About
Desde San Juan Bautista...
Curatorial Text by Anabelle Rodríguez-González
As a Collateral Event of La 60ma Biennale di Venezia, Desde San Juan Bautista... is a group exhibition with new and recent actions, artworks, documentary and archival materials, photographs, ephemera, interventions, and performances by four renowned interdisciplinary exhibitors born, raised, living, and working from Puerto Rico: Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Celso González, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, and Daniel Lind-Ramos. Their efforts have travelled the globe evolving within a variety of art forums reflecting extensive international trajectories. The curators are Anabelle Rodriguez, Chiara Boscolo, Roberto Escobar Molina (REM).
The title of the exhibition is a direct reference to the first name given to the Island in its now over half a millennia after its initial confrontation with violent forms of extraction associated with colonialism. The first clash came with the arrival of the Spanish and what would become the genocidal saga of La Conquista del Nuevo Mundo; then a second, after the 1898 Hispano-American War, with becoming a territory of the U.S. along with the Philippines and Guam.
This is the first time in the history of La Biennale di Venezia that a group of Puerto Rican exhibitors present a proposal to represent the island-nation of Puerto Rico and to celebrate the resilience and creativity of Puerto Rican culture, while confronting the enduring legacy of its formal international political status.
The exhibition reflects the dissociation and exploitation of a colonial political system that has attempted to unravel the fraught complexities of contemporary Puerto Rican identities. The estrangement that is inherent to the colonial status is an extended act of violence resulting in a psychic malaise because of what Anibal Quijano has so aptly described and defined as “the coloniality of power”.
At the heart of the exhibition stands Celso González' monumental Yola Sculpture, "San Juan Bautista," a powerful symbol of Puerto Rico’s enduring spirit. This site-specific installation challenges the constraints of its political status, whil honoring the Island's rich maritime heritage.
Desde San Juan Bautista... is not merely an exhibition, but a new testament to the enduring spirit of Puerto Rican visual artistry. Consolato invites audiences to engage with the complexities of Puerto Rican identity and the ongoing struggle for cultural sovereignty.
An Exhibitionary Triad
From a logistical perspective, this project includes three interrelated exhibition components. Firstly, the welcoming beacon of Desde San Juan Bautista... is a large format waterborne sculpture representing a yola – a modest type of fishing boat common in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. González’s christened this yola San Juan Bautista and it is designed to be a site-specific installation. To elaborate on the story of this extraordinary boat - for it is well known that all worthy vessels have fabulous stories – it is significant to establish that the original spark and musing for the boat was first articulated by Daniel Lind-Ramos in protest of the deleterious impact of the Island’s longstanding colonial status on its ability to host, much less establish, an official pavilion in international events, such as La Biennale, where nationalsovereignty is a requirement. Puerto Rican art remains (in)visible in the sense that, even though it has been circulating around the globe beyond the United States, in it still does not command the attention of the international markets. Aptly named San Juan Bautista after the name first given to the Island and then to its capital city, the boat installation incorporates one of the artist’s popular and whimsical characters made of recovered materials, debris, and refuse collected along the beach and related environs. As a waterborne vessel, San Juan Bautista will be symbolically “moored” in the canal waters [as a reminder of the intention of having an official Puerto Rican pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in years to come.
The second component of the exhibition is made up of two scheduled performative interventions by Awilda Sterling-Duprey. These include an outdoor performance involving the San Juan Bautista boat installation, and an indoor performance with an exhibition component that will remain in situ at the Forno Exhibition Space in the Castello sestiere in Venezia. Scheduled to be performed for a limited audience during the preview days of La 60ma Biennale, the artist’s first performance will be based on a splendorous androgynous character named Vejigante Decrépito. The vejigante was first mentioned in Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote as an ambiguous character wielding an inflated “vejiga” – a pig, cow, or goat bladder – used to hit unexpecting people during Carnival in a teasing and playful yet somewhat menacing manner. The polyvalent symbolism of the Puerto Rican vejigante stands for everything that is authentic and also surreal about the Island’s carnival in Loíza and Ponce. It has become an iconic symbol of political resistance within the Island and its United States diaspora.
As a woman, the artist decided to make use of this character which for a long time was only represented and performed in public by men. This political action has empowered her over the tradition as a subversive and flexible construct. The Vejigante Decrépito performance in Venice, however, will emphasize not decrepitude of the character - su decrepitud estrafalaria – but rather its capacity for rebirth and renewal. The artist chose this character because it shares similar characteristics with other Afro-Latino and Caribbean countries, including the diablitos cojuelos of the Dominican Republic and related traditions in Jamaica and Mexico. This performance is meant to be an improvisation that interacts with unexpected “variables” – i.e. places, objects, viewers – without any intention of controlling the environment before the performance.
As a woman, the artist decided to make use of this character which for a long time was only represented and performed in public by men. This political action has empowered her over the tradition as a subversive and flexible construct. The Vejigante Decrépito performance in Venice, however, will emphasize not decrepitude of the character - su decrepitud estrafalaria – but rather its capacity for rebirth and renewal. The artist chose this character because it shares similar characteristics with other Afro-Latino and Caribbean countries, including the diablitos cojuelos of the Dominican Republic and related traditions in Jamaica and Mexico. This performance is meant to be an improvisation that interacts with unexpected “variables” – i.e. places, objects, viewers – without any intention of controlling the environment before the performance.
Exhibition at the Forno Exhibition Space in the Castello sestiere
The third component is the main collective exhibition presented in the Forno Exhibition Space near Il Arsenale in the Castello sestiere that will consist of new site-specific and performative works by Daniel Lind-Ramos and Awilda Sterling-Duprey, alongside two site-specific installations by Chemi Rosado-Seijo and Celso González.
For Desde San Juan Bautista... —an evocative title proposed by this artist—, Daniel Lind-Ramos is creating a new assemblage and site-specific installation titled Talegas de la Memoria #2 that will bring together discarded objects. His formal praxis engages with the aesthetics of the Carnival of Loíza and welcomes the shiny and shimmery through the presence of sequined textiles in the artist’s workshop that he lightly sews – hilvana – into striking assemblages. All ofwhich sometimes resonate with specific Africanist collecting all sorts of discarded materials around Loíza, including everything from dried coconuts and their stylized husky pencas, metal implements and blades in different states of decay, concrete blocks that become a menacing “fence” around coconuts, and make a visual stand for all that is vital and fertile in the surrounding environment. A rolled blue tarp issued by the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) makes a direct association with disaster-relief efforts and, in a rather poignant way, links Lind-Ramos’ work with that of other artists who also incorporate these tarps into their work. Each signifying the trauma of environmental injustice as part of the baggage and impact of Imperialism on the smallest of the small, as Puerto Rico bears the brunt of climate change together with the small islands of the world.
A roughened and thick canvas-like fabric called yute. This new installation, created as an assemblage, projects the artist’s sociocultural critique on the urban encroachment - i.e. concrete blocks circling around a pile of coconuts posed “in reverse” so as to “resist” their eventual disappearance – and the veritable cooptation and destruction of the natural realm by the built environment as an ironic signifier of “civilization”. The aesthetic and formal proposal for Talegas de la Memoria #2 alludes to the environmental stress subjected upon the cultural landscape of Loíza. Puerto Rico has experienced more than its fair share of extreme climate change in the form of catastrophic hurricanes and storms that seem to have exponentially increased in strength and velocity over the past couple of decades. Not unlike the pastiche of postmodernity, the assemblage is both formal amalgam and the conceptual synthesis of the artist’s aspirations regarding the vital importance of nature in an Island that is under constant overdevelopment while local residents become displaced through many of the same touristic strategies that have also impacted Venice in a negative manner.
The power of Daniel Lind-Ramos’ work stems from his ability to create unexpected combinations of materials and affects through his sculptural practice of assemblage as a way to hilvanar - to loosely tie together elements associated with the cultural traditions of Loíza and the embedded memories represented through the symbolism imparted by the discarded objects and debris that somehow manage to resonate deeply with the African roots of his community.
Forming part of the site-specific installation, Chemi Rosado-Seijo is a socially engaged artist who will present new and recent documentation of past and ongoing collective actions and artistic and ecological interventions in the now decades-long community-based project at El Cerro in Naranjito, Puerto Rico. Initially presented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the project began in 2001 and its current goals include turning the community into the Island’s first “Green Barriada”. A selection of El Cerro photographic documentary materials and ephemera will be assembled by the artist in one of the Forno Exhibition Space rooms.
Forming part of the site-specific installation, Chemi Rosado-Seijo is a socially engaged artist who will present new and recent documentation of past and ongoing collective actions and artistic and ecological interventions in the now decades-long community-based project at El Cerro in Naranjito, Puerto Rico. Initially presented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the project began in 2001 and its current goals include turning the community into the Island’s first “Green Barriada”. A selection of El Cerro photographic documentary materials and ephemera will be assembled by the artist in one of the Forno Exhibition Space rooms.
The other site-specific documentary installation included in the Forno Exhibition Space will consist of a display of documentary materials associated with the design and construction of the San Juan Bautista yola by Celso González, including original drawings, digital designs, a scale model sculpture of the boat, and related ephemera.
Lastly, a second and more intimate performance intervention by Awilda Sterling-Duprey is scheduled to take place within a room in the Forno Exhibition Space. Sterling-Duprey’s performance includes the practice of drawing blind-folded following sound patterns of specific music such as jazz. The artist chooses and plays a banda sonora - a soundtrack chosen for each intervention, which is usually instrumental jazz. She studies it thoroughly ahead of time: the actions, the sound metrics of the musical composition, and she already has in mind what color palette she will use to paint with her performing body. She enters the room and proceeds to draw blindfolded to specific musical scores, preferably jazz. She selects the specific music, the colors she will use in her preferred medium of thick oil crayons bars. Once she enters the room, she observes the space to establish a thorough feel for it before she sets to work. The set must be ready, the thick and pasty oil crayons in place, and her banda sonora of choice – the soundtrack for the performance – starts to play. As the soundtrack unfolds, she blindfolds herself and starts to draw while embodying the rhythm of the music in space and time. It is all improvised – and that is precisely the essence of the performance as well as the poesis of the drawing and recorded gestures left behind. This action must be documented and it must somehow “remain”, so that part of the premise and purpose of the installation is that “it stays in Venice” after the performance ends. It will be videorecorded and the remaining drawings will be displayed for the duration of this Collateral Event exhibition as part of La 60ma Biennale di Venezia.
Founder’s word
"We are honored to showcase the exceptional talent of Puerto Rico's artists at La Biennale di Venezia," said Roberto Escobar Molina, founder of Consolato. "This exhibition represents a milestone in our cultural history and reaffirms Puerto Rico's place on the global art stage.”
