| My exhibition, Cambio de domicilio (Change of Address), consists of four independent installations that critically explore Puerto Rican identity in the context of mobility, crossing, fragmentation, estrangement and discontinuity. Based on extensive research that traces and recovers the social and political history behind the “circular migration” diaspora between Puerto Rico and the metropolis, Cambio de domicilio is the first in a series of projects dedicated to questioning Puerto Rican identity. The cumulative effect will be the creation of a liminal space where Puerto Rican identity is seen as a “floating social construct – a space in which cultural, linguistic and personal boundaries can be renegotiated and reconceptualised” to shape more effective strategies for political and social representation, both here and there.
The use of ‘distortion’ and ‘imitation’ as potentially transgressive by-products of colonial relations is explored in the video installation Allá y Acá (Here and There): A Film Record of Puerto Rico Maneuvers. The work features two videos, displayed simultaneously inside two suitcases. It opens with a reference to the diegesis of West Side Story, evoking the Sharks and the Jets, before shifting to a sequence from The Wizard of Oz, where a voice-over repeatedly states, “There’s no place like home”. Meanwhile, on the other screen, disorienting footage of birds in migratory flight is accompanied by the same voice, now repeating: “There is no place that is my home.” The decision to mistranslate this phrase serves two purposes: first, to employ Brechtian ‘distancing’ theory, prompting the viewer to recognise how meaning is discursively constructed and reproduced – an awareness that can be applied to social and political change; second, to destabilise the ‘otherness’ of Spanish/bilingualism by introducing two layers of distortion – between English and Spanish, and within Spanish itself (where the phrase sounds somewhat awkward, convoluted or even alien).
Another project within Cambio de domicilio that seeks to dismantle colonial tropes linking physical economies between self and other is Hogar Dulce Hogar/Home Sweet Home, a work consisting of a metal frame enclosing a floating hut in a kind of carpeted pool. Two sets of ‘pool ladders’ placed diagonally opposite to each other suggest that this ‘wandering nation’ drifts between colony and metropolis – or, more precisely, that it exists in a perpetual state of departure and arrival. The work challenges the association of the casita (small house) with a space that confines imagination and identification within binary structures of national identity. At the same time, it proposes a model of relational difference, in which self and other disrupt each other, unsettling the interior and exterior geographies of exile.
Both Twin Props: No Relief in Sight and (Abjects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear) use ‘smoked mirrors’ and their surrounding space to interrogate the normative boundaries separating the symbolic from the real. The darkened mirror surfaces not only suggest a collapse of space between the viewer and the “corrective” architecture of the institution in which they are installed but also address an audience and space that remain predominantly “white”. In Twin Props: No Relief in Sight, two industrial “bladeless” fans (like those used in factories to provide “relief” to workers in inhumane conditions) frame an oscillographic reflection that distorts the viewer’s sense of self. The fans’ movements synchronise and desynchronise, preventing the viewer from adopting a stable, coherent position. Fragmentation and desire are arranged in a way that compels a reconsideration of social relations.
Adam de Croix |
