»El Flexible«

Before the crew of six could set sail in the Caribbean Sea, a period of planning took place: Not only the route, the equipment and the weather conditions required care, but the boat itself needed to be restored. A fisherman originally found the boat on a beach close to where he lived, which is nothing unusual on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico as almost daily illegal immigrants try to land here. They cross the sea in small vessels called »yolas.«¹ Once they reach the beach, the refugees escape to get in contact with family members or friends, who often provide initial help. The expensive motors are taken by locals. The boats are left behind as deteriorating wooden shells, evidence of the clandestine crossing.

Early in the morning of the 3rd of November 2003, after two failed attempts because of difficult weather conditions, the group finally set sail on the Caribbean Sea in the small yola. They left in anticipation to traverse the ocean between the islands of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic using the shortest route, which their captain figured to be from the town of Rincon to Punta Cana. Following the yola on its journey, one could observe that the boat was in good shape and possessed life-saving accessories, with a new motor providing the driving force, and a GPS orientation system. It had been carefully restored and is even decorated with a handmade imprinted sign revealing the boat’s name, »El Flexible,« on the backboard. Furthermore, a larger boat accompanying the yola was in contact through a radio system and videotaped the trip. The people on board were enjoying the trip. They ate from their lunchboxes and talked. About halfway to the neighboring island, they even stopped the motor to fill up the tank with gas, took their life vests off and jumped into the turquoise sea to swim, which was smooth as glass that day.

Around noon the six passengers of the »Flexible« spotted land and shortly after they reached the coast, where they were expected by the local authorities of the immigration office, who then stamped the passports of captain Charlie Casellas, his sister Olga (Bebe) Casellas, and of the passengers and artists Carolina Caycedo, Raymond Chavez, Jesus (Bubu) Negron and Chemi Rosado Seijo. From here the crew and some helpers loaded the yola onto a truck and started to head to the capital Santo Domingo, where they installed the boat – including the video documentation of the crossing – in the Museo del Arte Moderno for the Bienal del Caribe.²

What then happened was unexpected for the artists: their project caused a scandal. They were asked to give an explanation on public radio, to give interviews on TV that very day. And the next day the front page of the local newspaper reported the events and slated the project as an offense to the hardships of Dominican immigrants.

But how could the imaginary produced by the artists, the producer and the curator of the biennial on the one hand and Dominican public opinion on the other be so radically opposed? What are the origins of the competing narratives exposed by this project?

In conversation with the artists they explained that it was their interest to relativize differences between the islands and to reclaim common roots and routes that reach back to Pre-Columbian times, when Arawak peoples originating in the Amazon basin of South America settled in both territories. Thus, the action was received contrary to the initial intent. It became a commonplace for Dominicans to critique the safe conditions under which the artists crossed the Mona Channel. In local opinion the artists not only had the means to improve the safety of the trip by adding life-protecting accessories according to US standards and by being accompanied by a larger boat which would have intervened in the case of an emergency; they had also used the original vessel of illegal immigrants and that, in their opinion, had defamed and ridiculed the sufferings of the refugees who often drown crossing the Mona Passage.

From the artists’ perspective it seemed appealing to perform the travel from their place of residence to the site of display in the very specific context of the Caribbean archipelago because it in itself addressed its location in the sea in relation to exhibition practice. The work aimed to evoke historical connotations and was a genuine effort to formulate a Caribbean identity – without claiming territory – through a transnational traverse. In the context of contemporary art discourses their actions were not only understood as a politicizing border-crossing event that uses the platform of an exhibition to address migration issues or to challenge the limitations of the nation-state, but also as a way of enacting the unique setting of the Caribbean Sea as a site of display that critiques traditional and genuinely Western concepts of exhibition practices like the biennial. In that context the action is interpreted as a statement of institutional critique towards exhibition conventions in international biennials, which have their roots in the celebration of nationhood and empire and now are also being translated into non-Western regions. The artists themselves understood the project »El Flexible« as an attempt to playfully negate boundaries represented by nationhood, citizenship and empire.

Why this concept was widely misunderstood by the audience might also have to do with the internal complications that Caribbean societies face in terms of their visual representations. A controversy that was sparked around NE3 (Biennial National Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas) in 2006 with regard to the kind of work that was displayed, shows a similar conflict.³ It seems that the conflict culminates as negotiation between forms of art that have global currency and the ones that are perceived as national or local visual culture.

[b]»Caribbeanness«[/b]
Both controversies show the complexity of contemporary inter-Caribbean relations that is at play today – relations that are deeply entangled in colonial and post-colonial histories, extreme economic differences, and the continuing struggle for identity affected by both local and global narratives.⁴ A dialogue in which the stakes of Caribbean intellectuals, as the main force in the production of anti-colonial imaginary, is contrasted with political and social realities adds another layer of complexity. Weary of the fact that the ideal of the interconnectedness of various islands is a dream driven by the need to develop a counter-narrative to the imposed Western realm of projections and ever-revolving power relations, I neither want to pledge for or against the state of Caribbeanness. Rather, I want to discuss how the discourse of Caribbeanness is transformed in the work »El Flexible« into a discourse on local and global mechanisms.

The notion of creolization, although not necessarily geographically determined, is nevertheless rooted in the organization of labor in plantations, in insular conditions and the imaginary of the sea. For Edouard Glissant, the basis for Creolité is this »underwater rhizome« that connects various ethnicities and histories. Elizabeth DeLoughrey defines Caribbean identity as deeply characterized by a »transoceanic imaginary« that maps transatlantic as well as regional identity. Kamau Brathwaite describes the Caribbean’s »unity as submarine,« and Derek Walcott suggests understanding »the sea as history.« All these scholars aim to re-map the region, to re-territorialize the Caribbean in terms of the relationship between water and land. Apart from the appeal that this meta-national narrative provides, one has to be careful when assessing how far it actually reflects the reality in which intermigration between the islands is enforcing the establishment of new forms of inequalities governed by categories of nationhood, class, race and gender.⁵

DeLoughrey furthermore warns that, »while water may ebb and flow, or connotate borderlessness, it is still patrolled by economic and military powers that claim their own type of territorialization.«⁶ With reference to C.L.R. James, who already declared two decades ago that, »the Caribbean Sea is now an American Sea. Puerto Rico is its show piece,«⁷ she disenchants the ideal of a non-nation-based aquatic sphere with the argument that, without the concept of national sovereignty, »this sea is already territorialized as an American lake.«⁸

The entanglement in colonial history in the case of the Caribbean leads to a complex search for national and/or regional identity. The authors of the key text »Eloge de la Créolité« argue (mostly in respect to Caribbean literature, but this is certainly applicable to visual arts) that Caribbean societies are »fundamentally stricken with exteriority,« a perspective enforced through »the filter of Western values« in which the foundation of identity was exoticized through the vision of the former colonizer. In order to reach what Glissant first spelled out as Caribbeanness, the aim must be the development of an »interior vision,« a voice that is emancipated from Europe as well as from the vision of Africa, which cannot be achieved without the unconditional acceptance of Creoleness.⁹ But what does this mean in the context of exhibition making? And what does it mean for the production of art and for example the project »El Flexible« regarding their aesthetic paradigms? In particular as there are few professional galleries, most internationally working contemporary artists from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico have their gallery representations elsewhere. As a result, again, the discourse on contemporary Caribbean identity through art often does not happen on the islands themselves, but in external satellites.

A productive way to conceptualize these various points of contestation is Appadurai’s notion of the »production of locality.«¹⁰ He argues for diasporic and other communities that they should form both physical and virtual neighborhoods to do the »work of imagination« that connects them with their translocal counterparts. Comparable dynamics are noticeable for the Caribbean art scene that, in conjunction with the international art world, forms physical and virtual neighborhoods similar to those of the diasporic communities. The physical site of the biennial temporarily reunites members of that »imagined community.«¹¹ But as Appadurai equally points out, the imaginaries of these localities are – although impacted by them – not necessarily in accordance with the concepts of national identity as well as other localities. Rather, they are constructed in relation to these variables. Hence, it is not surprising that in the case of the Bienal del Caribe (seeking a common regional matrix as its name suggests) exhibiting the work »El Flexible,« which originated within the context of Puerto Rican identity politics (which is in itself a conflicted hybrid between US and Puerto Rican imaginaries), resulted in a collision of local subjectivities.

[b]Postscript[/b]
When I came to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2008 to do research, I found opinions on »El Flexible« still greatly divided. The mission was to investigate not only the debate around the project but also the whereabouts of the small vessel and eventually organize its return from its current location, which everybody assumed to be the storage of the Museo del Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, to its owner, Michy Marxuach in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This however turned out to be difficult. And only hours before my departure I got a message saying that the boat had been sold a year ago in an auction – strangely with no further written documentation.