The debt accrued-an absurd $945 million-is unpayable. A current example is the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) brokering a deal with private companies for the repair of the island’s electrical grid rather than relying on mutual aid agreements with mainland power companies.
It is not only the metropole that has grown rich exploiting people the Supreme Court ruled “unfit” for self-government the colonized population, in turn, has stratified and fed off its own people. A tour of “American carnage,” some might say, but the real catastrophe here is an economic and political system that profits from debt. The scenery offered a history lesson, moving through the polluting wrecks of petroleum refineries past abandoned sugar-processing facilities, backwards from the industrial age to chattel slavery. Indeed, to visit the piece, one had to travel through dead lands.
Allora & Calzadilla refuted such readings and reclaimed the piece both for the bright electricity-generating light of Puerto Rico and the darkness of a bat-lined cave the native Taíno people associated with the land of the dead. Framed by that title, the work suggests the sliding scale of tropical/primitive/feminine expounded by colonizers and travel agents alike, while the use of fluorescent tubes, as Yasmin Ramirez argues, emphasizes a sense of the industrial, replicating a mainland sentiment wherein Puerto Rico is simultaneously a tourist paradise and an outpost of the military-industrial complex. In Allora & Calzadilla’s work history stands as both tragedy and source of hope, just as the piece itself depended upon the ancient and the futuristic.įlavin-whose minimalist, fluorescent tube sculptures became famous in the 1960s-named his Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) after the colors of New York’s Puerto Rican Day parade. For those who saw it, the piece prompted reconsideration of light and space, turning the cave and its surrounding forest into a kind of cathedral, the natural intervened upon by something almost supernatural, its luminosity accompanied by a faint hum.Ĭonceptually, the piece referenced the ravages of colonialism, the obsolescence of industry, the crisis implicit in fossil fuel energy use, as well as the promise of self-sufficiency. The tubes were housed in a hermetic, climate-controlled chamber powered by solar cells. Materially, the piece consisted of three famous fluorescent tubes-artist Dan Flavin’s 1965 sculpture Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake)-recontextualized by two Puerto Rican artists in the Cueva Vientos cave in Puerto Rico’s El Convento Natural Protected Area. The artwork occasioned critical reflection on power relations, on the legacy and continuing process of colonialism-reflections linked to nature and industry, resources and electricity, that are particularly timely for Puerto Rico today. Most importantly, however, Allora & Calzadilla’s Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) functioned as a source of immanent critique. For some, it sacralized the space in which it was placed. Reframing a remote rock formation rich with traces of indigenous history and myth, this work was the object of visits resembling nothing so much as pilgrimage.
A curious work of art, located deep inside a limestone cave, deserved to be considered “religious” for multiple reasons.
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