The Caribbean has often experienced a history of confusion and misunderstanding.
It has been perceived from the outside through a colonial gaze, represented in the conquistador who arrived at the islands wearing a helmet and armor and entered an exotic world.
It means embracing sexualization, voracious capitalism, the all-inclusive
resort
, oil barrels and tropical storms as a way of approaching this enigmatic world.
The Caribbean as an object of desire, of domination, remains latent in the heart of the Western white man.
It is forgotten that this is a changing and floating universe and that it is more of a mental construction than a specific region drawn on a map.
In reality, he lives embedded in a one-room studio in New York, in the kitchen of a Five Guys, on a computer connected to Wi-Fi from the jungle, in the electronics store of an English-speaking Indian descendant of a family that has centuries living there or in reggaeton.
The Caribbean bathes a territory without walls that in recent years has tried to acquire a new meaning and dust itself off from that reification that has even created a rugged self-perception.
'Maniel 01' (2021), work by Engel Leonardo.
Óscar PERNAS MARTINEZ
Its history is also crossed by uprooting, diaspora, forced or chosen exile.
A constant change, movement and displacement.
The painter Freddy Rodríguez was born in 1945 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, and was exiled to New York fleeing Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, that exaggerated and bloodthirsty dictator who ended up buried in the Mingorrubio cemetery, in Madrid, where he is now accompanied by the corpse, or what remains of it, of Francisco Franco Bahamonde.
Rodriguez, who died in Queens at age 76 from Lou Gehring's disease, looked like he had landed on Mars.
The dominant cultural scene barely paid attention to Latin Americans.
He began, at a very young age, painting Manhattan skyscrapers during his lunchtime from the job that guaranteed him bread.
He cultivated other genres such as
collage
and sculpture, he used metal with canvas, earth, glass, sawdust.
But his true love was geometric abstraction.
In his period of maturity he returned to the themes of the Caribbean with an inevitable point of reference, colonization.
He did not ignore the immigrant experience, the tension of arriving in a strange place with your customs on your back, nor the sexual scandals of the Catholic Church.
He expressed the racism he suffered through color and shapes.
He paid tribute to the living, also to the dead.
He erected an outdoor monument to remember those who died in an American Airlines plane crash bound for the Dominican Republic, which occurred just after takeoff from JFK.
There it is still, a curved wall on which the names of the victims are engraved.
When it was his time, Rodríguez was considered by critics as an American artist, that kind of visa that is granted to talent but is hidden from everyday life.
Caribbean artists have been pioneers in 'performance', conceptual and environmental art in the Colombian context
However, his mental framework, his personality, rested on the Caribbean idea.
His work represents this incessant transfer of humanity and objects, and that is why it is part of the program
The shore, the tide and the current: an oceanic Caribbean
, which will be exhibited in this year's edition at Arco, the contemporary art fair in Madrid .
The exhibition is commissioned by Sarah Hermann, curator and historian, and Carla Acevedo-Yates, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA).
Both speak with great enthusiasm about Freddy Rodríguez.
And it is not that they focus only on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, that preconceived idea, but that they cover artists such as Gaëlle Choisne, who lives in Paris, with a Haitian mother, or the Belgian-Beninese born in Port-au-Prince Adler Guerrier.
In every summary there is a reductionism, but the intention of this exhibition, from the name, proposes to free us from prejudging and stop looking for palm trees, bikinis, decapitated roosters.
“We talk about an oceanic sea and that sea refutes the fragmented, the disconnected, the insular concept that has always been given to the Caribbean as a space.
It is one of the ways we have found to communicate this,” explains Hermann over a video call.
Acevedo-Yates joined the conversation, rigid in her chair.
Logics are colonial legacies, she explains.
Poetry and poetics have helped challenge the forms and structures that come from dominant empires over the centuries.
We are another West, Hermann adds, that the history of art, as told, has not contributed to the understanding of non-European cultures.
They both agree that this cannot lead to writing a list of grievances and acting like mourners.
But neither can I describe this reality from the magical, the wonderful, the extraordinary, the men who become animals, as Alejo Carpentier said.
Of course, this idea is also directly related to what a child, who slept on a mattress next to his grandfather's bed, conceived in his head and spread around the world with his books.
Gabriel García Márquez contributed to the real wonder of the Caribbean and its popularization.
Haitian artists also developed in this intuitive way, of which there are references in textbooks, but also large holes in understanding, blind spots.
Caribbean artists have been pioneers in
performance
, conceptual and environmental art in the context of Colombian art.
The artist and curator María Isabel Rueda regrets that we are facing a crisis of spaces for art and culture.
It has been the universities, she explains, that have kept the support scene for art and culture active and those that have supported students and facilitated spaces for the circulation of critical proposals that are not only governed by the market.
“In the art world in which I orbit there are interesting proposals from young people who, due to centralization, have remained excluded from the common places,” she concludes.
In addition to Arco, the Venice Biennale, dedicated to tourism, will critically address the distorted vision of the Caribbean.
'Learning #4B' (2018), work by Freddy Rodríguez.
It is not at all easy to exhibit other forms as Caribbean as the carnival, so relegated from museums and crafts.
The great festival of feathers and colors forms the backbone of the calendar of these places.
The dresses, the floats, the dances, the night.
In a curatorial practice called Chotin', held in Panama at the end of last year and sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art of that country, the MCA of Chicago and the MoMa PS1, they talked about how artists from the Bahamas had incorporated references to the carnival and artisans and specialists who had been in these practices for years and years were valued.
Young artists, like the Dominican Engel Leonardo, work on these hybridizations.
“They do not approach it with an extractivist philosophy, they are carrier artists.
Carriers of those cultures,” says Hermann.
Leonardo appears on the other side of the computer screen with long hair and a welcoming smile.
These days he enjoys walking through the center of Madrid and Retiro Park, on the eve of the inauguration of Arco.
Unlike many artists of his generation, he lives and works in Santo Domingo.
Intuitively he began to use plants, pots, landscape elements, organic material, part of the furniture.
He thus entered the Caribbean world, and touched the roots, not only the indigenous ones, but also the black ones of the slaves who arrived forcedly.
Thus he has ended up dedicating part of his creation to the research and understanding of the manials, as the communities formed by the blacks who escaped from slavery in the mines and sugar cane plantations were called.
From there sculptures come out that try to transmit all this energy.
He has approached exoticism out of curiosity and that is why he also pays tribute to Damballa, a deity of the Haitian voodoo religion.
In his case, Caribbeanness is geographical, not just mental, and it turns out to be an experience “that goes through your daily life.”
The shadow of colonialism never escapes from it.
It seems contradictory to him that his country's independence day celebrates the separation of Haiti and not the break with the kingdom of Spain.
According to the curator, there are many creators thinking about perreo and reggaeton as a form of aesthetics and rebellion.
That's behind us.
More current is the perreo and the gluteal movement that reggaeton causes.
This musical genre, which has been used as a form of protest in public spaces, of social emancipation against meapilism and beatery, has been another of these successful cases from the Caribbean
to
the entire world.
You can listen to reggaeton in Arabic in a hotel
lobby
in Dubai if you have good ears.
Carla Acevedo-Yates assures that there are many
performance
artists thinking about perreo as a form of aesthetics and rebellion.
In 2019, Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee joined the people's protests to depose the governor of Puerto Rico, and that is what happened.
If Engel Leonardo will be curious about the reactions to his work from visitors to the fair, Madeline Jiménez Santil prefers to stay at home, which in her case is Mexico City.
Dominican, developed a project called
Semillero Caribe
as a way to bring it closer to Mexico, a country that lives behind it and identifies it with tourism and prostitution.
“For me, contemporary art in the Caribbean does not exist,” he explains from the living room of his house while the street vendors try to torpedo the conversation with their hollow voices.
“Contemporary art responds to a specific economy that does not exist in the Caribbean.
We have not robbed anyone to have museums.
We are in a system that was not created for us,” she says.
She has used her own body artifacts, which draw geometric shapes, and to evade her instrumentalization, she transforms them into a new code.
Sometimes the drawings are in the form of sex toys and become hysterical pieces, with a pure linen frame, a way of using traditional language, “pure art”, which is pierced, bathed and filled with color to create, for example, an
all-inclusive
hotel
, which, according to all those interviewed, here represents an extension of the cultivation plants in which the slaves worked.
Summertime will never be the same.
Joiri Minaya's story also goes against the grain of the cliché.
She was born in New York, but grew up in the Dominican Republic.
At 21 she returned to study at Parsons School of Design and become a multidisciplinary artist.
Because of the American passport, she has been freed from the tortuous procedures that immigrants go through, although it is not that she has been oblivious to the experience of being a foreigner.
The rest of her she sees from the outside because of “how I look and the accent.”
The race and class dynamics that dictate American society do not always fully understand the possibility of being black and Latina at the same time.
After she explains it to them, they still approach her with “many prepackaged ideas” about the Caribbean.
“If I can't escape that, I'm going to make it part of my job,” she says.
“A big part of it is fighting these stereotypes and subverting them so that the observer realizes whether his ideas are representative of the humanity of the other.”
In one of her most beautiful works, she covers the statues of the colonizers who populate Latin America with fabrics of floral designs.
She doesn't do it with Photoshop, but literally, and then she captures it in photographs.
When she unveils the monument again, the bronze is still there, rusted by rain and wind, but turned into a caricature.
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