Flores, Jerome Branche, Danny Cueto, Denisa Tomkova, Nomusa Makhubu, Grant Kester, and Marcelo Expósito, as well as to Pat Odber for carefully proofreading this book. The research for this book was funded by multiple institutions, including the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation ­under the FPU program, the Asociación Universitaria Iberoamericana de Posgrado (AUIP), the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the Santander Iberoamerica Fellowship, and the Erasmus Program for Visiting Professorship. Thanks also to all the artists and institutions who gave permission to have their work reproduced in this book. Last but not least, I have no words to acknowledge the patience and good advice I received from Kim Giunta, Jasper Chang, Cheryl Hirsch, and the Rutgers University Press editorial team.

Notes

­Unless other­wise noted, all translations are my own.

Introduction 1 Some praiseworthy contributions that attempt to spatially locate the framework of Ca­rib­bean visual practices can be found in Wainwright (2013), Niblett and Oloff (2009), Stephens and Flores (2016, 2017). 2 Some positive and innovative contributions have addressed the contradictions arising from this situation, w ­ hether trying to place Ca­rib­bean art within global imaginaries (Wainwright 2012; James 2008; Cullen and Fuentes 2012) or re-­signifying the image of the region (Kempadoo 2013, 2016; Thompson 2007; Sheller 2003). 3 Recent books such as Curating in the Ca­rib­be­an have attempted to shift the focus from specific discourses to curatorial and cultural politics. Although the scope of this book is certainly germane to that proj­ect, it also challenges the isolation that national histories of Ca­rib­bean art based on exhibition-­making have created. 4 Having said this, it is also evident that a long genealogy of active spatial and geographic mappings exists in Ca­rib­bean art, and that ­things do not come out of a vacuum. Ca­rib­bean artistic genealogies are full of former experiments driven by a similar desire to problematize space through artistic practice. Enumerating all ­those initiatives would exceed the scope of this book, which in no way attempts to stand for an “art history” of the Ca­rib­bean, nor even to completely cover the two de­cades it focuses on. 5 In words of Colombian curator José Roca (2006, 478): “In the case of the art from the margins, it is assumed that the work is inscribed in the space of a postcolonial history supposedly common and homogeneous, which rather is taken for granted or is presumed absent, letting the artwork unable to be perceived or correctly understood.” 6 As Andrew Teverson and Sara Upstone (2011, 1) note, “In the field of postcolonial studies, however, space has always been central. From its very beginnings, ­those 169

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7

8 9 10

11

involved in developing knowledge of colonial and postcolonial discourses have identified space in all its forms as integral to the postcolonial experience. Often cited as the seminal postcolonial critic, Edward Said’s work is intimately spatial, as illustrated by two passages of his writing in par­tic­u­lar: ‘Imaginative Geography and Its Repre­sen­ta­tions: Orientalizing the Oriental,’ in Orientalism ([1978] 1995, 49–72), and the l­ ater devotion of the first fifteen pages of Culture and Imperialism (1993) to the relationship between empire and geography.” Something similar applies to Bhabha’s exploration of liminality and hybridity in The Location of Culture (2012). A similar criticism, focused on Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, can be found in Crichlow and Northover (2009, 46–56). The authors of Globalization and the Post-­Creole Imagination draw on Sybille Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed (2004) to stress the importance of the continuous pro­cess of space-­making as “mapping the pres­ent, in ‘unfinished genealogies’ ” (57). Wainwright argues, in that sense (2012, 12): “The cele­bration of the Ca­rib­bean as a seminal example for the new global geography of border-­crossing, intermixing and mobility needs to be handled more carefully.” See Reyes-­Santos (2015). Scott’s view of the Grenada Revolution in Omens of Adversity (2013) points to a similar sense of solidarity and shared—­yet differentiated—­experience. Soja’s interest in retrieving spatiality for social theory is remarkable not just ­because it privileges geography over historicity and time, through an archaeology of how historicity itself (time unfolding lineally, progressively) has been histori­ cally underpinned. Gordon K. Lewis’s interest (1983) in locating and grounding Ca­rib­bean thought stands as an appealing pre­ce­dent in this sense.

Chapter 1 Being ­Here and ­There 1 Pascal Meccariello, Jorge Pineda, and Raquel Paiewonsky; Tony Capellán, former member of the group, was also a g­ reat help in ­those months. 2 The proj­ect consisted of a screen projection in which several individuals explained how to chew gum. When entering the installation, visitors received a piece of chewing gum. They had to choose ­whether they would follow the authoritarian and absurd norms the screen was dictating or w ­ hether they would “misbehave.” Many visitors showed their discomfort with the given rules, sticking their gum on to the projection. 3 In Maria Lind’s words: “The curatorial would thus parallel Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the po­liti­cal,’ an aspect of life that cannot be separated from divergence and dissent, a set of practices that disturbs existing power relations. At its best, the curatorial is a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, ­whether from curators or artists, educators or editors” (2009, 65). 4 Bennett’s emphasis on ideology and concealment within the exhibitionary complex bring to mind Foucault’s claim (1989, 33) that “the presence of the law is in its concealment.” 5 Leon Wainwright (2013) has explored the consequences of approaching Ca­rib­bean art histories from an U.S., “Americocentrist” perspective. To c­ ounter that, Wainwright recurs to a broader time-­space including Africa but also Britain. Such

Notes to Pages 24–28  •  171

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14

an approach, nevertheless, is not without its own blind spots, namely excessive importance granted to the British avant-­garde in the configuration of Ca­rib­bean artistic discourses, something that forces the adscription of Ca­rib­bean visibility within a U.S./U.K. divide. In this chapter, I argue that many of the curatorial efforts made by Ca­rib­bean individuals and institutions have been oriented to challenge any inscription of that sort. Much has been written on this subject. What remains, however, is to conceive of Ca­rib­bean creative activities and artistic spaces within a more comprehensive logic of power and ­labor relations and not as an exclusive, isolated area—­a need that is even more pressing when we consider how artistic practice “colonizes” extra-­ artistic spheres. For a critical review of this pro­cess, see Barker (1999), O’Neill (2007), and Bonami (2003a). Very few references can be found concerning the decisive transformations in con­temporary art spectatorship in the Ca­rib­bean. Gordon (2013) and Tancons (2012) are exceptions to this. As we ­will see in chapter 5, one of the most in­ter­est­ing points made by Cozier relates to the consideration that “local” Ca­rib­bean contexts have already been engaging in international debates before, and along with the presence of foreign curators and actors. As pointed out by José Manuel Noceda, founder of the Havana Biennial: “The 1990s brought fresh air with the emergence of a ‘new vanguard’ that connects synchronically all the region. For the first time ­will be pos­si­ble to conceptualize a ‘movement’ pres­ent both in the territories favored by the tradition: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and in ­those small enclaves whose avant-­gardes ­were initiated almost in the dawn of the new millennium: Aruba, Barbados, Curação, Virgin Islands or Trinidad” (1999, 95). Exhibitions such as Amer­i­ca: The Bride of the Sun (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 1992); Ante América (Queens Museum of Arts, New York, 1992), and the itinerant Latin American Artists of the 20th ­Century w ­ ere part of this pro­cess. See Viala (2014). The main danger for Ca­rib­bean creators, the curator argues, was that of having their artistic products interpreted as naïf or exotic art. By focusing on determining what could define “creole aesthetics” and by asserting that creolité was “un état de fait” (a ­matter of fact), the exhibition could not provide a successful solution to the repre­sen­ta­tional and identity prob­lems it attempted to confront (Bocquet 1992, 13). “Se insistió mucho en la participación de las islas pequeñas que suelen estar al margen de los encuentros artísticos internacionales, aun de los continentales. Pese al tamaño de la República Dominicana, sufrimos una cierta discriminación, felizmente cada vez menos pronunciada, en los eventos internacionales, a nivel del número de participantes o de la misma participación, de la designación de jurados, de la consulta, de las oportunidades de premiación. Quisimos tratar de evitar tales incon­ve­nientes. Ahora bien, la marginación, junto a la carencia de estructuras adecuadas, es tan real que algunas islas, no obstante el empecinamiento de parte de la Galería de Arte Moderno, no ‘supieron’ participar.” The debates of the Third Havana Biennial are a good example of the positions being taken at that moment. See Camnitzer and Weiss (2011).

172  •  Notes to Pages 28–30

15 The clearest case is the Francophone one, where the French American and Pacific territories are frequently united and subsumed into common discourses. The results of ­those encounters are in­ter­est­ing from a comparative perspective, but a critical reading of the colonial imperative that led to this comparison is frequently lacking. 16 It has always been the desire of Ca­rib­bean curators and cultural institutions to design itinerant exhibitions. Moving the curatorial display across dif­fer­ent Ca­rib­bean territories involves reaching bigger and more varied audiences and also engaging with several “localities.” Although some initiatives such as the art exhibitions linked to Cariforum and more recently shows such as Horizontes insulares or The Global Ca­rib­be­an have been displayed in several locations, the difficulties in displacing artworks and the divergence of audiences and cultural politics among Ca­rib­bean territories limited the circulation of exhibitions. Instead, the model of the biennial or the mega-­exhibition, in which artists, curators, and specialist move to the chosen place, has prevailed, determining to a ­great extent the configuration of a Ca­rib­bean curatorial grammar. 17 Ca­rib­bean curatorial research in the case of Britain has been related to the strong presence of West Indian communities within the critical debates on diaspora, race, and citizenship. To the efforts of David Bailey, Isaac Julien, or Kobena Mercer, we can add collective exhibitions such as Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Ca­rib­bean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996 or more recently Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. See Araeen (1989); Bailey, Baucom, and Boyce (2005); Chambers (1999); Hall (2006); Mercer (1999, 2003, 2008); Walmsley (1992). 18 In this case, the dedication of Documenta XI to creolization and a first participation of Ca­rib­bean artist ­under the frame of the 1994 edition that carried the title of Karibische kunst heute w ­ ere the major incursions. 19 In addition to the exhibitions mentioned in this chapter, we should consider interest in collecting Ca­rib­bean and Latin American art and the activity of academic and cultural centers. For an updated review of this pro­cess see ­Sullivan (2012). 20 The connection of the Canary Islands’ cultural politics with the Ca­rib­bean region through the idea of “Tricontinentality,” the cele­bration of the quincentennial of the “discovery,” and the action of curators such as Antonio and Octavio Zaya, Orlando Britto, María Lluïsa Borràs, and Iván de la Nuez, brought a per­sis­tent focus on Ca­rib­bean artistic practices. Exhibitions such as Islas (Islands), Horizon­ tes insulares, Otro País: Escalas Africanas (Another country: African scales), Cocido o crudo: Comer o no comer (Cooked or raw: To eat or not to eat) or Cuba siglo XX: Modernidad y sincretismo (Cuba twentieth c­ entury: Modernity and syncretism) (1995) derived from this connection with a full or significant participation of Ca­rib­bean creators and cultural debates. This pro­cess was essential in the configuration of post/decolonial lectures of the Iberian real­ity. This topic is discussed in Garrido Castellano (2015, 2016d). 21 Many renowned Ca­rib­bean artists, including Carlos Garaicoa, Los Carpinteros, Jorge Pineda, and o­ thers, settled in vari­ous locations in Spain over this period, and a similar pro­cess has taken place with intellectuals (Rafael Rojas, Jesús Díaz), writers (Abilio Estévez, Antonio José Ponte), art critics, and curators (Iván de la Nuez, Gerardo Mosquera).

Notes to Pages 31–34  •  173

22 Not all of t­ hese exhibitions w ­ ere restricted to the Ca­rib­bean, although they all set out to place the region within spatial configurations, problematizing the identification between territory and context. They w ­ ere centered on the reformulation of the relationship between national identity and diaspora, the articulation of a broader mapping of Ca­rib­bean culture, and the strategies used by artists and curators to eschew the “burden of repre­sen­ta­tion” (Mercer 1994) imposed by external interests. They accomplished t­ hose objectives in dif­fer­ent degrees and dif­fer­ent ways. For a critical examination of each show, see Garrido Castellano and Brébion (2012). 23 Some group exhibitions became vehicles for an exchange between dif­fer­ent Ca­rib­bean creators, the assertion of very dif­fer­ent views on the Ca­rib­bean, and fi­nally an attempt to go beyond specific issues through curatorial innovation. Some of ­those exhibitions fostered the movement of artists and curators within the Ca­rib­bean, generating research initiatives, knowledge, and idea-­sharing across the region, something that had not been developed before to such a degree. 24 The Santo Domingo event, transformed into a triennial, has kept its focus on an expanded Ca­rib­bean, covering all the countries of the Ca­rib­bean basin. In the 2000s, the San Juan Biennial ­adopted an approach more focused on the interactions of graphic art with contextual practices, covering a wider range of discourses and media. Concerning the Havana Biennial, a pro­cess of spectacularization and commoditization of some of the practices gathered u­ nder the event has centered the discussions. See Weiss (2011). 25 Both events overcame economic prob­lems to hold their first edition in 2013. The Martinique Biennale occurred in 2013, its first—­and provisionally last—­edition named De la resonance du cri littéraire dans les arts visuels (On the resonance of the literary cry in the visual arts). In this case, the biennial’s main objective was to rethink the relationship between lit­er­a­ture and con­temporary art, inspired by the figure of Aimé Césaire. 26 On the role of the Third Havana Biennial, see Camnitzer and Weiss (2011) and Llanes (2012). 27 Mosquera (2010, 1989) on postcolonial art practices and scenarios is particularly useful ­here. 28 “This biennial is a statement in itself. Not only for presenting for the first time, as we pointed out, a solid set of pieces, in terms of quantity, dimensions and plastic values, but also for creating a favorable field to think Ca­rib­bean and Central American art and to establish a theoretical framework contextualized within its images, signs, symbols and own visual meta­phors.” (Rodríguez [1992, 18]; “Esta bienal es una propuesta en sí misma. No solamente por presentar por primera vez, como ya apuntamos, un conjunto sólido, en cantidad, dimensiones y valores plásticos, un conjunto de piezas, sino también por crear un campo propicio para comenzar a reflexionar sobre el arte del Caribe y Centroamérica, y establecer un cuerpo teórico que se contextualice dentro de sus imágenes, sus signos, símbolos y metáforas visuales propias.”) 29 “In fact ­there is another painting in the Ca­rib­bean and Central Amer­i­ca, outside primitive painting. It is just that very few examples have been seen or are known outside the insular borders. That painting is identified with the space of a local and a universal real­ity. All decorated by a kind of poetic intervention defining the need for a planetary identity, which is one that surpasses local and regional bound­aries.”

174  •  Notes to Pages 35–41

(Rodríguez [1992, 18]; “De hecho existe otra pintura en el Caribe y Centroamérica, fuera de la pintura primitiva. Solo que muy pocos ejemplos se han podido ver y conocer más allá de los bordes insulares. Esa pintura se identifica con el espacio de una realidad local y una realidad universal. Todo cromado por una especie de intervención poética que define una necesidad de identidad planetaria, o sea más allá de los conflictos globales y regionales.”) 30 Both the Marginal Biennial and the “official” Ca­rib­bean Biennial ­were part of the few events including the continental Ca­rib­bean. However, if the latter w ­ ere driven by a po­liti­cal enactment of national “Hispanism” in cultural politics, this inclusion implied something totally dif­fer­ent in the Marginal Biennial, where it stood for an articulation with Third-­Worldist emancipative agendas and continental unity. 31 We should remember ­here that the Biennial was supported by the “nationalist” Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. ­ ill thus be denominated 32 The last two editions of the event in its biennial form w Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe (San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Ca­rib­bean Printmaking). ­ ere brought together u­ nder the heading of “Artistas latinoamericanos en 33 ­These w EE.UU. (Latin American artists in the United States) ” In the 2000s, when the event took the form of a triennial not exclusively focusing on graphic arts, the presence of Latino artists and Puerto Rican creators living in the U.S. would be a regular occurrence. 34 For a detailed description of t­ hose debates see Camnitzer (2003) and Weiss (2011). ­ ere pres­ent only 35 To clarify, by way of example: A total of fifty artists from India w in the second and third editions of the Havana Biennial. As impressive as the number may be, the most decisive fact of this exchange has to do with the confluence of two proj­ects of artistic thirdworldism during the late 1980s. The participation of art critic and curator Geeta Kapur in the Third Havana Biennial insisting on “pointing out a ‘radical’ objective within the cultural politics of the Third World” (1990; see also 2000) confirms the positioning of the Cuban Biennial vis-­à-­vis the Indian artistic landscape. 36 Personal interview with José Manuel Noceda, 2012. 37 The appearance of ­those generations of curators cannot be simply seen as a consequence of the curatorial turn that art experienced at the end of the twentieth ­century; rather, it can be attributed to a strong connection to the practical needs of each context. 38 Silvia Karman Cubiñá (2001, 14) refers to three conditions characterizing the situation of Latin American curatorship, to which this exhibition tries to respond answer: economic needs within an institutional, governmental, and individual level; the lack of professionalization of the art scene; and the lack of infrastructures within the art system. It is worth noting that Varela, Henríquez, and Pineda all have three successful artistic ­careers. Their aim when producing Curador curado was not to reflect on an individual condition but to sketch out the general instability of the Dominican cultural and artistic milieu. 39 Email conversation with Jorge Pineda, 2013. 40 “A través de las últimas dos décadas, esta ausencia ha dejado vacíos inllenables [sic] que afectan todavía la actividad de los creadores contemporáneos que han tratado de insertarse en el contexto internacional sin llegar a un resultado que los beneficie en el desarrollo de sus carreras.”

Notes to Pages 44–50  •  175

Chapter 2 Ca­rib­bean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere The chapter section on “Nothing” is a scaled down version of an unpublished text on Cattelan and Hoffmann’s Invisible Biennial. 1 My approach to institutional contexts as a set of “­human and other­wise” forces owes much to W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) theorization of ­things’ agency. 2 As stated in the introduction, the confinement of artistic contemporaneity to (mostly) objectual practices displayed in “conventional” exhibition locations or in art biennials overshadows the variety of initiatives and practices b­ ehind the definition and active construction of that contemporaneity both nationally and at a Ca­rib­bean level. The subsequent sections of this chapter, as well as the rest of this book, ­will center on this pro­cess, introducing several examples that set out to subvert coercive or restrictive institutional dynamics to the discussion on art institutionalism in the Ca­rib­bean. 3 This goal must not be confused with the inclusion of “alternative” examples of institutional critique within an unquestioned theoretical matrix. Rather, what is at stake is how to produce a more comprehensive view on how t­ hose practices challenge and reconfigure the universality that lies at the core of institutional critique in productive ways, decentering and “provincializing,” to borrow Chakrabarty’s term, both the canonical histories of art institutionalism and the critical, emancipative strategies developed against that institutionalism. 4 Following Robert Smithson, Brian Holmes (2011) uses the expression “cultural confinements” to describe how some potentially emancipatory practices are deactivated through their confinement to narrowly-­defined cultural categories, impeding them of “contaminating” other agencies and initiatives outside that field. Holmes sustains the need for con­temporary art to move beyond its field-­ specificity in order to insert its criticism within a broader social landscape. Chapter 5 w ­ ill provide practical examples on how this could be achieved. 5 See for example proj­ects such as The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist (2003), in which he asked several artists to elaborate on how they would redefine Documenta. 6 “Recurating” has been defined by Terry Smith (2012a, 194–206) as an emerging tendency in con­temporary curatorial activity. The clearest example of Hoffmann’s interest in exploring the history and the afterlife of exhibitions is his When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes (2012, Wattis Institute for Con­ temporary Art, San Francisco), in which he replicated Harald Szeemann’s 1969 show. 7 This recalls earlier proj­ects by Cattelan, such as the Oblomov Foundation (1992), which aimed to grant an artist a scholarship for not exhibiting anything in one year (Cattelan was himself the final recipient of the money), or Lavorare é um brutto mestiere (Working is an ugly task, 1993), his participation in the Venice Biennial, where he leased his exhibition space to a perfume brand. 8 In 1977, Syed Hussein Alatas explained how the idea of laziness determined the possibility of blaming the colonized for the dysfunctional ele­ments of colonial rule, playing a central role in the policing of Asian socie­ties. See Alatas (1977). 9 “Uma praxis de secessão democrático-­radical que permaneceria viva na experiência dos modernos explorados.”

176  •  Notes to Pages 51–53

10 Months before the game, René Francisco and Eduardo Ponjuán’s exhibition Artista melodramático was censored, and Marcia Leiseca, then vice minister of culture, was fired. 11 Delgado’s action consisted of having the artist defecate on the official Granma newspaper, and bore the name of La esperanza es lo único que se está perdiendo [Hope is the only ­thing we are losing]. This action took place as part of El objeto esculturado [The sculpted object] exhibition. All ­those episodes have been widely discussed and analyzed. For a broad perspective on ­those issues, see Fernández (2003) and Isaac Santana (2005). 12 This pro­cess has been well documented. In that sense, we can mention, among many ­others, the key contributions of Luis Camnitzer, Rachel Weiss, Gerardo Mosquera, and Lupe Álvarez, among many o­ thers. 13 “En nuestro contexto, todo fenómeno artístico, tarde o temprano, es absorbido institucionalmente: tanto los que surgen de manera espontánea, fuera de los canales establecidos para la distribución del arte, como los que programáticamente intentan salirse de estos canales. Aun aquellas obras que intentan una crítica a las instituciones—­incluyendo la nuestra—­están inmersas en el proceso mismo de institucionalización.” 14 Saavedra offered one of the most sustained critical approaches to the artistic and social predicament of Cuba during the last de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury. For an exhaustive analy­sis of his work, see Weiss (2011). 15 In New Art of Cuba, Camnitzer alludes at the commitment of many Cuban artists to insert criticism within the revolutionary pro­cess, with the intent of perfecting it. This was particularly evident during the years of the so-­called Proceso de Rectificación de Errores y Tendencias Negativas (Pro­cess of Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies), initiated in 1986 in light of the Perestroika. 16 The evolution that can be observed in the work of artists such as Luis Gómez constitutes a good example of this turn. Whereas at the end of the 1980s Gómez was interested in developing a more anthropological and spiritual practice, following Juan Francisco Elso and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, in the 1990s his work begins to address the exhaustion of certain topics, such as the figure of the island, the image of the balsero (rafter). At the same time, Gómez starts dissecting the ways in which difference is reified, displayed, and appropriated in Cuban art. Two artworks may illustrate this: Quiet Room (1998) consisted of a g­ iant shipwreck whose presence made it difficult for spectators to access and contemplate the installation; Arte interpretado (Interpreted art) was software developed along with Kevin Beovides that translates discourses on art by critics such as Gerardo Mosquera into an artistic image. 17 The Fondation Clément is the major con­temporary art center in the Francophone Ca­rib­bean. Since its creation in 2007, it has hosted several regional exhibitions and developed creative programs aimed at young Martinican, guianan, and Guadalupean artists. The Fondation, located in the space of a slave plantation and an active rum factory, has become an impor­tant institution at the regional level. The continuities between the Fondation’s past and its increasingly leading role in the Martinican cultural scene are not without contradictions. Many artists have maneuvered to criticize the institution’s relation with slavery while exhibiting

Notes to Pages 56–62  •  177

t­ here, pointing out how the narrow audience for many events implies a continuity with the cultural elitism of former periods. 18 This section summarizes a longer enquiry into the work of Ca­rib­bean installation artists published in Third Text journal in 2014. See Garrido Castellano (2014). 19 Classic contributions to this debate can be found in Appadurai (1986), Howes (2003), Latour (1993), Pearce (1994), and Tilley (2006). An applied insight of ­these issues to the space of the museum is pres­ent in Bleichmar and Mancall (2011), Classen and Howes (2006), Dudley (2010), Gosden and Marshall (1999), Stahl (2002). 20 In the Ca­rib­bean, we find a seminal pre­ce­dent on that ­matter in the work of Sidney Mintz (1985, 1996). 21 See http://­nikolainoelprojects​.­blogspot​.­co​.u­ k​/­. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Temporality lies at the center of installation practice, as do the spatial and the site-­specific. See Bishop (2005), Hawkins (2010), and Suderburg (2000). 25 On materiality, see Edwards and Hart (2004). 26 Again, several artists could have been chosen to exemplify this point. Joscelyn Gardner and Ewan Atkinson in Barbados, Jorge Pineda and Marcos Lora Read in the Dominican Republic, and Carlos Garaicoa in Cuba, to mention just a few well-­known cases, have also worked extensively with phantasmagoric and vanishing presences in relation to dif­fer­ent institutional spaces. 27 In this point, Derrida would agree with Žižek’s critique of ideology (expressed at its best in 2012); for the latter, however, ideology cannot be singled out of a “third continent” (the Habermasian identification of falseness within ideology would be the first one, whereas the second ­will include both “from top to bottom” Althusserianism and the Foucauldian approach to fragmented micro-­powers) constituted through the omnipresence of ideology in economic and class strug­g les. See also Jameson (1997). 28 I have dealt with this subject concerning the work of the Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago in Garrido Castellano (2016b). 29 The analy­sis that follows is a scaled down version of an article published in 2016. See Garrido Castellano (2016a). 30 In fact, it was the first and last installation made by the artist. It was included in the exhibition Six Options: Gallery Space Revisited, which attempted to underscore the potentiality of critical, installative interventions within the space of the National Gallery. See Douglas (2004). 31 Devon House is an historic mansion that was the first seat of the National Gallery of Jamaica. 32 As part of this success, the installation was quoted and replicated in Ebony Patterson’s contribution to the Young Talents V exhibition, held in 2010. Cultural Soliloquy (Cultural Object Revisited) was part of a broader proj­ect in which Patterson broached several noteworthy artworks from the National Gallery of Jamaica collection. 33 This issue centered the discussions on art and vernacular practices in Jamaica during the 1990s and 2000s. See Douglas (2004), Paul (1999, 2010), Boxer and Poupeye (1998).

178  •  Notes to Pages 66–69

Chapter 3 Art Melting in Site-­Specificity Epigraph: “El público no especializado y desprevenido de la calle se interesaba, se acercaban, querían participar. Lo que no sentíamos al principio era una receptividad de los curadores, críticos de arte, y las instituciones artísticas que veían la per­for­mance como un relleno, una antesala a algo de verdad. Los artistas fuimos demostrando calidad en los trabajos y poco a poco el medio fue aceptado.” 1 “Modificación y actualización de las bases para que las mismas reflejen la realidad sociocultural de las artes visuales en la República Dominicana.” 2 “Estamos en un gran momento de crisis de valores, sociocultural y político, en nuestro país.” 3 This position has marked MAM’s policies in the last two de­cades. From the early 2000s onwards, when the curator Sara Hermann took charge of the institution, the Museo would encourage artistic experimentation, promote activities outside its space, and facilitate exchanges with international curators and thinkers. Keeping its role as the nation’s main official institution dealing with con­temporary art, the activities of the MAM have been diversified, embracing some of the most daring proposals arising from all over the country. 4 “La osadía de su trabajo reside en una simplicidad al servicio de una intención estética y política ambiciosa. Su obra denota sensibilidad, firmeza, capacidad de entender el contexto desde el que trabaja y, a la vez, capacidad de responder a él con un lenguaje tan complejo y difícil de adaptar a contextos institucionales tradicionales. El premio fue otorgado por unanimidad.” 5 In fact, the Dominican Republic National Biennial is one of the oldest events of this kind in the Amer­i­cas. The event was part of a national program established by Trujillo with the intention of drawing up the cultural princi­ples of the new state. This plan included the foundation of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1942, the Galería Nacional, the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, the Teatro Escuela, and, in the following de­cade, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. 6 From the 1960s the Concurso León Jimenes offered the main alternative to the National Biennial, establishing an active artistic center in Santiago de los Caballeros. Celebrated yearly ­until 1972, it reopened in 1981 with a biennial periodicity. 7 One eloquent example would suffice to explain how deeply rooted this system is. The prizes for each category w ­ ere eliminated temporarily eliminated in the 1998 edition of the National Biennial; however, in light of the public dissatisfaction, they ­were restored in the next edition. See Gil (2005). 8 Some critics, such as Myrna Guerrero (2009), have pointed out that an artistic ecosystem based on periodic economic rewards produces a disproportion between local recognition and one-­time support and the aspirations of many Dominican creators of pursuing a successful artistic ­career internationally. In many cases (the names of Tony Capellán, Marcos Lora Read, Raquel Paiewonsky, Polibio Díaz, and Miguelina Rivera come to mind), however, national success has meant a first step ­toward propelling national artists into broader arenas. 9 I am aware of the difficulty of describing and analyzing per­for­mances which I have not directly witnessed. If all the chapters of this book rely strongly on first-­hand information from primary sources, this dependence is especially felt in this case.

Notes to Pages 69–71  •  179

10

11 12

13

14 15

For example, the help of Quisqueya Lora, Silvano Lora’s d­ aughter, has been essential for reconstructing the reactions to the initiatives or­ga­nized by Lora at the beginning of the 1990s. Similar conversations have been held with Sayuri Guzmán, Caryana Castillo, and David Pérez, and through fieldwork the scenarios of some actions have been visited. Ca­rib­bean per­for­mance art generally lacks in-­depth archival documentation, something that constitutes a major concern at a time when performative actions have gained preponderance. This is one of the main reasons for focusing on Dominican per­for­mance, which constitutes one of the most vibrant chapters of the region. Among many pos­si­ble examples, we should mention two major recent initiatives: the cele­bration of the Notting Hill Carnival at the Tate Modern, curated by Claire Tancons and including the presence of artists Hew Locke, Marlon Griffith, and the Dubmorphology Collective, and the multicentered ongoing proj­ect En Mas: Carnival and Per­for­mance Art of the Ca­rib­be­an curated by Tancons and Krista Thompson. This article (Taylor 2006) updates the insights on per­for­mance from the Amer­i­cas brought together in the classic volume The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer­i­cas (Taylor 2003). It is worth noting that both locations have been the scene of impor­tant actions. Per­for­mances have been a common presence in the Concurso León Jimenes, some of them obtaining the Concurso’s main award, and some actions, like David Pérez Karmadavis’s Estructura completa, took place in the streets of the capital city of the Cibao region. Something similar happens in Puerto Plata, which despite being a tourism-­oriented city was also the headquarters of one of the country’s most impor­tant performance-­based art movements. Actions have also taken place in the Dominican-­Haitian border and Bonao. For the sake of conciseness, this chapter focuses on exploring proj­ects and movements emerging in Santo Domingo, Santiago, and Puerto Plata. Angel Rama’s idea of a lettered city attempted to define the role that Latin American cultural elites played in the pro­cess of developing national identities. Written in 1984, Rama’s seminal book ­will initiate a debate on the constituent exclusions defining that lettered city and the subversive potential of practices arising from ­there. Issues of subalternity, hegemony, and cultural difference ­will permeate this discussion. The milestones of this discussion are represented by Beasley-­Murray (2010), Beverley (2011), Moraña (1998), and Moreiras (2001). I attempted to pres­ent this conversation (along with my colleague Magdalena López) in a recent collaboration (López and Garrido Castellano 2016). I have recently dealt with this duality in an essay dealing with Indiana’s most recent novel, La Mucama de Omicunlé (Garrido Castellano 2017). Guzmán adds: “I believe that, in the specific case of the Dominican Republic, the spectator realizes that ­there is a lot of control in the actions. Per­for­mances generate tension, but it is a controlled, mea­sured, calculated one. I think that Dominican per­for­mance is not as transgressive the Mexican, Venezuelan, Guatemalan, Colombian or Cuban per­for­mance can be. I think this has to do with the sociopo­liti­cal situation” (personal interview with the author); “Creo, en el caso específico de República Dominicana, que el espectador se da cuenta de que hay mucho control en la acción. La acción genera tensión, pero es una tensión controlada, medida, estudiada. Pienso que la per­for­mance dominicana no se

180  •  Notes to Pages 72–79

16 17 18

19

20 21

22

23

caracteriza por ser transgresora como puede serlo en México, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia o Cuba. Pienso que eso obedece a la situación sociopolítica.” Balaguer’s second mandate ran from 1966 to1978. It was marked by attempts to deal with the aftermath of the Trujillato and its po­liti­cal repression. Danilo de los Santos, Memoria de la plástica dominicana, Vol. 6 (Santiago de los Caballeros: Grupo León Jimenes, 2005): 12−13. The CODAP somehow inherited an experience of artistic collectives that can be traced back to the 1930s and 1940s with the arrival of the Spanish Civil War émigrés and experienced a decisive moment in the 1960s, when anti-­Trujillo opposition materialized in the creation of several art collectives and manifestos. In spite of this, our interest in the 1970s has to do with the importance of per­for­ mance at this par­tic­u­lar moment through the development of the first public actions. It should be noted that the roots of social engagement are not limited to per­for­mance: the developments in installation art by names such as Soucy de Pellerano w ­ ere equally impor­tant in challenging the position of the audience and the role of the artist itself. Dominican theater went through a similar pro­cess of grouping and pushing the cultural bound­a ries imposed by governmental politics. Or­ga­nized by the capital city council, the Santo Domingo Biennial preceded the national one by several months. It is significant that the artists themselves categorized the failure of the event in terms of cultural precariousness in social terms, pointing to the fact that Dominican artists occupied a position of “vulnerable class” within their society (de los Santos 2005, 21). In the same way, 1992 marked a renewal of interest in preserving the colonial heritage of the surroundings of Ciudad Colonial, a pro­cess intended to increase cultural heritage tourism. “A local craftsman was narrating while he made one of his chairs: ‘­Today my main rivalry is with the plastic chair,’ and he was seated on a plastic chair while he was carving the Wood! So, if nowadays we find in e­ very colmado that plastic sculpture with such in­ter­est­ing color combinations, why ­can’t we replicate it and take it to another place, why c­ an’t we exaggerate it?” (personal interview with Shampoo Collective; “Un artesano del pueblo narraba mientras hacía una de sus sillas: ‘hoy mi principal competencia, es la silla de plástico’, y él está sentado en una silla de plástico haciendo una de madera . . . ​Entonces, si hoy vemos en cada colmado esta escultura de plástico con combinaciones de colores tan interesantes, ¿por qué no replicarla y llevarla a otro contexto? ¿Por qué no exagerarla?”) Jorge Duany, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel, and Silvio Torres Saillant have shown that the experience of transnational pro­cesses of mobility and racial identification have been crucial in the definition of the Dominican racial imaginary and its intersectionality. See Duany (2011), Martínez San Miguel (2003), and Torres Saillant (1999). A recent attempt to “decouple” Haitian-­Dominican relations from the point of view of per­for­mance can be found in Lapin Dardashti (2016), who analyzed the artistic production of Scherezade García and Charo Oquet. In this essay, Dardashti delimits how the Hispañola’s “color lane” was built in relation to the power dynamics at play in a broader American landscape. The institutional pa­norama of Santo Domingo is ­shaped by the activity of the Universidad Autónoma, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Spanish Cultural

Notes to Pages 80–87  •  181

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32

Center, and Casa de Teatro, to name just the main entities that regularly deal with art. In Santiago, the Centro Cultural León Jimenes is one of the main driving forces of artistic experimentation. Choosing Puerto Plata as an operational base effectively means challenging the centrality of both locations in the Dominican cultural landscape. The concept of sanky panky alludes to a par­tic­u­lar phenomenon of male prostitution pres­ent in the Dominican Republic and in other Ca­rib­bean countries, in which a young man seduces male and female tourists in resort beaches. This action is linked to the work of Dominican artist Tony Capellán, who has been carry­ing out a quasi-­archaeological l­ abor with the detritus deposited by the Ozama River, generating installations close to Povera Art, since the 1990s. Galindo has been living in Santo Domingo since then, and she is married to Dominican performer David Pérez Karmadavis. On the relationship between tropicality, waste, and landscape in the Ca­rib­bean, see Adrián (2012). Santiago Sierra’s outsourced actions rely on shock and disruption to make his audience aware of its connivance with the cap­i­tal­ist system of exploitation and cooptation in which cultural industries are included. Sierra’s approach to collaborative art practices received full attention during the 2000s, when his work was somehow used to polarize debates over disruptive and consensual positions in socially-­engaged art. Be that as it may, the binary opposition of ­those two “positions” seems to lead to exhaustion. For Grant Kester (2017, 26), a “far more nuanced account of both consensus and dissensus as experiential modes in con­temporary art and po­liti­cal re­sis­tance” is necessary. The per­for­mance was part of La ruta del per­for­mance, already discussed. Fumagalli has recently dedicated a volume to examining the cultural production around the border developed in the La Española Island (2015). See also Martínez (2003). In a similar way, Raj Chetty and Amaury Rodríguez demand the repositioning of blackness in the context of the Dominican Republic from the standpoint of a situation of “racism, imperialism, military force, and social strug­g le” alluding at the transnational pro­cess surrounding Trujillo’s pigmentocratic dictatorship and Juan Bosch’s forced exile (2015, 1). For both researchers, the Dominican Republic constitutes a privileged standpoint with the capacity of black studies for “paying attention to the differences across dif­fer­ent black po­liti­cal and cultural strug­g les, ideologies, practices, and per­for­mances.” See also Candelario (2007). Looking for an alternative interpretation of emotions to that found in psychoanalysis and Marxism, Ahmed stresses the importance of the accumulation of emotions historically, as a form of “affective value” (2004, 11). But, she adds, “whilst Marx suggests that emotions are erased by the value of t­ hings (the suffering of the worker’s body is not vis­i­ble in commodity form), I focus on how emotions are produced. It is not so much emotions that are erased, as if they ­were already ­there, but the pro­cesses of production or the ‘making’ of emotions. In other words, ‘feelings’ become ‘fetishes,’ qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation” (11). In a similar vein, Karmadavis’s performative practice is committed to the making of emotions and revealing how they are produced in the Haitian-­Dominican context.

182  •  Notes to Pages 107–114

Chapter 4 ­Toward a Diasporic Counterstreaming Ca­rib­bean Imagination 1 Vertovec, who was born in Chicago and worked for a long time in Britain, now lives in Germany and his recent proj­ect has been the analy­sis of the German case. His biography epitomizes the idea of super-­diversity that he has recently outlined. 2 Shalini Puri (2004, 30–41) has warned about the importance of nationalism in shaping Ca­rib­bean identities. In the new world pa­norama, the success of transnational models of interpreting cultural pro­cesses needs to be counterbalanced by the national. Against the hegemonic role of economic transnational fluxes, which require the maintenance of situations of domination and national cultural ideas and identities, Puri defends the assertive use of hybridity as a means of generating concern for located policies that regulate the cir­cuits and directionality of cultural exchanges. 3 Haitian art also offers a good standpoint from which to evaluate central issues concerning race and difference within French cultural politics. However, it is usually framed separately from the rest of the Francophone Ca­rib­bean, borrowing some but not all of the issues entailed by the display and discussion of art from the Ca­rib­bean territories that are still po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically dependent on France. 4 A comprehensive and comparative analy­sis of Ca­rib­bean “diaspora aesthetics” (Lemke 2008) explaining the divergences but also the connections between dif­fer­ent diasporic mappings has still to be made. 5 Although acknowledging the importance of the distinction between diaspora and migration for the Ca­rib­bean communities living in France, we would like to stress the practical dimension linked to art, which must be unavoidably understood as a mobile cultural product. Christine Chivallon has offered an exhaustive review of the main positions of the debate to which we refer for further analy­sis. Her studies have also been impor­tant in expanding the contours of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (see Chivallon 1997, 2002, 2011). 6 From a dif­fer­ent perspective, Aaron Kamugisha also speaks of a colonized citizenship in the context of the Anglophone Ca­rib­bean, referring to “the complex amalgam of elite domination, neoliberalism and the legacy of colonial authoritarianism, which continue to frustrate and deny the aspirations of many Ca­rib­bean ­people. It is this that lies at the heart of the postcolonial states” (2007, 21). Kamugisha’s definition opens up in­ter­est­ing possibilities for a comparative approach to the issue, for it stresses the structural continuity of dominance in the postcolonial Ca­rib­bean state. 7 The Cité Internationale des Arts provides a place for artistic and research residencies, a space for exhibition, and a series of artistic and cultural events involving artists from all parts of the world. 8 For a detailed description of the proj­ect, see Plasse and Sorel (2011). 9 See https://­aica​-­sc​.­net​/­2017​/­05​/­05​/­challenge​-­critique​-­2017​-­a llison​-­thompson​-­2​/­. 10 Looking generally at the production of Martinican, Guadeloupean, Guyanese, and Haitian artists, this link is not as evident as it might appear to be. I noted this during my field research in Martinique and Guadeloupe, where artists frequently stated that being aware of the theoretical framework of Chamoiseau, Glissant, and Césaire had the effect of locating them within the restrictive role of illustrating cultural theory, distancing ­these artworks from the current po­liti­cal situation of the archipelago.

Notes to Pages 114–117  •  183

11 “L’histoire de sa présence au monde et l’histoire de la présence du monde en son sein aussi bien avant, pendant qu’après l’empire colonial.” ­ ere how Guadeloupe, 12 Although nothing new is being said, it should be recognized h Martinique, and French guiana belong to that system due their po­liti­cal status. 13 Magiciens de la terre was one of the most influential con­temporary art exhibitions, curated by Jean-­Hubert Martin in 1989 at the Centre Georges-­Pompidou. While the importance of Magiciens in breaking with the preponderance of U.S. and Western Eu­ro­pean artists within the art pa­norama and introducing a postcolonial concern into the field of artistic contemporaneity and visual discourses is widely acknowledged, the exhibition is also well known for the nonmodern treatment given to “non-­Western” productions. 14 Cuzin is one of the most experienced curators and researchers in Ca­rib­bean art living in France. She has been involved for many de­cades in prominent cultural events related to the Ca­rib­bean, such as the UNESCO funded “Le Route de l’esclave” proj­ect. 15 Out of the six editions of Latitudes, three ­were dedicated to the Ca­rib­be­an: the first one, covering Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French guiana; the third one, covering the “terres de l’Atlantique” and including examples of the Anglophone and Hispanophone Ca­rib­be­an; and the fifth one, dedicated to the Amazon, which included Surinam, the Guyanas, Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela. 16 “Tous métis donc, mêlés, mestizos, métèques, kréyol, Créoles. Que l’on choisisse le terme que l’on voudra! Tous unis contre les Bastilles des sociétés univoques! Le monde est une gigantesque Créole Factory, personne ne doit plus l’oublier!” 17 “ ‘Les Nouveaux mondes’ ce sont les pays vides d’habitants—­véritablement vides comme l’Île de La Ré­union ou vidés par les colonisateurs européens—­où s’est effectuée la rencontre de cultures qui n’appartenaient pas à ces espaces. À partir de rien ou à partir de traces laissées par les civilisations amérindiennes, une culture créole s’est construite, effet de pro­cessus continus de métissage, d’hybridation, de fusion ou de syncrétisme. L’esthétique créole est celle du mélange: mélange des couleurs, mélange des saveurs, mélange des sons, mélange des genres . . . ​Ces inventions et ces créations sans cesse renouvelées ne seraient-­elles pas aujourd’hui le meilleur moyen de ré­sister au consumérisme et à ses séductions?” 18 This interpretation of creoleness has been naturalized and made invisible by the elites governing Ca­rib­bean postcolonial states. Following Percy Hintzen (2002, 2004), Aaron Kamugisha (2007) has shown how the maintenance of a radical discourse can survive alongside a pro­cess of racialization and a brutal reterritorialization of difference and marginalization. What is striking is the degree to which this ideology, while acting as an invisible and unquestioned “state of ­things” within the Ca­rib­bean, is also extremely appealing and easily exportable outside the region. 19 “La Créolité est notre soupe primitive et notre prolongement, notre chaos original et notre mangrove de virtualités.” 20 Burke’s work has been widely discussed (see Burke 1998a, 1998b). 21 “Pourquoi accordait-on tant d’importance à la remémoration du ‘partage de l’espace-­temps’ qui séparait Paris de ses provinces, sans faire référence à la distinction politique omniprésente qui traverse encore aujourd’hui les fonds d’archives, les pratiques historiographiques et la mémoire populaire entre ce qui constituait l’«outre-­mer» et la France?”

184  •  Notes to Pages 119–130

22 It should be remembered that the work was produced in the context of the ethnic and social debates around citizenship and race that s­ haped the presence of Les Bleus, the French Football National Team, in the 2008 EuroCup and the 2010 World Cup. 23 ­Here it is worth recalling Mercer’s (1999, 59) observations on blackness and diaspora as a comparative point: “ ‘Hyperblackness’ in the media and entertainment industries serves not to critique social injustice, but to cover over and conceal increasingly sharp inequalities that are most polarized within black society itself ” (see also Best 2011; Copeland and Thompson 2011). Nevertheless, in the case of France, the situation works in a dif­fer­ent way, isolated and far from the cosmopolitanism pres­ent in Britain. This chapter tries to explore that difference. 24 Email exchange with the artist. June 2011. 25 Ferly explains how impor­tant it was for her to move to the UK in order to “abandon photography and become a con­temporary artist.” Personal interview with the artist. Le Moule, Guadeloupe, May 23, 2011. 26 Ibid. 27 Ferly remembers the case of a Swedish artist living in London whose En­g lish was perfect, save for a slight accent. This speaks of the versatility of the proj­ect. Ibid. 28 An interest in artistic action and engagement with spectators can be also seen in the work of artists like Bertrand Grossol, Gilles Ellie “Cosaque,” Cinthia and Audry Phibel, and Steeve Bauras.

Chapter 5 Subversive Alliances The title of the chapter section on El arte de bregar makes reference to Arcadio Díaz Quiñones’s El arte de bregar, which in turn borrows from a common Puerto Rican expression meaning “to strug­g le with real­ity.” In that section I explore this concept as a means of broaching Puerto Rican infrastructural practices. 1 The privilege of individual over collective creative strategies has permeated Ca­rib­bean critical thinking on artistic practice for many de­cades. The individual artist is the main ­factor of cultural change when t­ here is a passive body of spectators that might follow the right path once this enlightened creator reveals it. 2 They all belong to a generation of Trinidadian artists that gained international attention at the end of the 2000s. Moreover, many of them have lived several years outside Trinidad (in the case of Campbell and Griffith they still live abroad), something that appears reflected in their artistic practice. 3 The best known of all of ­these was undoubtedly Chris Cozier’s Tropical Night series, one of the most commented on exhibited contributions by a Ca­rib­bean artist in recent de­cades (see, for example, Mosaka 2007). 4 My visit to Trinidad was motivated by writing a PhD dissertation on how Ca­rib­bean artistic discourses of the 1990s and 2000s subverted colonial and postcolonial expectations and ste­reo­t ypes about the region by proposing alternative spatial geocultural configurations. The stay in Port of Spain was crucial for my understanding of the dangers of focusing only on repre­sen­ta­tional practices. 5 I could see how many of ­those visitors ­were not linked to the somehow erratic art scene in Trinidad. In fact, in my interviews I noted the enormous gap between the atmosphere that Alice Yard promotes and that of “conventional” gallery spaces

Notes to Pages 130–132  •  185

and art collectors in Trinidad. The formal, ceremonious character of the latter contrasts with the relaxed and “dare-­to-­try” mood that prevails in the Yard. It is significant how visitors are not asked to show any final outcome: t­ here is no “practical goal” when visiting Cozier, Leonard, and Laughlin, although the space’s atmosphere of efficiency and hyperactivity is contagious. The availability of the proj­ect’s found­ers, who act as facilitators and mediators from the very first day, also helps in that sense. 6 The exhibition got the name of GPS. A Ca­rib­bean VideoArt Show, and traveled from Madrid to Alice Yard in Trinidad, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, and fi­nally ­Hangar in Lisbon, Portugal. It showcased the work of Sheena Rose (Barbados); Joëlle Ferly (Guadeloupe); María Elvira Dieppa (Colombia); Pascal Meccariello and María Teresa Díaz-­Nerio (Dominican Republic); Lázaro Saavedra (Cuba); and Argelia Bravo (Venezuela). 7 ­Here we should mention the tradition of collective creativity associated with the Trinidadian carnival. 8 Among the artists and curators who have been in residence in Alice Yard are Bisi Silva, Blue Curry, Ebony Patterson, Heino Schmid, and Kobena Mercer. The long list of partnerships developed by the Yard has won the proj­ect an unbeatable reputation all across the Amer­i­cas. 9 The Woodbrook area is a major financial and recreational area in downtown Port of Spain. 10 The Alice Yard crew mention how the space was already used for cultural and neighborhood activities, supporting cricket games or mas musicians, long before it became an art space 11 Jonkonnu is a parade popu­lar in several West Indian territories including dance, costume, and musical per­for­mances. 12 The piece, which included references to Dessalines and the Haitian Revolution, the ­Middle Passage and con­temporary emancipation proj­ects, was charged with an historical resonance that contrasted with the spontaneity of the collaborations and responses it elicited in Port of Spain. 13 For a reading of con­temporary lit­er­a­ture from the Hispanophone Ca­rib­bean based on failure, see López 2015. 14 Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849) was born in Kingston. He belonged to a ­family of Iberian origin and was trained in London. Belisario’s work stands out for its ability to depict popu­lar scenes of Jamaica during the emancipation era. 15 The lithograph representing Actor Boy belongs to Belisario’s Sketches of Character book, preserved at the British Museum. 16 Doris Sommer (2013, 15–49) has mentioned emulation as a central part of artistic proj­ects using intervention in civic spaces. 17 See http://­caribbeanreviewofbooks​.­com​/­. Laughlin was also editor of Ca­rib­bean Beat journal. 18 The National Galleries of Barbados and Jamaica have played central roles in the promotion and dissemination of con­temporary artistic manifestations from both countries. Cozier and other Trinidadian artists tell how the lack of institutional support was always a drawback for their participation in international events. 19 The critic Annie Paul (2003) defined “alter-­natives” by citing the example of Cozier: “Christopher Cozier is a prime example of what I want to call, extremely tentatively, the alter-­natives—­that is, artists who are not interested in fostering a

186  •  Notes to Pages 134–139

20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

28

29

Ca­rib­bean aesthetic or promoting and supporting national agendas. The alter-­ natives are the illegitimate c­ hildren of the nation who by virtue of differing race, class, gender, or sexual variables find themselves on the wrong side of nation stories in opposition to the majority groups that claim owner­ship of the national or Ca­rib­bean space. Alter-­natives are a kind of internal refugee and suffer a double illegitimacy when they go abroad ­because their artistic practice is seen as elevated above or irrelevant to the realities of third-­world countries by metropolitan critics.” The entire initiative partook in the operational tools of tactical media, flowing the street with visually appealing material that would arouse the interest of ­people not used to con­temporary creativity and developing one-­to-­one engagement. Galvanize was or­ga­nized by Mario Lewis, Peter Doig, Christopher Cozier, Steve Ouditt, Nicholas Laughlin, and Charlotte Elias. As we saw in the introduction, ­these issues have dominated art criticism from and about the region in the last de­cades. Grant Kester (2011) has drawn the attention to the convergence of emerging collaborative art practices and the sociopo­liti­cal circumstances of the last two de­cades. ­These circumstances have turned protest and participation into a global real­ity, yet an “asynchronous” one. This question summarizes a long debate that has been determining the discussions on socially engaged art for de­cades. See, among ­others, Bishop (2004, 2006, 2012) and Thompson (2012). “Autonomy implies a relationship of segregation or exclusion. It is this second connotation that fuels hygienic criticism: the defensive fear of affiliations or interconnections with contaminated or impure realms (and the corollary assumption that all forms of cultural production within modernity, aside from the arts, are complicit with, or symptomatic of, a repressive social order). The per­sis­tence of this fear among critics, curators, and artists is understandable. An antagonistic relationship to the viewer and a defensive relationship to other domains of cultural practice are written into the very DNA of modernist art” (Kester 2011, 38). “The work of art trains us for social interactions that we a­ ren’t yet prepared for in real life. ­Actual social or po­liti­cal change is deferred to an indefinite and idealized ­f uture, when the aesthetic ­will have fi­nally completed its civilizing mission. It’s not simply the belief that artistic experience is in some essential ways distinct from po­liti­cal experience, but the more extreme proposition that any form of po­liti­cal action is premature ­until humanity allows itself to be guided by aesthetic princi­ples” (Kester 2011, 42). Besides curating art exhibitions and writing on dif­fer­ent socially-­engaged art proj­ects, Kester worked for the New Art Examiner and Afterimage. This last collaboration was decisive in the criticism of social practice he developed in the 2000s. Personal conversation with Kester, California, May 15, 2016. This is also the case of many other theorists of American social practice who are immersed in their own and other ­people’s proj­ects while reflecting on them at the same time. The names of Suzanne Lacy, Greg Sholette, and Nato Thompson come to mind h ­ ere. The debates on socially engaged art have been traditionally located within Western Eu­rope and the United States. Kester’s work is impor­tant not ­because he

Notes to Pages 140–142  •  187

incorporates case studies from other latitudes but ­because he is attempting to deal with ­those issues from a wider perspective. My recent work follows this path. 30 Gregory Sholette (2015) warns that this effervescence of social practice is taking place at a moment when basic h ­ uman rights are considered a state security risk, when sweeping economic restructuring converts the global majority into a precarious surplus, and when a widespread hostility to the very notion of society has become a rhetorical commonplace within mainstream politics. 31 Recent interest in socially engaged and activist art can be placed within a profound pro­cess of cultural transformation linked to the consolidation of neoliberal capitalism but also influenced by the transformation of institutional politics, the decline of the welfare state, and the impact of social and tactical media on forms of protest. More than that, and equally impor­tant, we should not forget that although a global phenomenon, this situation does not necessarily represent the diversity of contradictions and obstacles to which artistic proj­ects respond. See Thompson (2015), Weibel (2015); Finkelpearl (2000, 2013). 32 The Taller Alacrán became a pivotal platform of social and po­liti­cal re­sis­tance through the graphic arts in the Puerto Rican context of the 1960s. It also marked the beginning of the romance between in­de­pen­dent art centers and the neighborhood of Santurce in San Juan. See Díaz-­Royo (2008), Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos de Puerto Rico (1998), Herrera (2009). 33 ­These include Area: Lugar de Proyectos (http://­w ww​.­proyectosarea​.­com​/­#!about​ /­c240r),  = ​ ­ Desto, Car Watch, Metro, Clandestino787, Conboca (http://­w ww​ .­conboca​.­org​/­), and The Status (http://­w ww​.­el​-­status​.­com​/­). See Segarra (2012). 34 The island of Vieques is located eight miles east of Puerto Rico. During the twentieth ­century it became a testing ground for the U.S. military. 35 The CIRCA Art Fair was created in 2006 in Puerto Rico with the intention of establishing a Ca­rib­bean art fair, stimulating the creation of a body of regional collectors. Its functioning, however, was marked by reticence on the part of the Puerto Rican artistic community. Its last edition took place in 2010. 36 In 2003, the U.S. Navy withdrew its forces from the Vieques territory, putting an end to the occupation of the island with the purpose of military testing and massive bombing, which had a disastrous impact on the ecological equilibrium of the island. Filiberto Ojeda was the leader of the anticolonial Ejército Popu­lar Boricua (EPB). ­A fter being ­under arrest warrant, he was murdered by the CIA on September 23, 2005. His life and the circumstances of his death still constitute a recurring issue in Puerto Rican cultural and po­liti­cal arena. 37 Between 2010 and 2011 a series of strikes took place in several recintos of the Universidad de Puerto Rico. The strikes began at the Río Piedras Campus, quickly expanding within and outside the island. Motivated by the drastic cuts in public educational expenditure, the strike impacted artists and other cultural workers linked to the university, who joined the protests. The consequences of ­these demonstrations w ­ ere particularly felt in the Puerto Rican visual and artistic landscape of that moment. The strike fi­nally generated a transnational movement of solidarity and was followed in the United States and Spain. 38 For instance, in an intervention developed in 2004 artist Jesús “Bubu” Negrón set the ancient chimney of the sugar plantation La Igualdad (equality) operative for seven days. This action gave the community of Añasco a common purpose. Located at the west of Puerto Rico, the municipio of Añasco was impoverished as a

188  •  Notes to Pages 143–146

39

40

41 42

43 44

45

46 47

48 49

result of the closing of many of the factories operating within the region. Negrón’s intervention did not attempt to restore the prosperity of former de­cades but served as a catalyst for public discussion about the importance of community organ­ ization in dealing with collective strug­gles. This was not a one-­time interest in social engineering in the case of Negrón, who, as Rosado, transformed his own apartment into a cultural space. Santiago Muñoz has developed a strong body of filmic work dealing with the legacy of coloniality on the island and exploring the genealogies of Puerto Rican and American anarchist and radical imaginaries (see Garrido Castellano 2016b). On his behalf, “Tony” Cruz has focused on the relation between informational and spatial devices and power. BetaLocal’s library is unique on the island. It gathers a plethora of titles on tactical media, con­temporary art, and social activism. Moreover, the library has been collecting a wide range of in­de­pen­dent publications related to the Puerto Rican art world, such as fanzines, posters, and documentation from other artist-­managed spaces. Email conversations with José “Tony” Cruz, Beatriz Santiago, and Pablo Guardiola, March 1−31, 2015. This, however, does not always occur, at least not in the same terms. In our conversations in San Juan in 2012, both Santiago Muñoz and “Tony” Cruz noted how La Práctica ended up producing a far too individual, “theory-­based” experience, while only vaguely generating the cooperative results it expected to achieve. The Public School relies on an autodidactic system of education, without curriculum or academic affiliation, and is pres­ent in several American and Eu­ro­pean countries. Email conversations with José “Tony” Cruz, Beatriz Santiago, and Pablo Guardiola, March 1−31, 2015. All three agree that engaging regularly with nonartistic audiences is perhaps the major challenge they have faced since the creation of BetaLocal. Hirschhorn became famous for creating “monuments” to g­ reat phi­los­o­phers such as Gramsci or Bataille. Each of t­ hese proj­ects consists of a long-­term intervention in a par­tic­u­lar deprived community which is “exposed” to the radical and emancipative influence of that thinker. Tiravanija is well known for configuring participatory installations inside galleries and museums where the audience is invited to eat the food cooked by the artist, sharing a collective experience. Superflex is a Danish collective that employs participative strategies and fundraising campaigns to develop artistic interventions in foreign countries. While t­ hose proj­ects are led by an interest in social development, several critics have questioned to extent to which t­ hose interventions end in developing a sort of “humanitarian capitalism” (see Kester 2011). Personal interview with Beatriz Santiago and José “Tony” Cruz. San Juan, June 10, 2012. Curated by Gerardo Mosquera, Alexia Tala, and Vanessa Hernández Gracia, the Triennial had the name of “Imágenes desplazadas/imágenes en el espacio” (Displaced images/Images in space). Among the innovations brought by this edition, we should note the organ­ization of a critical symposium including the

Notes to Pages 147–159  •  189

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

participation of Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Alfredo Jaar, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. “Otro orden de saber, un difuso método sin alarde para navegar la vida cotidiana, donde todo es extremadamente precario, cambiante o violento.” “Actuar, trabajar con habilidad y experiencia, cumplir con las expectativas.” “A l’emancipation des individus, c’est-­à-­dire à leur capacité à imaginer de nouvelles manières de vivre, d’être citoyens, d’être curieux, de créer?” As in the cases of Beatriz Santiago and José “Tony” Cruz in Puerto Rico, the artistic work of Joëlle Ferly responds directly to the issues targeted by L’Artocarpe. For example, in 2009 Ferly was asked to contribute to a collective exhibition held at the Clément Foundation. In order to contribute to the exhibition, Ferly declared herself on strike and started serving the catering to the audience of the Fondation, widely segmented in terms of class and race. The action took place in the context of the general strike that mobilized the Francophone Antilles in 2009 demanding better salaries for low-­income workers and a decrease in the cost of basic commodities. This pretty well sums up Ferly’s interest in engaging critically with the issues of her local context. L’Artocarpe. L’Artocarpe project profile. Accessed June 2016 (a website that is no longer available as of October 2017). Many initiatives or­ga­nized by L’Artocarpe have reached other locations in the island, which has considerably increased the impact of the institution on the Guadeloupean art world. The first one was the T&T Art Gallery, directed by Thierry Alet. The spatiality of dancehall culture is one example of t­ hose forms. See Cooper (2004). For an analy­sis of vernacularism within con­temporary Ca­rib­bean cultural practices see Henke and Heinz (2008). Rawlings is responsible for the creation of Draconian Switch, an online magazine that has published extensively on West Indian urban culture and visual practices. On the po­liti­cal dimension of the Trinidadian carnival, see Green and Scher (2007) and Guilbault (2007). Created in 2011, Fresh Milk offers a platform for critical and creative dialogue, an artistic residency, and a contact point between con­temporary art and the local population of Barbados. https://­freshmilkbarbados​.­com/ LASA is an art space located on the periphery of Havana, focused on nurturing a territory traditionally isolated from the cultural effervescence of the Cuban capital. Espacio Aglutinador was the first private art space in Havana, founded in the 1990s by Sandra Ceballos and Ezequiel Suárez. The Cátedra de Arte y Conducta was Tania Bruguera’s pedagogical proj­ect 2002–2009. Fi­nally, DUPP is a public intervention collective also or­ga­nized in the 2000s by the Cuban artist and teacher René Francisco Rodríguez. Created in 2006 by Tirzo Martha, in the premises of a psychiatric institution, the IBB encourages collaboration with local communities in Curação, including the clinic patients. It also offers a residency and an educational program. The Ghetto Biennial was created in 2009 by the Atis Rezistans Collective as an alternative forum for visual and artistic exchange. Unlike other exhibitional events, it is compulsory for visiting artists to spend several weeks in Haiti prior to the inauguration of the biennial and to engage with Haitian communities throughout the pro­cess of artwork production. The successive editions of the

190  •  Notes to Pages 160–163

64 65 66

67

biennial have maintained an interventive and po­liti­cal tone, while also developing sustainable resources such as a library. On the importance of collaboration within Haitian art, see Asquith (2013). The space was also the residence of artists Sandra Ceballos and Ezequiel Suárez in Vedado. This anticipates the logic of proj­ects such as the Cátedra de Arte y Conducta. This ele­ment breaks with the renovating logic of Cuban art and the capturing of “young talents” by an international public that keeps an eye on Cuban creativity ­a fter the success of the Havana Biennial. Especially significant is the “recovery” of artists like Chago Armada, one of the most critical voices of Cuban art during the seventies, who has been repressed and marginalized since this period. In a recent article, I have examined how Puerto Rican artists conceive intervention in a transnational level, dislocating the bonds between national identity and its territory. With this subject in mind, I analyzed Beatriz Santiago’s “performative documentary” produced both inside and outside Puerto Rico, including both ­under a single gaze, tackling a similar situation. Juan Flores’s notion of cultural remittances, expressed in the last book he published before his death in 2014, was the main source for this analytical approach.

Coda 1 Many of the loudest and most active voices taking part in the debates on activist and socially engaged art have stressed the fact that t­ hese are not “new” phenomena, nor can they be subsumed ­under a new artistic current. On the contrary, the practice of activist and socially engaged art frames a decades-­(or even centuries-) old quest for social justice and emancipation to a g­ reat degree in­de­pen­dent from the experiences and experiments of the Western avant-­garde.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to plates. Abdessemed, Adel, 142 Abramovic, Marina, 142 Abréu, Diógenes, 66 ABTV Collective, 51, 53 Acconci, Vito, 142 Adrián, Francisco J. Hernández, 181n. 27 Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, 31, 172n. 17 Afterimage, 186n. 27 Agamben, Giorgio, 7 agency: artistic agency, 1–5, 10, 12–14, 41–42, 46, 49, 51, 54–57, 69, 77, 134–138, 159–161, 163–165; collaborative agency, 127, 129–130, 146, 148, 153–154, 161; cultural agency, 71; curatorial agency, 20, 22; institutional agency, 22–23; ­things’ agency, 175n. 1 Ahmed, Sara, 64, 87, 181n. 32 A la espera, 89 Alatas, Syed Hussein, 175n. 8 Alba, Elia, 54 Alcázar de Colón, 86 Alet, Thierry, 189n. 56 Alexis, Chris, 154 Alfombra roja, 82 Alice Yard, 92, 129–135, 138, 154–156, 161, 184n. 5, 185n. 6, 185n. 8, 185n. 10

Almonte, Eliú, 78 Al tramo izquierdo, 86 Alvarez, Lupe, 52, 176n. 12 Amer­i­ca: The Bride of the Sun, 171n. 11 Amersfoort, 31 Amsterdam, 47 Anderson, Benedict, 156 Another Fucking Readymade, 47 Ante América, 171n. 11 Appadurai, Arjun, 177n. 19 Araeen, Rasheed, 172n. 17 ARC, 157 Archer-­Straw, Petrine, 13 Area: Lugar de Proyectos, 146, 187n. 33 Argentina, 35, 139 Armada, Chago, 190n. 66 Armenteros, Bingene, 66 art d’Outre-­Mer, 110, 114–126 Arte-­estudio, 80 Arte interpretado, 176n. 16 Arte urbano Sarmiento, 78 Artista melodramático, 176n. 10 Aruba, 26, 32, 37, 171n. 10 Asquith, Wendy, 24, 190n. 64 A tarro partido II, 51 Atis Rezistans, 160, 189n. 63 Atkinson, Ewan, 177n. 26

207

208  •  Index

Austria, 31 Autograph ABP, 121 Awai, Nicole, 129 Bacot, Yolande, 116 Badajoz, 29–30 Báez, Josefina, 78 Bailey, David A., 39, 149, 172n. 17 Balaguer, Joaquín, 34, 72–73, 180n. 16 Ballester, Juan Pablo, 53 Banana Proj­ect (Boclé), 97, 118 Bancel, Nicolas, 115 Barbados, 15, 132, 157, 167, 171n.10, 177n. 26, 185n. 6, 185n. 18, 189n. 60 Barker, Emma, 171n. 7 Barriendos, Joaquín, 60 Barrow-­Gilles, Cynthia, 13 Basurama, 78 Batia, Sharon, 128 Baucom, Ian, 172n. 17 Bauras, Steeve, 54, 184n. 28 Beasley-­Murray, John, 179n. 13 Belisario, Isaac Mendes, 132, 185n. 14–15 Belize, 26, 38 Benítez, Marimar, 35 Benjamin, Mario, 98 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 39 Bennett, Tony, 21, 170n. 4 Beovides, Kevin, 176n. 16 Bereton, Bridget, 156 Berlin Wall (fall of), 4, 51 Bertin, Christian, 100–101, 110, 112–114, 118 Bessa, Antonio Sergio, 36 Best, Stephen, 184n. 23 BetaLocal, 142–146, 151–152, 156, 161, 188n. 40, 188n. 44 Beuys, Joseph, 53 Beverley, John, 179n. 13 Bhabha, Homi, 169n. 6 biennials: Aruba Biennial, 32; Bienal de Pintura del Caribe y Centroamérica, 33, 173n. 24, 173n. 28; Bienal de San Juan de Grabado Latinoamericano, 35, 173n. 24, 174nn. 31–32; Ca­rib­bean Biennial (Santo Domingo), 27, 32–34, 74–76, 91 (2010 exhibition), 174n. 30, 180n. 19; Dakar Biennial, 151; Dominican National Biennial of Visual Art, 65, 67, 71, 76–77,

178nn. 5–7; Ghetto Biennial, 93, 159–160, 189n. 63; Gwangju Biennial, 98; Havana Biennial, 23, 25, 32–34, 36–38, 42, 44, 74, 90, 149, 171n. 10, 171n. 14, 173n. 24, 173n. 26, 174n. 35, 190n. 66; Invisible Biennial (Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann’s proj­ect), 11, 45–49, 55, 175; Johannesburg Biennial, 33; Liverpool Biennial, 57, 102; M&M, 142–143; Marginal Biennial (Silvano Lora’s proj­ect), 34, 76, 174n. 30; Martinique Biennial, 32, 173n. 25; Mercosul Biennial, 119; Poli/Graphic Biennial (San Juan), 32, 34, 42, 44; Poli/Graphic Triennial of San Juan, 36, 42, 99, 146, 188n. 49; Venice Biennial, 18, 28, 33, 82, 175n. 7 Big Chair (Winter), 93 Bishop, Claire, 85, 108, 177n. 24, 186n. 24 Black British Art, 2, 121 Blanchard, Pascal, 115 Bleichmar, Daniela, 177n. 19 Blue Curry, 57–59, 102, 185n. 8 Boclé, Jean-­François, 97, 110, 118–121 Bocquet, Pierre, 27, 171n. 12 Bonami, Francesco, 48–49, 171n. 7 Bonao, 179n. 12 Bonilla, Yarimar, 54 Borràs, María Llüísa, 29, 172n. 20 Bosch, Juan, 181n. 31 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 47, 145–146 Boxer, David, 39, 177n. 33 Boyce, Sonia, 172n. 17 Brâncusi, Constantin, 77 Bravo, Argelia, 185n6 Brazil, 115, 119, 183n. 15 Brébion, Dominique, 22, 39–40, 173n. 22 Brennan, Denise, 79 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The, 59 British Musuem, 185n. 15 Britto, Orlando, 172n. 20 Bruguera, Tania, 29, 71, 189n. 61; Cátedra de arte y conducta, 157, 189n. 61, 190n. 65 “Bubu” Negrón, Jesús, 187n. 38 Buck-­Morss, Susan, 60 Bueno, Frank, 19 Burke, Alex, 102, 110, 117–118, 183n. 20 Buskirk, Martha, 48 Bustamante, Fernanda, 70

Index  •  209

Caillois, Roger, 108 Caminero, Clara, 80–81 Camnitzer, Luis, 35, 52, 171n. 14, 173n. 26, 174n. 34, 176n. 12, 176n. 15 Campbell, Charles, 129, 131–132, 161, 184n. 2 Canary Islands, 172n. 20 Candelario, Ginetta E. B., 181n. 31 Cane and Sugar, 112 Capellán, Tony, 27, 170n. 1, 178n. 8, 181n. 25 Capote, Yoan, 90 Carib Art, 26–27 Ca­rib­be­an: Crossroads of the World, 31 Ca­rib­bean Community (CARICOM), 33 Ca­rib­bean Linked, 157 Ca­rib­bean Review of Books, 131, 185n. 17 Ca­rib­bean Visions: Con­temporary Painting and Sculpture, 28 Caribe insular: Exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso, 29–32 Carifesta, 133 Cariforo (Centro Cultural), 29 Cariforum, 172n. 16 Carnada, 82 Carpinteros, Los, 29, 90, 172n. 21 Carrilho, Nelson, 37 Car Watch, 187n. 33 Casa Aboy, 140 Casa Candina, 140 Castillo, Caryana, 80, 103, 179n. 9 Castillo, María, 19 Castillo de la Real Fuerza Proj­ect, 51 Cattelan, Maurizio, 11, 43–49, 175, 175n. 7 CCA7, 133 Ceballos, Sandra, 95, 189n. 61, 190n. 65 Centro León Jimenes, 84, 181n. 23 Césaire, Aimé, vi, 113–114, 173n. 25, 182n. 10 Chabal, Patrick, 2 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 175n. 3 Chambers, Eddie, 39, 172n. 17 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 114, 117, 182n. 10 Che Guevara, Ernesto, 51 Chetty, Raj, 181n. 31 Chicago, 182n. 1 Chirac, Jacques, 114 Chivallon, Christine, 111, 182n. 5 Chlordecone, 119 Chocopop Festival, 78–80, 103 Chong, Albert, 29

Choroní, 82 Cinco Car-­rosas para la historia (Lora Read), 103 CIRCA Art Fair, 141, 187n. 35 Cité Internationale des Arts, 113, 182n. 7 Ciudad letrada, 70 Clandestino787, 187n. 33 Classen, Constance, 177n. 19 Clifford, James, 111 Closer (Warner), 106 Cocido o crudo: comer o no comer, 172n. 20 Cohen, Robin, 111 Colectivo Shampoo, 77–78, 180n. 21 Colegio Dominicano de Artistas Plásticos (CODAP), 65–69, 180n. 18 Collaborative art, 14, 127–163 Colombia, 169n. 5, 179n. 15, 183n. 15, 185n. 6 Columbus, Christopher, 26, 34, 75; “discovery” of the Amer­i­cas (quincentennial anniversary of), 26, 33–34, 74, 180n. 20 Conboca, 146, 187n. 33 Concurso de Arte León Jimenes, 67, 86, 178n. 6, 179n. 12 Conga Reversible (Los Carpinteros), 90 Contextual art, 5, 9 Cooper, Carolyn, 189n. 57 Copeland, Huey, 184n. 23 Cordialement vôtre, 121 Cortés, Hernán, 30 “Cosaque,” Gilles Ellie, 184n. 28 Cosmopolitanism, 9 Costa Rica, 37–38 Costura para un corazón, 82 Cour d’air (Liseron-­Monfils), 55, 94 Cozier, Christopher, 24, 27, 31–32, 39, 129–134, 160, 171n. 9, 184n. 3, 185nn. 18–19, 186n. 21 Craven, David, 156 Crichlow, Michaeline A., 6, 39, 50, 170n. 7 Croatia, 113 Cruz, José “Tony,” 188n. 39, 188n. 41, 188n. 44, 188n. 48, 189n. 53 Cuba, 10–11, 14–16, 29–30, 34, 50–54, 76, 149, 157, 171n. 10, 176nn. 14–16, 177n. 26, 179n. 15, 185n. 6, 189n. 61, 190n. 66 Cuban Art Dedicates Itself to Baseball (performative proj­ect), 50–54

210  •  Index

Cuba siglo XX: Modernidad y sincretismo, 172n. 20 Cuéllar, Manuel, 69 Cullen, Deborah, 36, 141, 149, 169n. 2 Cultural Object, A (Scott), 60–62, 90 Cultural politics, 3, 11 Cultural Soliloquy, 177n. 32 cultural translation, 14 Culture and Imperialism, 169n. 6 Cummins, Alissandra, 40 Curação, 10, 14, 26, 37, 104, 157, 171n. 10, 189n. 62 Curador curado, 40–41, 76, 174n. 38 Curating in the Ca­rib­be­an, 169n. 3 Cuzin, Régine, 115–116, 183n. 14 Dakar, 149, 151 Damoison, David, 106, 110, 112–114, 118 Dardashti, Lapin, 180n. 22 Dash, Michael J., 137 Dávila-­Villa, Úrsula, 36 Davis, Annalee, 27 Dean, Mitchell, 12–13 De la Nuez, Iván, 16–17, 50, 172nn. 20–21 Delgado, Ángel, 51, 176n. 11 De los Santos, Danilo, 72–73, 180n. 17, 180n. 19 De Maeseneer, Rita, 3 De Orellana, Francisco, 30 Départements d’Outre-­Mer, 2, 53–55, 108–126, 148–153, 183n. 21 De Pellerano, Soucy, 180n. 18 Derrida, Jacques, 59–60, 177n. 27 Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP), 157, 189n. 61 Dessalines, Jean Jacques, 185n. 12 Detector de ideologías, 53 dialogical art, 139 Díaz, Jesús, 172n. 21 Díaz, Junot, 59 Díaz, Polibio, 178n. 8 Díaz-­Nerio, María Teresa, 185n. 6 Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio, 147, 184 Díaz-­Royo, Antonio, 187n. 32 Dieppa, María Elvira, 185n. 6 Dirlik, Arif, 11 Ditrén, María Elena, 65 D’ la Mona Plaza, 77

DNA, 18 Documenta, 33, 172n. 18, 175n. 5 Doig, Peter, 133, 186n. 21 Dominican Film Festival, 76 Dominican Republic, 10–12, 15–18, 27–29, 34–35, 63–89, 148, 171n. 10, 177n. 26, 179n. 15, 180nn. 16–23, 181nn. 24–26, 181nn. 29–31, 185n. 6 Douglas, Andrea, 177n. 30, 177n. 33 Draconian Switch, 155, 189n. 58 Duany, Jorge, 180n. 22 Dubmorphology Collective, 179n. 10 Duchesne Winter, Juan, 70 Dudley, Sandra, 57, 177n. 19 Dumit Estévez, Nicolás, 78 Durán Almarza, Emilia María, 78 École Negro-­Caraïbe, 156–157 Edwards, Elizabeth, 56, 177n. 25 E-­Flux, 43 El arte de bregar, 140, 147, 184 El Cerro, 141 El descubrimiento del 70, 77 Elias, Charlotte, 133, 186n. 21 Eliasson, Olafur, 47 El Museo del Chopo, 81 El objeto esculturado, 176n. 11 Elso, Juan Francisco, 73, 176n. 16 Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, 47 Empire, 50 En bandeja de plata, 82 Endless Column, 77 En­g lish, Darby, 45 En Mas: Carnival and Per­for­mance Art of the Ca­rib­be­an, 179n. 10 Entre vues, 53 Enwezor, Okwui, 37 Erotic Art Week (Trinidad), 154, 159 Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (Dominican Republic), 178n. 5 Espacio Aglutinador, 95, 157, 160, 189n. 61 Esson, Tomás, 51 Estévez, Abilio, 172n. 21 Estructura completa (Karmadavis), 86, 105 Eu­ro­pean Union, 30 Exchange Atelier (Peña-­Forty), 99 Experiencia (Grupo Proyector), 94

Index  •  211

Fall, N’Goné, 157 Farquharson, Alex, 21 Ferly, Joëlle, 53, 104, 110, 121–124, 147–153, 184nn. 24–27, 185n. 6, 189n. 53 Fernández, Frency, 176n. 11 Ferreras, Mónica, 54 Filipovic, Elena, 30 Finkelpearl, Tom, 187n. 31 Firmin, Antenor, 164 Fischer, Sybille, 60, 170n. 7 F.isura, 80 Flores, Juan, 108, 190n. 67 Flores, Tatiana, 7, 32, 169n. 1 Fondation Clément, 53–54, 113, 119, 176n. 17, 189n. 53 Fort-­de-­France, 53, 112–113, 118, 150 Foucault, Michel, 3, 170n. 4 1492/1992: Un nouveau regard sur les Caraïbes, 26 Fowler, Kate, 17 France, 10, 13, 53–55, 108–126, 149–150, 182n. 3, 182n. 5, 183n. 14, 183n. 21, 184n. 22 Francophone Ca­rib­bean, the, 13, 53, 108–126, 176n. 17, 182n. 3, 189n. 53 Fraser, Andrea, 47 French Guiana, 13, 55, 110, 115, 150, 176n. 17, 182n. 10, 183n. 12, 183n. 15 Fresh Milk, 157, 189n. 60 Fuentes, Elvis, 39, 149, 169n. 2 Fumagalli, María Cristina, 85–86, 181n. 30 Fusco, Coco, 75 Fwomajé Collective, 157 Galería de Arte Moderno (Dominican Republic), 28, 34, 178n. 5 Galindo, Regina, 80, 82, 181n. 26 Galvanize, 133–134, 186n. 21 Garaicoa, Carlos, 29, 172n. 21, 177n. 26 García, Sherezade, 180n. 22 García Canclini, Néstor, 37 Gardner, Anthony, 33 Gardner, Joscelyn, 177n. 26 Garrido Castellano, Carlos, 18, 22–23, 29, 142, 172n. 20, 173n. 22, 177n. 18, 177nn. 28–29, 179nn. 13–14, 188n. 39 Gell, Alfred, 57 Germany, 28, 31, 136, 182n. 1 Gil, Laura, 178n. 7

Gilbert and George, 142 Gill, Lyndon, 155 Gillick, Liam, 49 Gilroy, Paul, 9, 182n. 5 Gioni, Massimiliano, 47 Glissant, Édouard, 113–114, 182n. 10 Global Ca­rib­bean, The, 31, 172n. 16 Globalization and the Post-­Creole Imagination. Notes on Fleeing the Plantation, 170n. 7 Gómez, Luis, 50, 53, 176n. 16 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 75 Gonthier, Yo-­Yo, 117 González, Jennifer A., 45 González, Julieta, 36 Gordon, Douglas, 47 Gordon, Leah, 159, 171n. 8 Gosden, Chris, 56, 177n. 19 GPS: A Ca­rib­bean Video Art Show, 185n. 6 Green, Charles, 33 Green, Garth L., 189n. 59 Grenada Revolution, 4, 7, 170n. 9 Griffith, Marlon, 98, 129, 179n. 10, 184n. 2 Grossol, Bertrand, 184n. 28 Grundisse, The, 50 Grupo Proyector, 94 Guadeloupe, 13–15, 53–55, 108–126, 137, 147–153, 159, 182n. 10, 183n. 12, 183n. 15, 185n. 6 Guagua aérea, la, 78 Guardiola, Pablo, 188n. 41, 188n. 44 Guatemala, 38, 179n. 15 Guerrero, Myrna, 178n. 8 Guevara, Paz, 18 Guilbault, Jocelyne, 189n. 59 Gutai, 74 Guyana, 26, 183n. 15 Guzmán, Sayuri, 64, 71, 80–84, 89, 179n. 9, 179n. 15 Haiti: art in, 14–15, 110, 115, 148, 171n10, 182n. 3, 182n. 10, 189n. 63, 190n. 64; border relation with the Dominican Republic, 85–87, 93, 179n. 12, 180n. 22, 181n. 32; Haitian Revolution, 60, 121, 185n. 12; vodun in, 74 Hall, Stuart, 108, 172n. 17

212  •  Index

Hallam, Elizabeth, 154 ­Hangar (Lisbon), 185n. 6 Hanru, Hou, 37, 142 Hardt, Michael, 50 Harney, Stephano, 156 Hart, Janice, 177n. 25 Hart Dávalos, Armando, 37 Hartford, Conn., 31 Harvey, David, 33 Hasta que me guste (Ramírez): (exhibition), 18–19, 101; (installation), 19–20 Hatuey, 76 Havana, 30, 36–38, 42, 160, 171n. 10, 171n. 14, 173n. 24, 173n. 26, 174n. 35, 189n. 61, 190n. 66 Hawkins, Harriet, 177n. 24 Heinz, Karl, 189n. 57 Helado de agua del mar Caribe, 84 Hélénon, Serge, 156 Hemispheric Institute of Per­for­mance and Politics, 82 Henke, Holger, 189n. 57 Henríquez, Quisqueya, 40–41, 66, 84, 174n. 38 Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos de Puerto Rico, 187n. 32 Hermann, Sara, 39, 77, 178n. 3 Hernández, Rita Indiana, 70, 179n. 14 Hernández García, Vanessa, 188n. 49 Herrera, Nelson, 187n. 32 Hintzen, Percy, 183n. 18 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 144, 188n. 45 Hobsbawn, Eric, 156 Hodder, Ian, 56 Hoffmann, Jens, 11, 36, 43–49, 175, 175nn. 5–6 Holmes, Brian, 137, 151, 175n. 4 Homar, Lorenzo, 35 Hommage to Hans Haacke, 51 Honduras, 38 hooks, bell, 154 Horizontes insulares, 31, 172n. 16, 172n. 20 Horo­witz, Noah, 49 Howes, David, 177n. 19 Huygue, Pierre, 49 Ibarra, Karlo, 80 India, 94, 139, 174n. 35

Infinite Islands: Con­temporary Ca­rib­bean Art, 31 InIVA (Institute of International Visual Art), 121 Instituto Buena Bista, 104, 157, 189n. 62 Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 146, 174n. 31 Isaac Santana, Andrés, 176n. 11 Isla, 82 Isla abierta, 86 Islas, 172n. 20 Jaar, Alfredo, 189n. 49 Jamaica, 15, 59, 90, 132, 171n. 10, 177nn. 30–33, 185n. 18 Jamaica ­Labour Party (JLP), 60 James, C.L.R., 50, 164 James, Erica Moirah, 58, 169n. 2 Jameson, Fredric, 177n. 27 Japan, 31, 136 Jáquez, Waddys, 78 Jayo, Berta, 80 Jazeel, Tariq, 3 Jones, Jonathan, 43 José A. Echevarría Stadium, 50 Juárez, Antonio, 80 Juhász-­A lvarado, Charles, 29, 36 Jules-­Rosette, Bennetta, 111 Julien, Isaac, 172n17 Jungerman, Remy, 37 Kamugisha, Aaron, 14, 163–164, 182n. 6, 183n. 18 Kaplan, E. Ann, 155 Kapur, Geeta, 174n. 35 Karibische kunst heute, 28, 172n. 18 Karmadavis (David Pérez), 80, 85–87, 105, 179n. 9, 179n. 12, 181n. 26, 181n. 32 Karman Cubiñá, Silvia, 41, 174n38 Kassel, 28 Kempadoo, Kamala, 79 Kempadoo, Roshini, 3, 169n2 Kester, Grant, 138–140, 144, 186n. 23, 186nn. 25–27, 186n. 29, 188n. 47 Kingston, 90, 185n. 14; Devon House, 61, 177n. 31 Kleyn, Yves, 74 Kréyol Factory, 31, 112, 116–118

Index  •  213

Kwasniewiski, Pawel, 80 Kwon, Miwon, 82 La bibliothèque (Burke), 102 Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín (LASA), 157, 189n. 61 Lacy, Suzanne, 138, 186n. 28 La esperanza es lo único que se está perdendo, 176n. 11 Laferrière, Danny, 121 Landau, Suzy, 54 La Perla Bowl (Chemi Rosado’s participatory art proj­ect), 142 La plástica dominicana, 77 La ­rose est sans pourquoi (Damoison), 106, 112 L’Art de faire grève, 53–55 L’Artocarpe, 95, 147–153, 156, 159, 161 La ruta de Hatuey, 76, 80 La ruta del per­for­mance, 82, 181n. 29 Las Vegas, 134 Latamie, Marc, 29 Latin American Artists of the 20th ­Century, 171n. 11 Latitudes, 31, 115, 121, 183n. 15 Latour, Bruno, 56, 177n. 19 Lauchez, Louis, 156 Laughlin, Nicholas, 1, 92, 129, 131, 185n. 5, 185n. 17, 186n. 21 La vida urbana en la región del Caribe, 28–29 Lavorare é um brutto mestiere, 175n. 7 Lawrence, O’Neill, 54 Le code noir, 120 Lee Loy, Jamie, 129 Lefebvre, Henri, vi, 6–7 Leiseca, Marcia, 176n. 10 Lemke, Sieglind, 182n. 4 Le Moule, 95, 147–153, 184n. 25 Leonard, Sean, 92, 129, 131–134, 185n. 5 Lewis, Gordon K., 170n. 11 Lewis, Mario, 134, 186n. 21 Li diab la (Bertin), 100–101, 112–114 Liga de Estudiantes de Arte (Puerto Rico), 140 Lind, Maria, 170n. 3 Liseron-­Monfils, Audry, 55–56, 94 Liu, Jenny, 48

Liverpool, 11, 57, 97, 102 Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (LKP), 54 Llanes, Lilian, 173n. 26 Location of Culture, The, 169n. 6 Locke, Hew, 179n. 10 Lockward, Alana, 78 London, 55, 107, 121–122, 124, 147, 184n. 27, 185n. 14 López, Elvis, 37 López, Magdalena, 179n. 13, 185n. 13 López, Pancho, 81 Lo que dice la piel, 86 Lora, Quisqueya, 179n. 9 Lora, Silvano, 34–35, 73–75, 80–81, 83, 85, 98, 179n. 9 Lora Read, Marcos, 103, 177n. 26, 178n. 8 Louis XIV, 120 Lovelace, Che, 129 Luke, Timothy W., 18 Madrid, 29, 185n6; Casa de América (Madrid), 29 Magiciens de la terre, 33, 115, 183n. 13 Mancall, Peter C., 177n. 19 Mano de obra barata, 86 Marino, Ángela, 69 Marshall, Don, 13, 177n. 19 Martha, Tirzo, 37, 104, 189n. 62 Martin, Meredith, 33 Martínez, Chus, 66 Martínez, Samuel, 181n. 30 Martínez San Miguel, Yolanda, 180n. 22 Martinique, 11, 13, 15, 53–55, 108–126, 150, 176n. 17, 182n. 10, 183n. 12, 183n. 15 Martorell, Antonio, 35, 140 Marxuach, Michelle, 142 Matin, Jean-­Hubert, 183n. 13 Matta, Roberto, 35 Mauritius, 117 Mayer, Helge, 80 Mbembe, Achille, 5, 114–115 McBurnie, Beryl, 155–156 Meccariello, Pascal, 19, 29, 170n. 1, 185n. 6 Medina, Cuauhtémoc, 189n. 49 Medina, Edith, 89 Member (Noel), 96 Menéndez, Aldo, 53 Mercado, Freddie, 75

214  •  Index

Mercer, Kobena, 172n. 17, 173n. 22, 184n. 23, 185n. 8 Metonimia, 65, 68 Metro, 187n. 33 Mexico, 35, 81, 180n. 15 Mezzadra, Sandro, 50 Miami, 28, 30–31 Mignolo, Walter, 136–137 Minaya, Joiri, 65–69, 71–72 Minshall, Peter, 129 Mintz, Sydney, 177n. 20 Miranda, Citlaly, 19 Mitchell, W.J.T., 20, 56, 175n. 1 Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 170n. 7 Modest, Wayne, 23 Mohammed, Patricia, 2, 7 Monge, Priscilla, 37 Montano, Linda, 142 Moraña, Mabel, 179n. 13 Moreiras, Alberto, 179n. 13 Mori, Mariko, 47 Mosaka, Tumelo, 184n. 3 Mosquera, Gerardo, 7, 22, 39, 50, 156, 172n. 21, 173n. 27, 176n. 12, 176n. 16, 188n. 49 Mouffe, Chantal, 170n. 3 Mozambique, 115 MSA, 140 Munro, Martin, 59 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), 185n. 6 Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR), 146 Museo de arte maníaco (Ceballos), 95 Museo de Arte Moderno (Santo Domingo), 40, 65, 76–77, 91, 178n. 3, 180n. 23 Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, 146 Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC), 29–31 Muyale, Osaira, 29, 37 Myanmar, 139 National Gallery of Barbados, 185n. 18 National Gallery of Jamaica, 61, 90, 177nn. 30–32, 185n. 18 Nationalism (in the Ca­rib­bean), 4, 13, 61–62, 69, 164

Negri, Toni, 50 neoliberalism, 4, 8, 163 Netherlands, 148 New Art Examiner, 186n. 27 New Caledonia, 115 new-­genre public art, 138 New York, 31, 82, 171n. 11 Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist, The, 175n. 5 Niblett, Michael, 169n. 1 Niemojewski, Rafal, 37 Night and Sugar, 57 Nixon, Rob, 83 NN [Arbeitstitel] (Curry), 102 Noceda, José Manuel, 22, 38–39, 171n. 10, 174n. 36 Noel, Nikolai, 57–59, 96, 129, 177nn. 22–24 Northover, Patricia, 6, 39, 50, 170n. 7 Notting Hill Carnival, 179n. 10 Novoa, Glexis, 50 Núñez de Balboa, Vasco, 30 Oblomov Foundation, 175n. 7 Ofili, Chris, 47 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 137 Ojeda, Filiberto, 141, 187n. 36 Oloff, Kerstin, 169n. 1 O’Neill, Mari-­Mater, 27 O’Neill, Paul, 48, 171n. 7 Ong, Aihwa, 13, 161 Open Mind (Capote), 90 Oquet, Charo, 78, 180n. 22 Orientalism, 169n. 6 Orozco, Gabriel, 47 Orozco, José Clemente, 35 Otero, Alex, 19 Otro País: Escalas Africanas, 172n. 20 Ouditt, Steve, 129, 134, 186n. 21 Ovando, Nicolás de, 79 Paiewonsky, Raquel, 19, 170n. 1, 178n. 8 Panama, 74 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 33 Paris, 26, 47, 55, 74, 112–113, 115–117, 120, 123–124, 147, 183n. 21; Hôtel de Ville, 115; Parc de la Villete, 103, 116 Parreno, Philippe, 49 Patterson, Ebony, 177n. 32, 185n. 8

Index  •  215

Paul, Annie, 7, 8, 59, 177n. 33, 185n. 19 Pearce, Susan, 177n. 19 Pedrosa, Adriano, 33, 36 Peña-­Forty, Omar Obdulio, 99 Perestroika, 176n. 15 Performagia, 81 Performar, 78, 80–85, 89, 94 Peru, 139 Peyton, Elizabeth, 47 Phibel, Audry, 184n. 28 Phibel, Cynthia, 54, 184n. 28 Phillips, Ruth, 56 Pierrot Men, 117 Pineda, Jorge, 29, 40–41, 170n. 1, 172n. 21, 174nn. 38–39, 177n. 26 Pinney, Christopher, 155 Pino, Alain, 54 Pivin, Jean Loup, 157 Pizarro, Francisco, 30 Plasse, Florent, 182n. 8 Please Pass the Dark Choco­late Over, Before I Commit Suicide (Ferly), 104, 122 Plomo, 82 Poesía a un edificio sin techo (Castillo), 103 Pointe-­à-­Pitre, 150 Pompidou Center, 32, 112, 183n. 13 Ponjuán, Eduardo, 53, 176n. 10 Ponte, Antonio José, 172n. 21 Port-­au-­Prince, 93, 159 Porter, Liliana, 35 Port of Spain, 92, 106, 129–134, 153–156, 159, 184n. 4, 185n. 9, 185n. 12 Portrait Request, 68 Portugal, 14, 30–31, 185n. 6 Poupeye, Veerle, 7–8, 60–62, 134, 177nn. 32–33; Ca­rib­bean Art (Poupeye, 1998), 8 Powell, Richard J., 45 Prats Ventós, Antonio, 72–73 Pratt, Mary Louise, 155 Price, Richard, 164 Price-­Mars, Jean, 164 Primera temporada de artes plásticas, 73 Proceso de Rectificación de Errores y Tendencias Negativas (Cuba), 176n. 15 Proyector con Experiencia Group, 80 Prudencia, 68

Puerto Plata, 12, 70, 78–80, 103, 179n. 12, 181n. 23 Puerto Rico, 14–15, 29, 35, 77, 140–148, 153, 159, 161, 171n10, 187nn. 34–35, 187n. 38, 188nn. 39–44, 190n. 67 Punto tangencial, 86 Puri, Shalini, 182n. 2 Queens Museum of Arts, 171n. 11 Quiet Room, 176n. 16 Quintapata Collective, 18 Rama, Ángel, 179n. 13 Ramírez, Belkis, 16, 18–19, 29, 101 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 25–26, 40, 188–189n. 49 Rancière, Jacques, 153 Ranger, Terence, 156 Rauschenberg, Robert, 51 Rawlins, Richard, 154, 189n. 58 Rehberger, Tobias, 47 relational aesthetics, 138, 145 Reunion Island, 112, 115–116, 147, 183n. 17 Reyes-­Santos, Alaí, 170n. 9 Ripley, Geo, 73, 80 Rist, Pipi­lotti, 47 Rivera, Miguelina, 178n. 8 Rivera, Severo, 66 Roca, José, 169n. 5 Roci Cuba proj­ect, 51 Rockstone and Bootheel: Con­temporary West Indies Art, 31 Rodney, Walter, 4 Rodríguez, Amaury, 181n. 31 Rodríguez, Bélgica, 173nn. 28–29 Rodríguez, René Francisco, 53, 176n. 10, 189n. 61 Rodríguez Brey, Ricardo, 176n. 16 Rojas, Rafael, 172n. 21 Rosado, Chemi, 141–142, 159, 188n. 38 Rosario, Angel, 77 Rose, Sheena, 185n. 6 Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Antwerp), 171n. 11 Saavedra, Lázaro, 53, 176n. 14, 185n. 6 Saba, 34 Said, Edward, 5, 169n. 6

216  •  Index

Saint Martin, 148 Saint Martin’s School of Art, 121 Samoa, 115 Sánchez, Maurice, 77 San Cristóbal, 82 San Francisco, 175n. 6 San Juan, 36, 75, 140–147, 173n. 24, 174n. 32, 185n. 6, 187n. 32, 188n. 42, 188n. 48; Cuartel de Ballajá, 36; La Perla (San Juan’s neigborhood), 141–142 Santiago de los Caballeros, 12, 16–17, 67, 70, 79, 84, 86, 105, 178n. 6, 181n. 23 Santiago Muñoz, Beatriz, 36, 142, 188n. 39, 189n. 49, 189n. 53, 190n. 67; conversation with, 177n. 28, 188nn. 41–42, 188n. 44, 188n. 48 Santo Domingo, 12, 33–34, 70, 73–75, 78–87, 101, 173n. 24, 179n. 12, 180n. 19, 180n. 23, 181n. 26; Casa de Teatro, 181n. 23; Centro Cultural de España de Santo Domingo, 18–20, 101, 180n. 23; Ciudad Colonial, 18, 180n. 20; Conservatorio Nacional de Música, 178n. 5; Palacio de Bellas Artes, 72, 178n. 5; Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 180n. 23 Sarkozy, Nicolás, 54 Sassen, Saskia, 83 Satisfied, 65–68 Scher, Phillip W., 189n. 59 Schmid, Heino, 185n. 8 Scott, David, 7, 115, 170n. 7, 170n. 9; Conscripts of Modernity, 170n. 7; Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, 7, 170n. 9 Scott, Dawn, 60, 90 Seaga, Edward, 60–61 Segarra Ríos, Abdiel, 146, 187n. 33 Senegal, 139, 149 Sheller, Mimi, 1, 79, 137, 149, 154–155, 169n. 2 Sholette, Gregory, 4, 43–45, 127, 186n. 28, 187n. 30 Sierra, Santiago, 86, 139 Silva, Bisi, 185n. 8 Silvano Lora Foundation, 98 Simétrico, 86 Six Options: Gallery Space Revisited, 177n. 30 Small Axe, 157

Smith, Terry (art historian and critic), 17, 33, 37, 135, 159, 175n. 6 Smith, Terry (Trinidadian architect), 154 Smithson, Robert, 175n. 4 Socially-­engaged art, 3, 13, 138, 190n. 1 Soja, Edward, 10, 170n. 10 Some Kind of Vessel, 57 Sommer, Doris, 134, 185n. 16 Sorel, Collette, 182n. 8 South Africa, 136 Spain, 28–30, 172nn. 20–21, 187n. 37 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 59–60 Spirit of Ca­rib­bean, The, 117 Spring (Tancons), 98 Stahl, Ann Brower, 177n. 19 Status, The, 187n. 32 Stephens, Michelle, 7, 9, 32, 169n. 1 Stimson, Blake, 127 St. Kitts, 11, 47 Stoler, Ann Laura, 84, 117 Street, Brian, 154 Suárez, Ezequiel, 189n. 61, 190n. 65 Suderburg, Erika, 177n. 24 ­Sullivan, Edward J., 172n. 19 Superflex, 144, 188n. 47 Surinam, 37, 183n. 15 Sweet of My Brown, The, 57 System HM2T Per­for­mance Art Group, 80 Szeemann, Harald, 175n. 6 T&T Art Gallery, 189n. 56 Tala, Alexia, 188n. 49 Taller Alacrán, 140, 187n. 32 Taller Alma Boricua, 140 Tamayo, Rufino, 35 Tancons, Claire, 7, 24, 69, 98, 171n. 8, 179n. 10 Tate Modern, 179n. 10 Taubner, Marco, 80 Tauliaut, Henry, 149 Taylor, Diana, 69–70, 85, 179n. 11 Tears of Bananaman, The (Boclé), 97 Teatro en la Calle Movement, 73 Teatro Escuela (Dominican Republic), 178n. 5

Index  •  217

Teverson, Andrew, 169n. 6 Third Text, 177n. 18 Thomas, Nicholas, 57 Thompson, Allison, 40, 182n. 9 Thompson, Krista A., 7, 23, 58, 69, 156, 169n. 2, 179n. 10, 184n. 23 Thompson, Nato, 186n. 24, 186n. 28, 187n. 31 Tiburce, Fernand, 157 Tilley, Chris, 177n. 19 Tillmans, Wolfgang, 47 Tilting Axis, 157 Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Ca­rib­be­an, 8–9 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 47–49, 142, 144, 188n. 46 Toda la verdade, 84 Toirac, José Ángel, 53 Tolentino, Marianne de, 27–28, 39 “Tonel” (Antonio Eligio Fernández), 50, 52 Torre de Babel, 80 Torres García, Joaquín, 35 Torres Saillant, Silvio, 180n. 22 Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Ca­rib­bean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996, 172n. 17 Trata, 86 Trelles Hernández, Mercedes, 36 Trinidad, 10–11, 14–15, 39, 92, 106, 159, 171n10, 184nn. 2–5, 185n. 7, 185n. 18; art scene in, 129–134, 140, 146, 148, 153 Tropical Night, 184n. 3 Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph, 164 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, 12, 72, 78, 178n. 5, 180n. 18, 181n. 31 Trump, Donald, 43 Tufiño, Rafael, 35 Tu me copieras, 120 UNESCO, 26, 33, 183n. 14 United Kingdom, the, 28, 116, 121–124, 148, 170–171n. 5, 172n. 17, 182n. 1, 184n. 25 United States, the, 14, 28, 33, 116, 141, 170–171n. 5, 174n. 33, 186n. 29, 187n. 34, 187nn. 36–37; Ca­rib­bean artists living

and working in, 45, 65, 68, 78, 108–109, 114 Universidad de Puerto Rico, 36, 187n. 37 Un mapa de sal, 16 Untitled (Curry), 102 Untitled (Noel), 96 Upstone, Sara, 169n. 6 Urry, John, 155 Vanderlinden, Barbara, 30 Van Hecke, Rita, 3 Varela, Fernando, 40–41, 174n. 38 Vedado (Havana), 50 Venegas, Haydee, 40 Venezuela, 73, 136, 179n. 15, 183n. 15, 185n. 6 Venturi, Robet, 134 Vera Rojas, María Teresa, 70 Vergès, Françoise, 110, 115, 126, 147 Vertovec, Steven, 107–108, 125, 182n. 1 Viala, Fabianne, 75, 171n. 11 Vieques Island, 140–141, 187n. 34, 187n. 36 Villazón, Ileana, 53 Virgin Islands, 171n. 10 Vous êtes ici, 31 Wainwright, Leon, 7, 169nn. 1–2, 170n. 8, 170n. 5 Walcott, Derek, 59 Walmsley, Ann, 172n. 17 Warner, Rodell, 106, 154 Washington, D.C., 31 Washington Bank, The, 32 Wattis Institute for Con­temporary Art, 175n. 6 Webster, Jane, 57 Weibel, Peter, 187n. 31 Weiss, Rachel, 51, 171n. 14, 173n. 24, 173n. 26, 174n. 34, 176n. 12, 176n. 14 When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, 175n. 6 Who More Sci-­Fi than Us, 31 Wifredo Lam Center, 90 Willemstadt, 104 Williams, Dave, 154 Winter, Joe, 93 Wood, Yolanda, 7, 24

218  •  Index

Woodbrook (Port of Spain), 131–134, 185n. 9 World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN), 149 Wrestling with the Image: Ca­rib­bean Interventions, 31–32 Wu, Chintao, 37 Wynter, Sylvia, 164

Year of the White Bear: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 75 Young Talents V, 177n. 32 Zaya, Antonio, 29, 172n. 20 Zaya, Octavio, 172n. 20 Žižek, Slavoj, 177n. 27 Zones d’attente, 120

About the Author

is a lecturer of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses on Ca­rib­bean visual culture, socially engaged art, and postcolonial and critical theory. He authored a book on con­temporary art from the Dominican Republic and edited a volume on Ca­rib­bean curatorial practices. Currently, he is working on a monograph on socially engaged art and coloniality.

CARLOS GARRIDO CASTELL ANO