In 2017 post-Maria, a few professors in the Urban Studies department at Queens College began to think about different ways to help Puerto Rico and its inhabitants after the hurricane. Together, they designed a grant and asked the QC Provost office for the grant that would help them travel to Puerto Rico in order to see the damage Maria left behind firsthand. After getting the grant approved, the professors decided that two students should join them, one from the Social Practice Master’s Program and the other from the Urban Studies Master’s Program. Together, they traveled to Puerto Rico and met with various stakeholders in order to be able to understand the effects of the hurricane and what organizations and communities were doing to help the island recover.
PORTO-RICO ACADEMIC MAY 2018 PROJECT SUMMARY
ART AGAINST AUSTERITY/MEMORIES OF DISINVESTMENT/PAGEANTRY OF RESISTANCE
Art Against Austerity/Memories of Disinvestment/Pageantry of Resistance is a research project focusing on the development of Art_Urban actions and Community Land Trusts (CLTs) as an anti-austerity movement connecting New Yorkās Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through a combination of printed visual art, counter-institutional organizing, an online video documentary platform and participatory performance we seek to physically and conceptually link conditions of disinvestment, speculation and displacement now negatively affecting residents in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This project is presented as a co-proposal between Art Department/Social Practice Queens faculty Gregory Sholette (Associate Professor) and ChloĆ« Bass (Assistant Professor) with Urban Studies faculty Rafael De Balanzo (Visiting Lecturer) and Scott Larson.Art Against Austerity advances the scholarship and creative work of all four listed faculty members by offering the chance to work with a new urban community (San Juan, Puerto Rico) at a delicate phase of urban renewal and recovery. This is an urgent time to engage in such work, and offers many unique opportunities and challenges the disciplines of both urban studies and social practice art.
Phase One: Travel to Puerto Rico. Our initial trip to work on the ground with collaborators in Puerto Rico, and at the end of phase one, we intend to write and publish a collaborative report, along with video, audio, and visual documentation of our research and interactions, to share with the Queens College community and with our collaborators in New York. In addition, this phase could culminate in a preliminary exhibit or performance detailing aesthetic aspects of time spent in San Juan.
Art Against Austerity is a social practice project connecting artists, researchers and urban tactitIans with local organizers and historians of resistance against austerity, displacement, land speculation and gentrification in and around the city of San Juan, Puerto Rican. The project is a collaboration between Social Practice Queens (SPQ), Queens College CUNY Urban Studies Department. In December of 2017 QC Provost Elizabeth Hendry and Interim Associate Provost William McClure we were generously awarded a grant to initiate phase one of the project.
Between May 12th and May 26th 2018 four researchers traveled from Queens College CUNY to San Juan Puerto Rico in order to gather information and develop contacts for our ongoing project focusing on community-based forms of rebuilding and resistance taking place on the island following the post-2008 bankruptcy and of course the devastating effects of two hurricanes in the Fall of 2017. During this initial research phase of the project I was joined by Rafael De Balanzo: a Visiting Lecturer in the QC Urban Studies Program; Naomi Kuo: MFA student concentrating in social practice art; Kimberly Torres: a QC Urban Studies graduate student, and on many days interested auditor Lucrecia Laudi traveled with us bringing along her expertise as a Washington DC-based architect/urban designer who wanted to observe how our project got off the ground. Meanwhile, back in NYC, our other project members include Chloƫ Bass: Assistant Professor of Art and co-director of SPQ; Scott Larson: Urban Studies Program Professor; Jeff Kasper: artist and SPQ Associate Administrator; Libertad Guerra: Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Loisaida Center; and Monxo Lopez: environmental activist and co-founder of South Bronx Unite.
Over the course of nine days we visited a number of projects relevant to our research ranging from governmentally funded community assistance agencies to urban gardens and various squat occupations with assorted degrees of legality. The following blog post represent a journal of my impressions, observations and questions as we move forward on this SPQ project Art Against Austerity/Memories of Disinvestment.
Day One
Monday, May 21 2018
Our first full day in San Juan began with an interview for the local PBS radio station WRTU 89.7 and was followed by an impromptu visit to CAUCE, a community activist organization that is also sponsored by the University and we concluded the day over dinner with a reflection on our initial impressions about the issues affecting the island and its residents from crushing debt, to gentrification and land speculation, to a history of environmental damage and 120 years of essentially a colonial relationship to the mainland USA.
Dr. Carmen A. Perez Herranz greeted Rafael, Kim and me (Kimberly will arrive a day later) on the San Juan, RĆo Piedras branch of the University of Puerto Rico where she escorted us to the local PBS radio station located on the campus. Dr. Herranz teaches with the faculty of General Studies and is in the process of launching an Urban Studies Doctoral Program [Herranz, Pollock, Edwards] hopefully within the next year. She is also an extraordinary font of knowledge about the issues that brought us to the island including the cycle of disinvestment, followed by so-called ārejuvenation,ā and then gentrification and displacement and expulsion of local residents, small business and native culture. For approximately an hour this morning Dr. Herranz interviewed us on the air about our project and our own research and art.
Rafael explored his activity in his hometown of Barcelona, Spain focusing on grassroots organizing to resist evictions and develop community redevelopment in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial implosion. Naomi described her work in the Asian communities of Flushing, Queens where as a native of Houston, Texas she has for the past five years observed and interacted with other Taiwanese Americans, as well as Chinese Americans. Through her collage works that combine drawing, painting and found materials she has come to understand that minority communities recreate identity through a montage-like process by redefining their culture using both memory and what is available āat hand.ā My own contribution pivoted on the anti-gentrification street art installation we carried out on New Yorkās Lower East Side in 1984 with PAD/D (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), and the site-specific historical mapping project REPOhistory produced in the 1990s, as well as our Social Practice Queens project at QC CUNY.
On and off the air, Dr. Herranz discussed with us some of the less immediately visible aspects of Puerto Ricoās history pointing out that a key turning point on the island took place in the 1940s when, in a sort of Robert Moses inspired discharge of concrete and macadam, the countryās fledgling public transit systems were discarded for miles of looping highways that connected cities and countryside into one enormous, automobile loving network. This in turn led to the suburbanization of much of the island as tropical style villages and rural landscapes were subsumed by housing developments resembling much of the US mainland. And while this superimposed
cement matrix worked well for what French Situationist theorist Guy Debord acerbically labeled āThe Dictatorship of the Automobile,ā Ā the human and environmental outcome was a fragmentation of organically structured social spaces and ecologies leading to fractured communities and spaces not unlike greaterĀ Los Angeles or The Bronx. Logically at this time Puerto Rico became increasingly dependent on the US car industry and of course the petroleum economy, while at the same time local agriculture, industries and crafts were dispersed and replaced with a system of imported foods and services, a reality we discovered first hand when shopping for groceries and finding that the only produce we found grown in Puerto Rico was basil, the only product was a bottle of hot pepper sauce.
During our visit to the University we discovered a space squatted by students. We also met with professors Eva de Lourdes Edwards, Gene Edwards and Janet Saumell a graduate student working with Dr. Herranz. Their range of interests was captivating and included studying the history and culture of the Caribbean region through its poetry and literature (Dr. Eva Edwards), focusing on the underground street art and graffiti that often expresses the real subterranean feelings of Puerto Ricans (Gene Edwards), and the macro suburbanization of the island by US-based development policies starting as far back as the 1940s and 1950s (Dr. Carmen Herranz). In conversations with graduate student Janet Saumell āwhose family came to PR from Cuba years earlierā it became clear that one immaterial but no less significant outcome of both the islandās ongoing economic crisis (especially after the 2008 real estate and financial meltdown), followed by the two 2017 hurricanes (Maria and a lesser degree Irma) is a collective paradigm shift in which many Puerto Ricans who once imagined themselves to be middle class Americans now view their status visa-vie the United States as second-class citizens living in a colony. This was a sentiment in fact echoed by other island residents throughout the time of our visit.
Later the same day we drove a short distance from the campus to a unique community action project run by the University known as CAUCE: Centro de AcciĆ³n Urbana, Comunitaria y Empresarial de RĆo Piedras (The Urban, Community and Business Action Center of RĆo Piedras), though driving in San Juan was complicated by the absence of most traffic lights following Mariaās devastation of the cityās infrastructure. What I found impressive however, is they way Puerto Rican drivers have worked-out a system for dealing with this problem. A certain number of cars would flow through an intersection in one direction. Then this group would stop and wait for the perpendicular streetās traffic to do the same, just as if an invisible green, yellow and red light hovered overhead as always. This urban gallantry became more complicated with multi-lane boulevards involving left turns across several lanes of traffic. And yet even this complicated maneuver was managed with remarkable calm. Hardly did I even hear a car horn during my entire trip. Whether or not such self-restraint is particular to Puerto Rican island culture, or a development in response to extreme post-Maria conditions is unclear, but methinks were a similar signaling blackout to befall Manhattan the outcome unlikely be so civil, at least based on my forty some years of experience on our concrete island.
CAUCEās Executive Director Dr. Mercedes Rivera Morales generously met with our research group on short-notice. She described to us that CAUCEis a locally-based organization that is simultaneously a program supported by the University. CAUCEās mission is to assist the nearby community in rebuilding the economy of the river basin region, though the project has also engaged in resistance to top-down development schemes. When the Puerto Rican government began excavating a site for an enormous new government office tower that it claimed would serve as a spur for regenerating the areaās businesses, community members had reason to believe that residential displacement and gentrification would be the actual outcome of the project. CAUCE supported neighborhood demonstrators who protested and also chained themselves to construction site equipment, ultimately stopping the tower from being realized.
As an organization, CAUCE appears to be an unusual admixture of top-down and bottom-up grass roots activity. With funding from a large institution (the University) CAUCEās local focus is centered within the specific community of Rio Piedras āa formerly independent municipality set along the shores of the river Piedras until its 1951 incorporation into San Juan proper. At the same time its larger goals appear dedicated to bringing about social change on a far broader level. For example, in her small neat office Dr. Morales has posted a copy of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals logo with its 17 objectives aimed at ending poverty and hunger, gender equality and renewable energy. Sitting on her desktop is also a calendar from Barcelona, Spain, perhaps the leading center for bottom-up urban transformation and direct-democracy. Barcelona also happens to be Professor Rafael BalanzĆ³ās home country and the city where his research is primarily focused. These seemingly coincidental connections became less accidental in nature after further conversations with Dr. Morales whose commitment to social change at the local level is clearly informed by a more comprehensive analysis of poverty and injustice situated at the global level.
At the end of our first day of research Rafael whipped up a delicious and filling vegetarian & pasta meal in which sweet onions and garlic dominated Barcelona style, as Naomi innovated a fine salad dressing using clementine oranges and cashew nuts (we forgot to purchase lemons or vinegar). This gave us another opportunity for discussion in which soon enough questions about own position and roles as visiting academics, artists and architects, but also as outsiders to PR. Perhaps inevitably the paradigm of the so-called Creative Cities /Creative Class was a topic of debate including How do/did artists and academics fit in to that model? Has it failed? Did it ever really work/have any merit? Could these ideas be āreusedā in a form more in keeping with the commons and resistance to gentrification/displacement? Finally, how do we avoid producing a research paper and exhibition that will join the many, many other research white papers and art shows about these concerns, and yet in which nothing very much seems to actually improve?
Day Two. Tuesday, May 22
This morning we were joined by Queens College Urban Studies graduate student Kimberly Torres, thus completing the research team for this initial phase of the project Art Against Austerity/Memories of Disinvestment. Today we focused the first half of the day visiting a couple of artists in the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce, then followed this up with a trip to a government and university sponsored development company on the Cantera Peninsula whose mission is to provide residents in one particular environmentally precarious part of the city with support, including relocation to non-flood prone neighborhoods but also in some instances legal title to their own homes that were often built by the residents or their parents using construction techniques apparently lost today.
Uziel Orlandi is a 20-something muralist in his own right and led us on a tour of the local graffiti subculture. Taking us to the Calle Canals underpass we were dazzled by spray-paint masterpieces the likes I have not seen in NYC since the 1970s and early 1980s (thought I have come across such street art in Barcelona and Athens). Though Javiar said he studied art for a while at the Escuela de Artes PlĆ”sticas y DiseƱo de Puerto Rico in Old San Juan (the art school, not the University) he expressed a strong alienation from the āart worldā of museums and galleries, preferring instead a DIY approach to culture, an outlook that he insisted is commonplace amongst people of his generation. Proof of this assertion was not long in coming. Our next visit was with a Santurce-based painter, graphic artist and silk-screen entrepreneur. Uziel showed us to the back of a painfully ordinary photocopy shop where artist Javier Matura screens images and logos on bags, t-shirts and makes posters, some of his own design. His latest work was a graphic announcement for the 1970s post-punk New York band Television. Javier also expressed his disinterest in, or perhaps more accurately, his enmity towards āhighā art, which both he and Javier associate with academic and institutional discourse.
Perhaps this rejection of white cube aesthetics and the link to 1970s/1980s DIY punk and post-punk music and culture is not entirely coincidental? I could not help but think of groups and projects I encountered in NYC back then including Collaborative Projects akd COLAB, The Real Estate Show, The Times Square Show, and East Village Art in general with its gritty, anti-formalist aesthetic that sought to overturn the abstract modernist paradigm of Greenberg et al. But if true, what on earth was this four decades old artistic model doing here in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2018?
In the afternoon of our second day we traveled to a government sponsored program set on a lumpy peninsula that projects into the San JosƩ Lagoon roughly separating the larger urban area of San Juan from its airport. Decades earlier this region was settled by farmers and other rural migrants seeking to move close to the city in search of work. The Company for the Integral Development of the Cantera Peninsula (Company for the Integral Development of the Cantera Peninsula) comes in. The Company is a government sponsored program that works to upgrade local water, sewage and power systems, but most notably it also obtains proper legal titles to these decades-old homes, thus transforming residents into property owners.
Seeking to serve the peopleās needs while guarding the fragility of the peninsulaās ecology is the stated mission of the Company explained spokesperson and project engineer Alfredo PĆ©rez Zapata. Using a set of aerial maps he provided us with an overview of the Companyās target region and then offered to take us for a tour around the immediate neighborhood. We moved from his air-conditioned office to the hot and humid outdoors where Mr. Zapata pointed-out with barely concealed pride that many of the locally constructed homes withstood hurricane Maria rather impressively thanks to the indigenous building skills of an older generation of Puerto Ricans.
As we walked he pointed out the colloquial construction methods employed by residents involving combinations of wood, poured concrete, sheet metal roofs and siding, all of which is then set above an elevated foundation to guard against flooding. In other words, according to Mr. Zapata the locals had a sort of local, DIY knowledge regarding how to rig a structure against storm water and wind. Sometime in the 1960s he believes, this local knowledge vanished. In any case, while the Company sports its own sleek, newly fabricated community center overlooking the lagoon, the surrounding vernacular homes are at the heart of its mission to established property rights for their owners. Is this program pushing back against the mass modernization of the island as explained by Dr. Herranz? We were left with more questions than answers. The Companyās approach also made me think of the once highly touted thesis to end poverty that was offered by Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto Polar in his 2000 book The Mystery of Capital.
De Sotoās methods were endorsed by Bill Clinton, Vincente Fox, Milton Friedman and even Margaret Thatcher among other prominent pro-market policy makers. His thesis is pretty straight forward. Why, he asks, does capitalism succeed in certain Western nations even as it fails in the Global South and elsewhere? The answer is that most residents of developing or underdeveloped nations are not actually property owners, not legally entitled to where they actually live, even though many have done so for generations. This means they have no way to enter into a system of leveraged credit to say startup a small business or make home improvements.
De Sotoās process of legitimating ādead capitalā sought to bring back to life populations that now remain in the shadows of informal economies involving barter and other forms of non-market exchange. such gray economies undergird the actual social fabric of many developing and underdeveloped countries. De Soto proposed moving such assets from the margins underground into the formal economy where everyone would benefit: capitalists, businesspeople and the newly minted landowners turned consumers. In short, this is land reform without casualties. No expropriation or redistribution of property, only the tedious research task of providing people with a legal title to their actual residencies.
However, this neoliberal necromancy has not always worked its magic as planned. Swedish economic theorist Staffan GranĆ©r points out that āwhat de Soto presents as a simple confirmation of the informal rules is in fact a battlefield of conflicting interests and legal claims.ā In other words, concrete issues of history, class and ultimately relations of power are not necessarily erased by legalizing claims to property, in fact they can be exacerbated leaving newly established land owners vulnerable to vulture capitalists and other speculators. But whether or not this caution pertains to the situation in Puerto Rico in general or to the Cantera Peninsula project is unclear. In truth we all thought that this program had merit on the face of it, especially if it is really backed up by the government when and if deep pocket developers came a calling with an eye to building luxury condominiums and hotels beside the lagoon. As we strolled snapping pictures along the way like visitors from another world, many people greeted Mr. Zapata with obvious deference and more than once he stopped to chat with them. This was clearly not a cold institutional relationship. We also came across some curious public art installations with stuffed animals bound to a tree and a jet plane made of painted rubble (signs of dark matter creativity?). And all the while throughout our excursion a furry micro-municipality of neighborhood dogs, feral cats and one small pig kept track of our movements.
Day Three
Wednesday, May 23
Our primary task for the third day was to make our own brief presentations to students at the University of Puerto Rico working on urban studies coursework. Dr. Herranz introduced our team and one-by-one we discussed various aspects of our individual research and practice. I again focused on arts-related interventions from 1980s and 1990s New York and the Lower East Side (Loisaida), but also added documentation about my work with Gulf Labor Coalition, the informally organized international group of artists and cultural workers focused on labor justice for migrant workers involved with constructing high art museums including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Gulf Labor asks āwho builds your architecture?ā
Naomi displayed images of her large collage works based on Flushing, Queens Chinatown and discussed the aesthetics of what she called āAsian Spacesā involving the reuse of materials and the hybridization of identities whereby immigrants construct a relationship to their place of origin. She also pointed out that this āMinority-Majorityā neighborhood has its own internal conflicts of nationality and class given the combination of Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Korean and other groups that make it up.
Naomi concluded with a description of her quilting project āCommon Thread,ā a collaboration with Queens Memory at the Queens Library where local residents of all ethnicities gather and are encouraged to exchange sewing skills and reflect on their own histories.
Rafael presented his research involving the application of adaptive cycle theory to cycles of urban transformation in Barcelona from 1953 to 2017, in which two temporal developmental loops, the first dominated by private capital interests, the second emerging from networks of horizontal cooperative social movements including squatters, activists and community land associations. Citing from his work with Nuria Rodriguez-Planas āThe heterogeneity of these social networks (shadow groups) fosters learning and social innovation and gives them the flexibility that the front-loopās dominant groups lack to trigger change not only within but also across spatial scale (local community-based, neighborhood, city) and time dimensions, promoting a cross-scale process of revolt and stabilization, also known as Panarchy.ā Wikipedia defines Panarchy as a combination of: ā1) ecology and complex systems, 2) technology, and 3) politics.ā While āthe āpanā of ecological thinking draws on the Greek-god Pan as a symbol for wild and unpredictable nature.ā
Kimberly acknowledged that she is still in a learning phase and interested in the way Community Land Trusts and hurricane relief efforts have or have not been successful as a means of opposing or reducing gentrification and displacement on the island.
Community Land Trusts as a means of fighting gentrification, displacement and uncontrolled commercial development is also the focus of Dr. Scott Larsons own research (see: Imagining Social Justice and the False Promise of Urban Park Design.) Following our discussions we had lunch with Dr. Herranz and students Gabriela Rebollo and Abner Fernandez. Gabriel provided some additional sites for us to visit including a squatted space on Day Five, while Abner commented dryly that while there is a lot of collective activity at the moment in Puerto Rico though very little collectivism. He reiterated that following the economic crisis and the storms the island has been revealed to be a colony of the United States above all else. He intends to move to Estonia to study semiotics at the University of Tartu. āWe have no Puerto Rican identity per se because the island is pretty homogenous. We are not American, not Nuyorican, not ever really Puerto Rican. We are simply āus.āā
Day Four
Thursday, May 24
Thursday afternoon we traveled to Old San Juan to meet with Charles Juhasz-Alvarado and Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero who manage the remarkable art center La Casa De Los Contrafuertes. On the way there we spotted an enormous cruise ship towering over the harbor that brought about a flashback to recent travels in Venice, Italy where locals battle invasive tourism from the very same gleaming white multi-story vessels carrying thousands of passengers. The incongruity of scale is startling (for more about this phenomenon in Venice and its link to the art world and biennial see my piece: Venice Biennale ā meet the activists repurposing the global art show.)
Once we arrived at the Contrafuertes space Charles and Ana took us on a tour of the centerās exhibition galleries, artist residency accommodation, and a large outdoor garden area which contains a stage for performances. It was immediately clear that their project has managed to claw-back a piece of Old San Juan from speculators and high-end luxury retailers by converting a former government museum into what might best be described as a Gesamtkunstwerk or all embracing, total work of art incorporating residencies for artists, a vegetable garden, exhibition spaces and a beehive themed library and reading room. Every detail of the building has been re-imagined from floor to ceiling to window treatments and hanging lights. Even an expertly installed exhibition of Haitian art works entitled āHaiti Aquiā offered an opportunity for subtle interventions including a rusted chain along the base of one wall to a framework of Russian Constructivist-like lattices holding up and framing several pieces. The overall effect made installations at the Museo de Arte ContemporĆ”neo de Puerto Rico look remarkably conservative and uninspired.
For many years Charles has taught at the nearby art school (Museo de Arte ContemporĆ”neo de Puerto Rico) and is highly regarded as both artist and teacher within the broader art community on the island and beyond. Ana Rosa is a renowned sculptor herself who graduated from the art school in 1992. They are in a sense part of an older Old San Juan arts community. Together they impressed upon us the many challenges involved with running The Contrafuertes space including dealing with the government (that provides some support), expenses for programming (as artists they know how important it is to pay people who assist with events, though funds to do so are often lacking), and also pushing back against what they see as unscrupulous offerings to assist from potential backers with a very different vision of the project than their own. At one point Charles characterized one such encounter as a blatant art washing strategy where fiscal sponsorship would require artists to āperformā as, well as artists by working in studios made visible to the public, thus exhibiting the creative city as these precarious cultural laborers are soon replaced by upscale lofts and āartsyā retail stores. We know the drill, as does Charles and Ana who, needless to say, rejected this mode support.
And there are the dreaded ābit-coin people.ā Charles described to us a visit from a couple of handsome young rich investors from California touting a surplus of crypto-currency capital and eager to become patrons of La Casa De Los Contrafuertes. Honestly, my initial thought was that this story reflected the somewhat eccentric artistic disposition of Charles until we began hearing the same scenario from a number of the people we met on our trip. A bit of Googling verified the veracity of the report. As one journalist puts it these ācryptocurrency entrepreneurs have moved to Puerto Rico to build a crypto utopia ā initially dubbed Puertopia but now named Sol ā where they plan to pay little in taxes.ā
Later in the evening Contrafuertes hosted a jazz program that drew a sizable crowd to the center. Notable among these visitors was formerly incarcerated artist, theorist and poet Elizam Escobar who was sentenced in 1980 to 68 years in prison for being a member of the Puerto Rican independence group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de LiberaciĆ³n Nacional or Armed Forces of National Liberation). After serving almost twenty years in am Evanston, Illinois facility outside Chicago he received clemency from outgoing President Clinton. Escobar has exhibited at ABC No Rio here in NYC and the Museum of art in Ponce, Puerto Rico where he was born in 1948. His theoretical work appears in journals such as Third Text and Left Curve where he addresses the role of the artist as a prisoner of wart. He comments at one point that āsurrounded by obscenity, art becomes a salvation, the sacred activity of liberty.ā [See: Escobar, Elizam. āThe Heuristic Power of Art.ā In The Subversive imagination: Artists, Society, and Responsibility, edited by Carol Becker, 1994. ]
My own art studies at The Cooper Union in the late 1970s crossed paths with New York based supporters of Puerto Rican independence as I discuss in the afterword to Mary Pattenās memoir Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective. Still, stepping back some I can not help note that the Contrafuertes jazz event gathered together a certain generation of artists, academics and cultural figures, many of whom have strong connections to the art world outside of Puerto Rico including on that other island of Manhattan in New York City where guests I chatted with told me they either taught or exhibited at one time or another. This realization was coupled by the absence of the cityās younger cadre of DIY street artists at the event.
Day Five
Friday, May 25
According to CNN, as of April 2018 Puerto Rico had closed some 283 schools, with most at only 60% of capacity. But while blame for the school closings is placed on people leaving the island in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, there appears to be much more to the situation. According to the New York Times āIn March [2018], the governor signed a law that for the first time will allow for the establishment of charter schools and vouchers. Charter schools are publicly funded, but independently run. Vouchers, which allow public money to be spent on private schools, are praised by some for giving more choice to parents. Opponents contend that they drain money from public schools.ā
On the evening of our fifth day we dropped in on one self-organized community response to this abandonment when we visited an empty public school on Calle Loiza that local cultural activists Mariana Reyes, musician Tito Matos and legal activist Taina Moscosa ArabĆa were involved with recycling the vacant city property. Obtaining permission from a San Juan councilperson who arrived to officially reopen the space, people soon gathered about, taking brooms to sweep away algae-streaked standing water and setting up microphones and loudspeakers. Soon after activists and locals spoke to the crowd with genuine enthusiasm and hopes that this would be the first step towards seeing the empty school put to a community-oriented use involving music, art and other cultural activities, even though it would not be functioning again as an educational center, or at least not in the near future, so we were informed.
Day Six
Saturday, May 26
Todayās visits involved two different approaches to reusing abandoned properties in the city. Our first trip was to Casa Taft, a modest sized building in the Santurce area of San Juan where Marina Moscoso ArabĆa (sister of Taina Moscoso ArabĆa who we met the previous day) is part of a group resurrecting the abandoned house at Calle Taft 169, but is also developing a strategy to leverage the recovered property into a case study for changing housing law. The project began as so many of these do with tending the outside gardens of Casa Taft, then grew into a clean-up and re-painting of its exterior. Marina is an incredibly energetic person and described with drama the spirited and at times argumentative discussion over what color the house should be (greatly limited by available cans of paint) until one proposal gained support: transform the facade of the house into what appears to be a tilted picture frame or giant Polaroid snapshot of the property itself. The self-referential gesture ironically winks-back at those who enjoy āruin-pornā images of post-crisis Puerto Rico, though it also seems to be saying to real estate speculators āthis is not for sale, we who live here occupy it.āā
Inside the cluttered and far from renovated living room of Casa Taft activist lawyer Marina explained to us that her group declared themselves āprofessional squatters.ā Marinaās stated aim is to rework Puerto Ricoās 2016 Civil Code so that instead of always favoring property owners āincluding those who have forsaken responsibility for their own buildingsā the new statute will reward those who rescue abandoned properties and return them to life within the neighborhood. āWe are all heirsā is the slogan Marina and her group seek to turn into law. She and her collaborators previously enacted a law declaring abandoned property a āpublic nuisance,ā and thus somewhat more open to legal occupation, squatting and recovery.
Significantly, she envisions Casa Taft as a future ācivic center,ā as opposed to a ācultural centerā (such as the school her sister is developing at the school a few blocks away). Which is to say, Marina sees her project and its civic mission as a way to demand expansion of government services such as sanitation, power, education and so forth, precisely the type of public services and assets that the current government are apparently seeking to privatize. Ideally, Casa Taft will become both a physical and juridical bulwark against that process, which is so central to the neoliberal policy model.
Later in the day we were joined by University student Gabriela Rebollo who took us to what might best be described as a ānon-professionalā squat. We arrived at a previously abandoned office building now being occupied by a group of younger activists (younger than either Marina or Taina) amd whose collective ambition pivots on creating an autonomous living space and community for themselves, rather than transforming the legal structure more broadly. Our group was proudly shown the structural improvements made by Pedro and his group including a library and a pair of large plastic cisterns to the roof for collecting rainwater. It was impossible not to note that this technique for gaining water independence from the municipal infrastructure (which is of course badly damaged from both the bankruptcy and storms) harkens back to the vernacular home constructions we witnessed on the peninsula. Nevertheless, Pedro moved to Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic and is himself part of a number of minorities who face their own struggles with discrimination on the island.
Pedroās conversation was punctuated with references to the theories of Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire and I posted a mental sticky note to ask him if they could use donated books, but then forgot to follow up (an actual sticky note would have worked better I suspect). Still, one thing Pedro also emphasized is the importance of researching the ownership of a given building before occupying it. Only the legal owner he insisted could request the police evict squatters, so when a space has no provenance such action is less likely to take place. Nonetheless, a day or two later we got word that the police did arrive at the squat with the alleged owner, though this news or its outcome remains unconfirmed as of now.
Our final trip of this day took us back to the Old San Juan area where we visited the murals, gardens and other projects developed by the group Brigada PDT (Puerto De Tierra). BPDT was organized in 2014 by Luis Agosto-Leduc, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga and JesĆŗs Bubu NegrĆ³n, and this past December 2nd, the group flew to the Queens Museum in Flushing (from where SPQ hails) in order to receive a 2017 Visible Award.
A bus stop made from reused materials is a useful artwork. And working with children and residents in the nearby community their murals appear to be one way the neighborhood defines its own identity, just as their garden project (gardens were ubiquitous on this trip, often inspired we are told by similar projects in Detroit and other US post-industrial cities) has such botanicals as cotton
plants and al mond trees growing within it.
Luis mused that locals have not been greatly interested in growing vegetables in their space, and yet they soon noticed residents did come to gather medicinal herbs. Taking a queue from this activity BPDT is now bottling its own tonic (a splash or two of which my overheated feet found incredibly invigorating).
Day Seven
Sunday, May 27
We left Sundayās schedule as a day to drive outside the San Juan city limits. We visited the nearby smaller city center of Caguas about 20 miles away, followed by a longer drive down to Ponce on the islandās Southwest coast. Arriving first in Caguas we lucked upon a yoga class taking place within a large exhibition and multi-use cultural space located in the heart of the city. This turned out to be just one part of Urbe Apie, a collective project organized in 2015 that, according to an interview on the Red Solidaridad website, arose out of the ālack of access to art and culture in the Urban Center of Caguas,ā as much as it did from young people watching their own city center gradually become a ghost-town following the 2008 crisis. These homegrown cultural activists decided to take ācharge of through art and culture to occupy abandoned and / or disused spaces; and invite the community to walk and occupy these spaces, in order to boost economic growth that benefits us all.ā
After explaining our research mission to local activist Omar Ayala Gonzalez he welcomed us with bottles of cold water and then gave us a walking tour of the murals and gardens Urbe Apie has developing in several locations around the largely abandoned town center. One of the projectās stated objectives is to provide locally grown food for Caguas downtown residents, an ambitious goal, though one Rafael said is being attempted in parts of his native Barcelona.
Urbe Apieās garden was the largest and most organized of all those we witnessed on our research trip and included a papaya tree laden with large green fruit. Omar also explained that in light of the start of the new hurricane season (officially kicking off June First) the group is attempting to gather, dry and store seeds and nuts for the future.
We were also struck by the large number of new and prominent parking meters installed up and down the streets surrounding what is almost entirely deserted commercial city center. When asked about this Omar, who studied law and humanities at the University, explained to us that this is one of the obvious examples of disconnect between government policy makers and those people living in the actual conditions on the ground in places such as Caguas.
Still, the townās limited resources and obvious struggles were not an impediment to Omarās spirit. āHere the houses have identityā he said, āthe streets have history.ā That sense of situated, physical memory was another thread that ran throughout many of our encounters while in Puerto Rico. It is a force that is not the same as nostalgia, but as Iranian artist Golrokh Nafisi points out when speaking about her home of Tehran,āwhat Iām talking about is actively remembering. I consciously and actively donāt use the word ānostalgia,ā because nostalgia is not political; it is the end of politics. What Iām talking about is remembering with the aim of claiming; It is not just remembering is it narrating your own story and to locate it in the historyā¦ Iām studying about ā Safar namehā (travel journal), an old form of writing about cities in which is descriptive but also generates imagination.ā
*
The tension between a romantic view of the past and one in which history disturbs the present is a phenomenon that I have described as the politics of archival resistance. And yet the gap between these positions can be quite narrow, just as urban ruins can unquestionably wield a powerful aesthetic affect uponus as if harboring a material agency that we are simultaneously drawn to and repelled by. We left Urbe Apie and Caguas behind and I drove the team a couple of hours to Ponce where our first stop was the famed art museum with an excellent, if at times sensational, collection of paintings and sculpture all housed in galleries labeled with corporate names such as UBS, Firstbank and Coca Cola Puerto Rico. That does not prevent some of the works from taking on a critical view of the islandās relationship to the US mainland, including such graphic works from the 1950s by Lorenza Homar and Carlos Raquel Rivera, the latter whose series āColonial Election and Hurricane From The North,ā left little doubt about his view towards āAmerica.ā
* Cited from a 2018 interview by Setare S. Arashloo with Golrokh Nafisi entitled āBody and (Above) the City: A conversation with the Girls of Enghelab.ā
Before returning to San Juan we intentionally detoured up winding roads on a nearby hill to find the skeletal remains of a once impressive hotel overlooking Ponce below. Inside broken pipes, wiring and ductwork dangled from ragged concrete cavities that still defined various spaces from individual chambers, to a kitchen and what might have been a vast ballroom. Everywhere we looked, in space after crumbling space, we found a comprehensive eyeful of graffiti in every imaginable size, color and style. It seems that even in the midst of ruin something stirs.
Day Seven and Eight
Monday, May 28th & Tuesday May 29th
Our final meeting with Carmen Herranz was a less formal affair, taking place at her suggestion on a hilltop far above San Juan where we gathered on a badly damaged wooden viewing platform that serves as a meeting place for lovers (our presence barely interrupted a young couple locked in embrace), as well as an accidental soundstage that amplifies the amphibious chorus of countless Coqui tree frogs. Looking down we also noticed something impossible to see from the street, a sweeping patchwork of blue FEMA tarps covering building after building whose rooftops were swept away by Mariaās winds some eight months earlier. Were we staring down at Houston or Louisiana or even New York City after Superstorm Sandy, it is unimaginable that such basic repairs would remain unattended to, especially as the new hurricane season arrives.
Before flying out the next afternoon Naomi and I visited the San Juan Contemporary Art Museum once again to cover some rooms we missed earlier. One installation in particular made us spellbound. Artist Pablo Delan required an entire gallery to install his work āThe Museum of the Old Colony.ā And rightly so. The work consists of carefully selected and enlarged archival materials that throw a cold nasty light on the way America first āliberatedā the island from the Spanish in 1898, treating inhabitants with a combination of patronizing condescension and outright subjugation. We learned that as early as the 1950s local attempts at creating an independence movement were repressed by soldiers under the command of a hysterical anti-communist US military. Racial debasement runs throughout the found images and texts. The project presented us with inescapable documents of historical cruelty, yet Delan delivers it to us with an icy calm, making it all the more ghastly and impossible to dismiss. Naomi and I realized that this exhibition is where our research excursion should have begun.
White bean tortilla prepared by Rafael
Phase Two: Integration of Puerto Rico research with partners in the Lower East Side (Manhattan) and the South Bronx. Based on the results of our initial round of workshops, interviews, collaborations, and experiences in San Juan, we will return to NYC partners at Loisaida, South Bronx Unite, and of course the larger Queens College art and urban studies communities to re-stage tactics that worked, improve on those that didnāt, and solidify research proposals to prepare for phase three.
Phase Three: Pageantry. This phase of work focuses on defining, staging, and performing aesthetic outcomes of research, and may include artistic approaches to urban data visualizations, public interventions both in New York and San Juan, informational street campaigns for community engagement, or other outcomes, to be determined by the results of phases one and two, what seems most urgent, and how best to design that urgency into art both in the short-term, and to be packaged for remote dissemination ongoingly.
Support for Phase One will be invaluable as we determine measurable outcomes, place-based interventions, and strong collaborative strategies for phases two and three of the project.
Art Against Austerity/Memories of Disinvestment/Pageantry of Resistance contributes to many elements of Queens Collegeās mission and strategic plan, but for the purposes of this grant we choose to highlight the following:
ā Preparing students to become leading citizens in a global society. This projectās rigorous multidisciplinary approach, combining formal research with experiential and artistic tactics, emphasizes multi-form learning as an essential practice of public, collaborative engagement.
ā Creating a broad range of intellectual and social communities. Fostering collaboration between American New Yorkers and American Puerto Ricans calls to attention the issues we face, and which connect us, across geographic boundaries but within aspects of shared culture.
ā Deep commitment to teaching. By including Mastersā level students as an essential part of this research trip, our project expands the site of learning beyond the classroom and offers invaluable opportunities to collaborate with professors as well as with local communities outside of our campus.
THE NEXT PHASE: REALIZING THE PROJECT: STAY TUNED!
The existing scholarly/creative work of the four contributing faculty members as relevant to the development of Art Against Austerity:
ā Gregory Sholette (Art) has long been involved with community-based creative projects focusing on housing and labor equity from his efforts with interdisciplinary collaborative group REPOhistory, which focused on historyās relationship to contemporary society, to his ongoing organizing efforts with GULF Labor and its attempts to artistically illuminate poor worker practices perpetuated by major cultural institutions. This work also dovetails with recent creative research projects Dr. Sholette has conducted with students from Social Practice Queens (SPQ) such as the Precarious Workers Pageant staged in the 2015 Venice Biennale.
ā ChloĆ« Bass (Art) has conducted art- and architecture-based research connecting similar urban development efforts in disparate cities and states, including a major 2010 – 2012 project linking Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the art and architecture organization SUPERFRONT, supported in part by the Queens Museum (New York), Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles), Marygrove College (Detroit) and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico.
ā Rafael De Balanzo (Urban Studies) is an artist, urban designer, and researcher studying cycles of urban change. His recent work has focused on the role of the arts in urban resilience, focusing on efforts in Catalonia and particularly in the city of Barcelona. He recommends strategies beyond traditional government intervention, focusing on grassroots elements of design, human congregation, and political engagement. He is particularly focused on reorganization methods instituted in the aftermath of crisis, including climate change and natural disasters. His work has been supported by the Goethe Institut among other institutions.
ā Scott Larson (Urban Studies) conducts research/work centered around urban development, with a particular focus on alternatives to existing capital-centric, real estate-oriented models. He is currently investigating Community Land Trusts as a mechanism for extracting housing from the market (as a first step toward housing as a universal, human right) and for reorienting political, economic power at the community level. Heās interested in unpacking CLTs not merely as the geographic container of resistance, but as the site and political/economic/organizational structure of community led action. Scottās existing research on this topic includes a paper recently accepted for publication with Environment and Planning A that explores the role of representation in the development of urban parks as vehicles for capital accumulation and gentrification.
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION SAN JUAN PUERTO-RICO 