Hurricane Remediation

Description

This will be a collective intervention about ‘hurricane’ from Puerto Rican and Caribbean perspectives. The word is used to represent the powerful, reoccurring atmospheric phenomenon on the Atlantic Ocean. But the word comes from the force known as ‘Juracán’ – a force shared between a mythological, religious triad of the Indigenous, Taíno civilisation that lived across the Caribbean, and was thereon almost eradicated during the invasion of the Americas during the XV and XVI centuries. The ancestry of Hurricane is thus important to elucidate, as it is a significant, enduring index of the Taíno culture, one that posits divine values that are not within the mindset of Western, Northen hemispheric values. While the meaning of the word has been deformed into a synonym and metaphor to crises and impending doom, the participants will address how ‘hurricane’ is part of Puerto Rican life, and of the Caribbean. The group—curator Raquel Torres Arzola, nature interpreter Juliann Rosado Pagán (representing NGO Para La Naturaleza), artist Karla Claudio, and UmArts research fellow Luis Berríos Negrón—will perform and discuss research work related to that root mythology and about post-hurricane reforestation. The group will thereon address Antillean imaginaries, ecosystem functions, riparian zone restorations, and ethnobotanies that extend from the Hurricane. They will lead to consider forms and actions that may provide fruitful notions about biodiversity and transhemispheric relations, while nurturing differences between repair and reparations, conservation and mitigation, restoration, remediation, and re-mediation. The context is also set to think about reforestation as key form to counter the problematic remnants of colonial memory and to challenge the logic of planetary 'geoengineering', looking to suggest other pathways through which to mediate pre-colonial landscapes, to live-with and transition-away from global warming and climate injustice.

Panelists

Karla Claudio, Juliann Rosado Pagán, and Raquel Torres Arzola

Convened by

Luis Berríos-Negrón (UmArts).

Huracán del norte. Carlos Raquel Rivera. 1955, linoleum. Collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.

ABSTRACTS

Juracán … by Luis Berríos Negrón

A sounding will be set-forth... to ask and open the way for our group of speakers to give voice to the Taíno Juracán as form that embodies forces ​​that are not limited to meteorological and/or catastrophic definitions. I will revive an unfinished artwork. Thereafter, I will make brief and cautious readings of the spiritual and mythological values related to this particular Taíno ancestry, so to put into context how my arts research on ‘greenhouse’ works as a decolonial underscoring of hemispheric climate injustice and critique to Western scientific and technological history. I will conclude by briefly reflecting on my current work on the transhemispheric space and metaphor of the ‘tree nursery’, leading to introducing the interventions by fellow-colleagues from Puerto Rico.

Sensing the Complex Duality: Climate Crisis and Colonial Paradox in the Caribbean … by Raquel Torres Arzola

This research project examines the complex relationships between colonialism (a historical concept related to the European colonization of the Americas) and coloniality (a Latin American concept introduced by sociologist Aníbal Quijano, which reveals the domination of class, gender, and race within the national boundaries of independent countries) and the way this duality shapes Puerto Rico’s reality within the context of the Caribbean as a frontier between empires.

The topic is explored through the experiences of three families in Puerto Rico engaged in the evolving creative industries, within the context of climate change and political crisis. Through their arts and crafts, these families work to preserve the ancestral legacy of land, wood, and other natural resources. The presentation is both silent and performative, designed to evoke the sensory and emotional impact of this complex duality.

The study highlights the lack of access to land as a legacy of the trauma caused by the processes of invasion, appropriation, and land sale during the various conquests in and of the Americas. Additionally, it addresses the lack of access to the management of natural resources as part of the experience of the coloniality of being, knowledge, and power—manifestations of how dominant classes govern the country.

Re-greening Puerto Rico: Para la Naturaleza Reforestation efforts 2018-2024 … by Juliann Rosado Pagán

Hurricanes have shaped our landscapes and cooled our marine ecosystems for many decades in Puerto Rico. As the smaller, eastward island of the Greater Antilles, and since the start of modern collected data, our location has been on the routes of at least nine (9) major hurricanes that have transformed our forests and coastal areas. Two of those more recent hurricanes, Irma and María devastated our island in September 2017. Their combined effect resulted in the destruction of infrastructure and heavy forest cover loss.

During the 1950s, when Puerto Rico´s economy changed from agriculture to industry, an unprecedented reforestation effort resulted in a great forest cover recovery, ramping from 6% to 55% cover. Yet, in less than two weeks these two hurricanes impacted forested ecosystems throughout the Island, losing an estimated 95% of canopy cover and an approximate of 31 million trees (Feng et al., 2018).

Since 1970, the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico (CTPR) has carried out one of its core missions to acquire and donate lands of great ecological, aesthetic, historic and cultural value, as well as the establishment of conservation easements, among many other initiatives. In 1989, the Trust established five tree nurseries throughout the island. The Barranquitas Tree Nursery—the first created in response of the heavy damage caused by Hurricane Hugo in our eastern forests—focused on the production of native and endemic trees as a way of changing the use of exotic trees in planted landscapes and reintroduce more resilient species. The Trust and its operational unit Para La Naturaleza work as a private, non-for-profit organization whose mission is to secure functional and healthy ecological systems of the islands of Puerto Rico and to inspire people to be stewards of nature and together realize our shared social, economic, and quality-of life goals.

The 2017 hurricanes heightened the rapidly changing climate we are living in, urging Para La Naturaleza to launch its more focused Reforestation Unit so to continue and increase the reforestation efforts throughout Puerto Rico. These reforestation efforts through tree production of native and endemic species have impacted natural protected areas, communities and urban areas of the Island. With over 700,000 trees nurtured in our five tree nurseries and over 230,000 trees planted since 2018, the Reforestation Unit continues to lead efforts in ecosystem restoration, riparian and coastal buffers and partnering with volunteers and communities to find natural based solutions to protect our natural and cultural resources.

Feng, Y., Negron-Juarez, R.I., Patricola, C.M., Collins, W.D., Uriarte, M., Hall, J.S., Clinton, N., and Chambers, J.Q., (2018). Rapid remote sensing assessment of impacts from Hurricane Maria on forests of Puerto Rico. Peer J Preprints, Vol.6, p.e26597

Between memory and matter: archival and material research with Caribbean wild plants and clays … by Karla Claudio

The editorial and educational work of La Recolecta or The Gleaners – an itinerant arts and ecology lab led by artist - encompasses 10 years of research into the potential of Caribbean wild plants for food, medicine and craft. Ethnobotanical knowledge is gleaned and shared through community workshops, zines and short documentaries. Interest in supporting food and material sovereignty through art as means to remediate the effects of climate change is born out of precarity directly experienced from post-hurricane life.

In the past five years, research has shifted towards exploring natural colorants as an intersection of diverse forms of knowledge: from the colonial histories of tropical dye plants to their phytochemistry and the poetic ways in which color and medicine are intertwined. The Nomadic Pigment Lab is born as an art and journalism series that cultivates exchanges with dye and pigment artists in Latin America. Research on natural colorants is based on both academic and empirical sources. 

Mythology and folk tales prove to be effective means of transmitting scientific knowledge through the persuasion of story and emotion. The short documentary piedra viva, piedra muerta (2021) on indigenous Taíno potter Alice Chéveres and her sister “Naco” Chéveres is a testimony of jíbaro cosmological view on karst aquifer systems. The short documentary Who is Logwood? (2023) aims to distil the knowledge of Dominican residents of Santo Domingo about the logwood tree (Haematoxylum campechianum) through the personification of the tree itself. Botanists and hairstylists speculate who is the logwood tree while projecting their own desires and aspirations.

Profiles

Karla Claudio is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator based in her hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her creative practice is guided by research on Caribbean ethnobotany, mythology, natural colorants and their colonial histories, and land based practices in support of food and material sovereignty. She leads La Recolecta, an itinerant arts and ecology lab that studies the potential of local soils and wild plants for food, medicine, and craft. She collects and shares this knowledge through community workshops, zines and documentaries. Her short films about Taíno potter Alice Chéveres and her family - la masa (2021), piedra viva, piedra muerta (2021), and la reseña de Cuquito (2021) - were featured in the group exhibition El momento del yagrumo at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021. Her videos and experiments with natural pigments and dyes have been featured at the Copper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Design Museum of Miramar, Kadist San Francisco, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, among others. She's currently producing her first feature film, Matininó, a hybrid documentary directed by Gabriela Arp and supported by Topic Studios, Doc Society, Sundance Film Institute and Ford Foundation. She was recently selected as a 2024 Sundance Latinx Fellow. Next June 2025 she will participate in a two-month artist residency at the Vila Sur Goethe-Institut at Salvador de Bahía, Brazil.

Juliann M. Rosado Pagán is a marine biologist and environmental planner from Puerto Rico. She studied coastal marine biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao Campus under Prof.-Dr. Alida Ortiz Sotomayor. She finished her master’s degree in environmental planning from Ana G. Méndez University, Cupey Campus, specializing in ecotourism development strategies for a subregion in the north coast of Puerto Rico. Juliann has dedicated her professional career working with the conservation of birds and sea turtles in Puerto Rico. Also, Juliann has served for the last 14 years the nonprofit nongovernmental agency Para la Naturaleza as an Environmental Interpreter and Reforestation Planning Coordinator, committed to connecting people with nature conservation. Juliann has a great passion for environmental education and citizen science, while birding across Puerto Rico’s forests and coasts.

Raquel Torres Arzola is an artist, independent curator, and community-driven project manager dedicated to researching and promoting the ancestral and contemporary connections between art, culture, gender, and ecology. She is skilled in conceptualizing, developing, managing, and producing art exhibitions and public education events across Puerto Rico's academic and cultural sectors. With extensive experience in fostering collaborations between private and public institutions, she is also an art writer, cultural lecturer, and researcher with deep knowledge of Puerto Rican and Caribbean history, complemented by international experience as a guest editor and peer reviewer for both independent and institutional programs. Raquel served as the Curator for Public Education for the Triennial of San Juan and the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, is a member of the Las Casas de la Selva forest community, and spent nearly two years as Outreach Organizer for the women-led reclaimed timber organization Puerto Rico Hardwoods, Inc., where she successfully secured a major business development grant. Currently, she is collaborating with Arte-Suelo-Ser, Inc. to secure funding for an empowerment-through-education program that supports disadvantaged and marginalized communities in co-designing and developing urban forests as part of climate resilience activism.

Luis Berríos Negrón is a Puerto Rican environmental artist and experimental architect researching the decolonising forms and forces of climate injustice. He currently works as Research Fellow in Art and Architecture at UmArts in partnership with Bildmuseet (2023-2024) and as Associate Professor at the Umeå School of Architecture (UMA). Recent selected exhibitions and installations include Sin Título / Untitled (POST Houston Texas 2022), Passage of the Specularium (Onoma, Fiskars FI 2020), Anarquivo Negantrópico (Gammelgaard DK 2019), Wardian Table at Agropoetics (Savvy Contemporary, Berlin DE 2019), Impasse Finesse Neverness (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, Salvador BRA 2017), Collapsed Greenhouse at Undisciplinary Learning (District, Berlin DE 2016), Earthscore Specularium (Färgfabriken Konsthal, Stockholm SE 2015), and Tear do Terreiro (3ra Bienal da Bahía, Salvador BRA 2014). He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School (2003), and a Master of Architecture from M.I.T. (2006). His current research project is 'Tree nurseries remediating of colonial memory of landscapes' (TBD). It is the continuation to a research residency he titled 'Strata, nurseries, and entrails ' (2021-22) that took place within the ongoing, national post-hurricane reforestation project of Puerto Rico by Para La Naturaleza, and from his PhD dissertation in Art, Technology, and Design from Konstfack & KTH titled 'Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures' (Konstfack Collection 2020).

This panel is funded by Umeå Transformation Research Initiative (UTRI).