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ABSTRACT
This article engages the debates on collective agency, autonomy, institutional practices and socially engaged art by comparatively analyzing the activity of two Caribbean artist-managed spaces which emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: BetaLocal in Puerto Rico and L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe. Based on fieldwork research and interviews with artists and art audiences, the examination of both projects will be driven by three main objectives: the first has to do with assessing in which ways both initiatives are shaped by their emergence in territories still attached to political and economic bonds. Secondly, I attempt to measure how both collective artistic organizations can approach the material conditions of cultural (re)production and autonomy, confronting the restrictions of Puerto Rican and Guadeloupean cultural and economic policies. Finally, I intend to locate my case study within a global panorama of socially engaged and collaborative artistic practice. From this perspective, I assert that collaborative practices emerging in still dependent contexts constitute a privileged viewpoint in order to examine issues of collective agency, empowerment and alternative futures.
Acknowledgements
The research developed here was produced over several long-term research stays in Puerto Rico (2010, 2012, 2015), Guadeloupe (2011) and the United States (Lilly Library, Duke University, 2013; NYU Bobst Library, New York University, 2015). I would like to acknowledge the collaboration of Joëlle Ferly in Guadeloupe, Laura Bravo López, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Pablo Guardiola and José ‘Tony’ Cruz in Puerto Rico, and Gregory Sholette in the United States. The images included in this article are courtesy of Joëlle Ferly and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Those issues have centered the art criticism from and about the region in the last decades. See Poupeye (Citation1998), Stephens (Citation2013), Thompson (Citation2006) and Wainwright (Citation2011). I have engaged this debate in Garrido Castellano (Citation2014, Citationin press). Although those insights have been crucial in order to dismount inherited visual and cognitive apparatuses of misrepresentation and commoditization of the Caribbean region, making emphasis in the multiple ways in which Caribbean creators have striven to define and assert counter-representation, less attention has been paid at organizational and infrastructural practices. Because of that, without forgetting the debates on Caribbean art, I will try to delve into those practices more in detail through long-term, practice-based, collective artistic initiatives.
2 The Caribbean currently has 14 territories that are politically linked, yet with different status, to France, Great Britain, Netherlands and the United States. The literature on the colonial and postcolonial predicament of the Caribbean region is extremely vast. Whereas this condition will be central to my argument in this article, I will not try to define what colonialism is or how does it impact Caribbean cultural practices. Instead, I will try to refer to situations in which that condition has a specific impact on artistic practices and actions.
3 The Taller Alacrán will be a pivotal platform of social and political resistance through graphic arts in the Puerto Rican context of the 1960s. It also inaugurates the romance between independent art centers and the neighborhood of Santurce in San Juan (see Díaz-Royo, Citation2008; Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos de Puerto Rico (ed.), 1998).
4 CCA7 was a Prince Klaus Awarded project created in 1997 by Charlotte Elias, which included the collaboration of Christopher Cozier, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Alice Yard, directed by Cozier, Sean Michaels and Nicholas Laughlin, was created in 2006 as a collaborative space located in downtown Port of Spain. It continues to be one of the most highly esteemed artist-managed projects in the entire Caribbean. Galvanize, organized by Mario Lewis and Steve Ouditt, was more exhibition-oriented and had a shorter life.
5 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.
6 LASA (Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín) is an art space located at the periphery of Havana, focusing 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 pedagogic project developed between 2002 and 2009. Finally, DUPP (Desde una Pragmática Pedagógica) is a public intervention collective organized also in the 2000s by the Cuban artist and teacher René Francisco Rodríguez (see Weiss, Citation2011).
7 Created in 2006 by Tirzo Martha, in the space 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.
8 Santiago Muñoz has developed a strong body of filmic work dealing with the legacy of coloniality in the island and exploring the genealogies of Puerto Rican and American anarchist and radical imaginaries. For an exhaustive view of her work, see Garrido Castellano (Citation2016). On his behalf, ‘Tony’ Cruz has focused on the relation between informational and spatial devices and power. The focus of this article on the collective dynamics developed around BetaLocal does not imply any depreciation of its founders’ careers as solo artist.
9 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.
10 See http://thepublicschool.org/.
11 Email conversation with José ‘Tony’ Cruz, Beatriz Santiago and Pablo Guardiola, March 2015. All three agree that engaging regularly with non-artistic audiences is perhaps the major challenge they have faced since the creation of BetaLocal.
12 We should not forget that the funding for that participation comes from an organization dependent on the French Ministry of Culture.
13 Especially active are the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR), both located in Santurce. The former developed a program in the 2000s aimed at helping Puerto Rican artists with questions of creativity and exhibition (http://mapr.org/es/museo/proa). The latter carries out site-specific and collaborative works, provides experimental space for workshops and artist studios, and organizes educational programs for different communities.
14 Personal interview with Beatriz Santiago and José ‘Tony’ Cruz. San Juan, June 2012.
15 In fact, the category of ‘Art d'Outre Mer’ has served as organizing idea for a series of exhibitions gathering the artistic production of former (and present) colonial territories. The Latitudes series, curated by Regine Cuzin between 2002 and 2007, or OMA. Outre-Mer Art Contemporain (2011) are good examples of this tendency.
16 As in the cases of Santiago and Cruz, the artistic work of Joëlle Ferly also responds directly to those issues. In 2009, Ferly was asked to contribute to a collective exhibition held at the Foundation Clément. The Fondation is the major art space in the Francophone Caribbean, a vast exhibitional space located in Martinique, in the space of a former plantation. 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 in demand of better salaries for low-income workers and a decrease of the cost of basic commodities, and summarizes well Ferly’s interest in engaging critically with issues of her local context.
18 Raunig and Ray (Citation2009, p. 20) refer to these measures as ‘Instituent Practice’. For them, the concept of ‘instituent practices’ marks the site of a productive tension between a new articulation of critique and the attempt to arrive at a notion of ‘instituting’ after traditional understandings of institutions have begun to break down and mutate.