Insolvent Utopias:
Colonial Aspirations
For the series Insolvent Utopias: Colonial Aspirations, I reimagine three hotels constructed during the modernity period in Puerto Rico (ca. 1950-1960), a process financed by the United States and its private interests 50 years after they invaded the Island.
From a futuristic perspective but keeping faithful to the original project’s design characteristics and architectural vocabulary, I reconstruct the spaces within a premonitory imaginary, in which I dare to envision its future outcome. My proposal intends to usher the viewer into socio-political and historical narratives linked to the economic development of Puerto Rico within the current colonial context and the consequential institutional bankruptcy of the island after the U.S. invasion of 1898.
I imagine fictional landscapes where hotel lobbies, terraces, and restaurants have been transformed into cultivated fields with produce that have significant socio-economic and historical meaning to Puerto Rican society; or have been overtaken by secondary ecological processes of succession. I am interested in creating paradoxes through a playful and cynical look that could be read as fiction or hyperbole to a shared reality, but that may well reflect a context not too distant from our current one.
My work constantly problematizes the political circumstances in which the modernity project for Puerto Rico was originated and conceived. In the context of deep contradictions to the ideological base and historical moment we live in since its inception, versus the colonial policies and private interests that structured the discourse for all social programs and institutions enacted from it at the time, my work reacts to the direct consequences resulting from such colonial model; specifically to the current physical landscape in constant decay as a result of the still prevailing and obsolete colonial framework. This is a crude reality that at a glance may seem apparently invisible but in its essence is empirically constant in the daily lives of Puerto Ricans, just as many other injustices we face.
Insolvent Utopias: Colonial Aspirations (Hotel Caribe Hilton - Terrace, San Juan, Puerto Rico), 2023, oil, beeswax, and gold powder pigment on canvas, 48" x 72".
Insolvent Utopias: Colonial Aspirations (Hotel Cerromar - Lobby, Dorado, Puerto Rico), 2023, oil, beeswax, and gold powder pigment on canvas, 48" x 72".
Insolvent Utopias: Colonial Aspirations (Hotel Caribe Hilton - Lounge, San Juan, Puerto Rico), 2023, oil, beeswax, and gold powder pigment on canvas, 48" x 72".
Insolvent Utopias: Colonial Aspirations (Hotel La Concha - Restaurant, San Juan, Puerto Rico), 2023, oil, beeswax, and gold powder pigment on canvas, 48" x 72".