NOTES ON PUERTO RICAN ART IN THE WAKE OF HURRICANE MARIA Reading The Whitney Exhibition Through Familial Memory, Trauma, And Grief

Words

ADRIANNA BRUSIE

I step into a tall elevator cramped between a dozen other visitors. The tall doors close in on us and we become engulfed in the space tainted by aquamarine. The elevator attendant guards an LED touch screen as the enclosure slowly ascends, coming to a halt at the fifth floor. The doors open into a white cube gallery space saturated with museum guests. no existe un mundo posthuracán. “A posthurricane world does not exist.” The words are scattered across the upper half of the gallery walls, leading towards the projection of a video which takes up the center of the gallery. In front of the screen are over a dozen visitors, young and old, listening attentively, urging me to drop into their meditation. I gaze at the moving screen and immediately am revealed a still that resembles my grandmother’s garage in San Juan: tropical plants lounging in every corner, surrounded by white painted walls that reflect the sunlight peeking through the spanish style metal gates. I’m sent back to January of 2021, which felt like the first time meeting my grandmother upon moving in with her that year while taking college classes on Zoom. For six months, her home became ours, and it was sitting right there, surrounded by the pristine walls of the white cube.

The film is dawn_corus ii: el niágra en bicicleta (dawn_corus ii: crossing the niagara on a bicycle) by Puerto Rican multimedia artist Sofía Córdova. It includes dialogue by the artist’s family members layered with footage from the island, actors dancing and moving with the natural and residential environments. But what captured me wasn’t that. It wasn’t necessarily what was said or what was shown, but the familiarity of the moments peeking through: the forest sounds of El Yunque, the shape of the telephone poles, the way the blue sky met the earth toned buildings, the flamboyant Puerto Rican accents. Standing in the white cube, I felt the usual spacial suffocation I experience in these galleries, yet this time, simultaneously, I was the the closest to Puerto

Rico I had been since I left my grandmother’s two years ago.

I’m consumed by a restlessness that urges me to wander the galleries in a nonlinear manner, with all senses open and ready to be arised by more familiar stimuli. I approach a large wooden telephone pole towering over me – just like those on the island. Except this pole was diagonal, installed to be suspended in the air as if it had been tipped over, torn apart, covered with broken wires and bent hardware that penetrate the surrounding space along with a sign that reads: VALORA TU MENTIRE AMERICANA

/ GARANTÍZALA / VOTA ESTADIDAD 11 DE JUNIO”

(Value your american lie / Guaranteed / Vote for Statehood June 11). The irony! Gabriella TorresFerrer’s sculpture transports Maria’s destruction of the island into the gallery space, haunting its viewers, many of whom would have never seen the destruction first hand, never mind the reality of the island’s exploited state. If they had visited Puerto Rico, it was most likely on their allinclusive luxury vacation hosted by Caribe Hilton. I continue, soon approaching three oil paintings by Rogelio Báez Vega. Again, I’m sent back, but this time to every abandoned building I’ve encountered on the island, and all the ways I’ve been taught to see it as free real estate to occupy and turn into more hospitality spaces for tourists. No. Framing these paintings are no ornate patterned woods, but piles of dirt sitting on the wooden floors of the gallery, holding tall blades of grass – dying, if not dead. Like the telephone pole, these sculptures bring visitors the very materiality of the island and its environment in its post-disaster state – in a way, as a communal mourning of the lives lost to the systemic betrayal and abandonment of the people of Puerto Rico.

Marcela Guerrero, now the DeMartini Family Curator and main organizer of the exhibition, writes: “No existe un mundo posthuracán proposes that imagining a new Puerto Rico is resolutely the purview of artists and that self-determination is a creative act. Art can be the medium of a posthurricane, postausterity, postearthquake, postpandemic world. This exhibition is a call to see the living and pay tribute to the dead.” The title, inspired by Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s practice and in particular her billboard project in 2020 that consisted of the question, ¿Imaginamos la libertad? (Do we imagine freedom?). This idea alludes to the fact that in order to imagine a future for Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and those in the diaspora must mourn its mass loss–including the mass violence and displacement caused by foreign governance and neocolonial agenda to occupy of the US territory and assimilate it to US economic and social hegemony. From what seemed to me initially a pessimistic framing of Puerto Rico and its contemporary spirit now emerged a deeper engagement and reenactment of the island’s ongoing violence and destruction by its own governance and its own imperial forces. Grief will always be a necessary step in tending to the ongoing collective trauma that is existing as a colonial subject in the imperial gaze of U.S. corporations and policymakers.

I continue on and soon encounter a wall of photographs of Javier Orfón’s Bientevéo (Iseeyouwell). It features a series of cupey leaves engraved with words and sketches, surrounded by images of fallen trees and crushed flowers after the storm. One of them features a quote by Papo Vives, an environmental scientist from Quebradillas. With the little Spanish I know left, I’m able to decode the phrase to something like, I would like to have a mind that takes me back ten, fifteen, twenty million years and see the formation of the islands. I too would like to see where this all began, the blessing that was the birth of the paradise, which would soon become its gift and yet its greatest curse, subject to its inevitable neocolonial seizure. I think back to a phrase from Sofia Córdova’s film: Puerto Rico is the blessed earth, the daughter of sea and sky. Rich, rich, blessed by my God. To see these leaves etched, photographed, printed, framed, and suspended on the light gray walls, alienated from their natural habitats and displaced into the sterile environment of spectacle and leisure was, to me, a perfect expression of the tragedy of the death of the island’s environment and its utter exploitation: the ecological devastation, fetishized and rendered for display in one of the richest neighborhoods in the US and the global art market.

What does it mean to display art of the trauma and devastation of one’s land within the realms of galleries and art institutions? More specifically, what does it mean for those who have been directly impacted by such disasters? I think about my grandmother who spent the hurricane and its wake alone in her San Juan home just months after my grandfather’s death. I think about the trauma it left in her and how easily it came back less than four years later every time the power went out or her fridge stopped working. The panic and fear in her eyes when the lights went out and all she could hear was the wind singing outside. The way she grabbed my arm to keep herself from falling in the midst of a breakdown and how I had never before been held so tightly. I didn’t have to experience the hurricane first hand to see and feel its legacy. Wandering through this gallery, I was overwhelmed with what felt like the posttraumatic stress that I saw in my grandmother when living with her. I didn’t expect to be this triggered. My grandmother once told me that a mother has a sixth sense that tells her when her child is in danger. Perhaps the child has a sixth sense too –and maybe even the grandchild.

In the background I start to hear the rumbling of loudly blasted reggaeton. I hear Bad Bunny. I’m being summoned. I walk toward the enclosed room projecting a video of a street celebration: Festival de las Máscaras, held annually on December 28. In Elle Pérez video titled Wednesday, Friday, costumed young people, drinking and dancing in the streets of Hatillo, Puerto Rico. While the scene is dark, the spirits are bright; people dance and climb on fountains, splashing water and rain onto the camera screen, blurring and obscuring the footage as the recording continues. Every hand has a beer or a flashlight and every body is soaked in rainwater and shaving cream, coated with a layer of shine that sparkles in the barely lit streets. If there’s one thing Puerto Ricans will do, it’s party. Even after three months of a seven-month blackout. A siren in the video sets off and welds with the music, creating a weird mixture of discomfort and bliss that begs for me to stay.Boys in the film pose as if for a photo when they notice the camera in front of them. This is how they wanted to be remembered. The camera continues to blur in and out, but the celebration continues. The music soon fades gradually into the sound of the waves crashing into the shore, prompting the screen to turn black and reveal a series of cement stairs leading to the shoreline of a beach – not unlike the ones where my grandmother would take me to. I sit there meditating on the sound of the waves and notice myself breathing deeper than I had in a long time. I missed the ocean. And it broke my heart every time I saw another news headline about some hotel or investor trying to build some pool or luxury hotel on the public land of beaches. A young toddler dressed in a pink tutu runs up to the screen, completely unaware of the artwork but utterly excited to make finger puppets. I wish I had that innocence, the willingness to play and find joy in the face of tragedy. Maybe innocence is the wrong word, but it was something I’ve lost since growing up. The finger puppets were like a ray of hope amidst all this weight of memory and longing that consumed me while I sat there. A lady, probably her mother, storms in to pull the little girl out away from the screen.

What does it mean to display art of the trauma and devastation of one’s land within the realms of galleries and art institutions? I keep returning to this question, not because I hadn’t considered it before, but because this tension between memory and display while viewing this exhibition had never been so high. The breadth of the artwork so admiringly encapsulates the richness of love and wisdom that remains in Puerto Rico and its devastation with such pride. I felt my heart warm to see the name Puerto Rico repeatedly appear on the walls of a prestigious and such well respected museum like the Whitney, retelling and thus validating the tragic reality of the island and its diaspora. But why here? Why in an art museum? Why was it that the closest I’ve felt to home was on the fifth floor of a museum ruled by corrupt investors, whose economics were not unlike those that are destroying Puerto Rico?

In the last room of the exhibition, I’m confronted with what looks like the walls of a school bus divided into ten equal parts, erected each by their own metal stands and displayed in a curved linear arrangement. Miguel Luciano’s Shields/Escudos displays priest shields made from abandoned school buses in Puerto Rico. I’m reminded of the number of schools that have closed in Puerto Rico since the pandemic, and the wall text corrects me: hundreds of public schools closed over the past five years as a result of budget cuts by the then Secretary of Education, the US-born Julia Keleher, who has since been convicted of corruption. That’s more like it. I begin to circulate the piece and when I reach the other side, I see ten Puerto Rican resistance flags facing away from the center of the gallery. My heart warms once again. Every time I have seen the Puerto Rican flag has been a moment of comfort; no one has as much pride for their country as Puerto Ricans. Every time I’ve received a smile from a stranger or a wave from a neighbor upon noticing the Puerto Rican flags or boxing gloves hanging in our cars comes back to me. Luciano’s piece is a tribute to the teachers and students in Puerto Rico, but also a sculpture of infinite anticolonial Puerto Rican pride. After my several rounds across the exhibition, the grief that consumed me remained. A weird duality of frustration and gratitude for the display of these works in the museum persisted. But oh, to see this room full of people. I hope they listen this time. (Though I don’t think they will.)

An excerpt from author Ana Teresa Toro’s essay “A Politics For Love” beautifully articulates my my thoughts as I left the exhibition:

In Puerto Rico right now, against the possibility of love, there are two negative forces operating in perfect harmony. On one hand, there are those who, by design, seek to fulfill the destiny of any colony but on an even grander scale–absolute exploitation. They aspire to create a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans, where those of us who remain are at the service of these new masters. And then there is another force, one that’s far more dangerous because it operaties inside the individual–indifference. There is a lack of connection and commitment to the country among those who rule it; they don’t truly know it and therefore don’t know how to love it. Or worse still, they do know the heart and soul of that particular way of existing in the world that it is to be Puerto Rican, and possessing that knowledge, they are eager to exploit it.