I saw the future, it's so wonderful, there are Puerto Ricans

"Wherever our heads might be, our feet are planted on the ground, on the land.”
- Cabral, 1979 1

“Imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones we cannot live within.”
- Ruha Benjamin, 2019 2

In Puerto Rico, a multitude of microcosms converge and diverge, each with its own unique sense of time, operational logic, and understanding of freedom, shaping the way we assimilate the challenges of the present. There is that one world where food and imported goods must travel absurd and redundant distances to reach the archipelago, while in another world, we stood in the rain at the Expreso Las Américas, protesting and demanding our right to live.3 In reality, these worlds are bound together by a shared terrain marked by dispossession, neoliberal policies, and utopian futures handed to others on a silver platter as part of the American colonial project. “Vi el futuro, es maravilloso, hay Puertorriqueñxs / I saw the future, it’s so wonderful, there are Puerto Ricans’’ takes its title from a message sent by Edwin Miranda, an adviser to ousted governor Ricardo Roselló, during the 2019 Telegramgate scandal.4 Originally, the message read “I saw the future, it’s so wonderful, there are no Puerto Ricans.” The wordplay employed in such an offensive statement serves to contextualize conversations surrounding Puerto Rican futurity. While wealthy foreigners are offered silver platter benefits, austerity measures are imposed on Puerto Ricans. The resulting power imbalances have fueled a race for a slice of paradise that is violently displacing Puerto Ricans, rapidly creating a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans, and more importantly, eroding our agency over our own future.

Survival in this arena has everything to do with imaginative politics. Speculative fictions, imaginative capacities, the construction of worlds, and the constant reinterpretation of the past, present, and future are our tools to reclaim spaces of power, contest the present and propose liberatory futures.

This exhibition showcases Puerto Rican artists who employ imaginative politics to explore Puerto Rico’s past, present, and future. By formulating strategies grounded in the present, these artists’ aesthetic practices prioritize a range of imaginative exercises that reject the colonial traditions of dominant speculative practices. Such dominant practices advocate for utopian futures that forsake and disregard the present, while reinforcing oppressive historical systems and generating pessimistic, dystopian responses. These artists view the imaginary as a means of achieving individual and collective liberation, and see the past, present, and future as interdependent temporalities that harmonize, converge, interrupt, and impact each other. Through a critical lens, they use these temporal spaces as opportunities to generate new forms of knowledge and forge new vocabularies that can pave the way for possible futures that ensure our permanence.

La Futura is a speech given by María José, a transdisciplinary artist and activist who was present during the “Ricky Renuncia” protests that took place in Summer of 2019 in Puerto Rico. The title of the speech is a play on words that proposes the singular feminine “la futura” as a challenge to the singular masculine “el futuro.” María José speaks of a future that defies modernist and nationalist conceptions of gender, race, class, disability, progress, among other topics. In turn, María José focuses on a future that recognizes and continues to challenge the present work being made to secure our own visions of the future, a future that is already here.

In Isla Flotante (Floating Island), Jezabeth González Roca recalls their father’s observation that Puerto Rico moved a few centimeters every day, which led them to imagine the island as a floating entity. Located between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates, Puerto Rico emerged from underwater volcanoes that spewed lava for millions of years, ultimately forming a landmass that rose above sea level. However, This volcanic origin and geological positioning make the archipelago prone to frequent and powerful earthquakes. Through this video installation, González Roca invites their family to explore the possibilities of living on a floating island. Through their work, González Roca skillfully combines speculative fiction with personal and collective narratives, weaving together their family’s rich imaginative capacity with the island’s already floating political, social, and economic realities.

Further exploring economic realities of the landscape, Amanda Torres in the video-performance Hoyo en Uno embodies the role of a golf player in the streets of Puerto Rico, attempting to hit a golf ball into the asphalt potholes of abandoned broken down roads. The imaginary environment proposed by Torres parallels an urban reality that critiques the rapid development of resort-like spaces exclusively at the service of wealthy tourists that have left an undeniable mark on the landscape and the people who live in it. Torres’ actions counter the performativity of tourism and the transformation of the Puerto Rican landscape into consumable and misrepresented images of the Caribbean.

José Luis Vargas’s work exists in a timeless space where spirituality, fantasy, science fiction, and myths converge with individual and collective imaginaries to give birth to reinventions of Puerto Rico’s past, present, and future. In both mythology and Puerto Rico, monsters appear in times of crisis, almost as a distraction from the serious problems that burden the population. Vargas identifies a common thread between Puerto Rican national identity and the garadiávolo or garadiablo, a stingray fish with diabolical features and anthropomorphic construction that was discovered by Alfredo García Garamendi during the 1970s. The garadiávolo presents itself as a subject distanced from its context, ultimately engaging in a struggle to self-define. With a combination of dark humor and allusions to the supernatural, Vargas reveals a world where remembering prevails over forgetting and where we can re-define individual and collective imaginaries with the capacity to subvert the fictions that have been sold to us as a country.

Echoes of a Tumbling Throne (Odas al fin de los tiempos) Livel 8: COOERPOH A COOERPOH by artist Sofía Córdova describes the character RayKay_16, a wondering cyborg existing in a constructed future through the use of installation, video, music and performance. Pulling from Ray Kurzweil’s concept of “singularity” that suggests that in a near future machine intelligence and humans will merge, Córdova questions the impact of these speculative developments on immortality, exploitation, gender, race and class through a narrative exercise.5 Córdova’s work pays close attention to the actions and spaces that are able to foster liberatory futures. In this narrative, the club, sound and movement become rituals that reveal speculative timelines and sites for considering possible realities.

Driven by an interest in modernity’s re-definition of object and subject relationships, Miranda Beltrán’s photographs were taken during his outings with the Guano Crew, an informal group of people who have taken an anarchist approach to speleology, exploring the many different cave systems in Puerto Rico. Taino petroglyphs coexist with undated rock formations and spray painted or scratched in graffiti, informing a sense of timelessness and unsettling notions of linear time within the caves themselves. In Beltran’s work, the cave is a space where a multiplicity of temporalities, fictions, hallucinations and realities collide—resignifying the way in which objects and subjects coexist throughout time.

Referencing the still life paintings of Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller, whose works were celebrated as a “’visual bridge between the Old World and the New World’”, Gabriella Torres Ferrer assembles a series of still lifes composed of pineapples, plantains, sugar cane, rum, data mining computers, among other objects.6 Through these works, they aim to explore the interplay between production dynamics, symbols of power, and the past, current, and emerging economies of the Caribbean, all of which are shaped by the legacy of colonialism and current neo-capitalist ventures in the archipelago and beyond. By touching on the history of monoculture farming in Puerto Rico, which was geared towards exporting raw materials to North America while benefiting from slavery and the exploitation of local labor, Torres Ferrer sheds light on the power structures that continue to influence the island’s present. Meanwhile, the inclusion of microcomputers that display real-time data on cryptocurrencies, personal information and decentralized technologies points towards the emergence of new, utopian economies that have emerged in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Maria, highlighting the complex relationship between power, production, and colonial-capitalist economic trends.

As Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination continues to be obstructed by those with access to hegemonic forms of power aiming to eradicate us, it is crucial that we prioritize the cultivation of speculative forms of aesthetic production that place our current experiences and the history of Puerto Rico at the forefront. By engaging in these imaginative practices, we can establish a framework for critically examining the legacy of colonialism in Puerto Rico, analyzing our contemporary context, and envisioning liberatory futures. After all, If we don’t imagine our futures, who will? Mariana Ramos Ortiz
Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2023

1. Cabral, Amilcar. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writing. New York: Monthly Review Press.
2. Benjamin, Ruha. Essay. In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, 14. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019
3. The Jones Act, also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires all goods shipped between U.S. ports to be transported on American-built and crewed vessels. The law also applies to Puerto Rico, causing economic challenges as it makes importing goods more expensive and redundant. La Ley Jones, también conocida como Ley de la Marina Mercante de 1920, es una ley federal que requiere que todas las mercancías enviadas entre puertos estadounidenses sean transportadas en barcos construidos y tripulados por estadounidenses. La ley también se aplica a Puerto Rico, lo que provoca desafíos económicos al encarecer y hacer redundante la importación de bienes
4. The Telegram Gate scandal of 2019 was a political event that involved leaked private messages from a group chat on the messaging app Telegram, which included then-governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, and his administration. The messages contained derogatory language about political opponents, journalists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and victims of Hurricane Maria. The leaked messages sparked massive protests throughout Puerto Rico. Rosselló announced his resignation on July 24, 2019, becoming the first governor in the history of Puerto Rico to resign from office. El escándalo de Telegramgate de 2019 fue un evento político que involucró la filtración de mensajes privados de un chat grupal en la aplicación de mensajería Telegram, que incluía al entonces gobernador de Puerto Rico. Los mensajes contenían lenguaje obsceno y derogatorio sobre oponentes políticos, periodistas, miembros de la comunidad LGBTQ+ y víctimas del huracán María. Los mensajes filtrados desencadenaron protestas masivas en todo Puerto Rico, con miles de personas saliendo a las calles para exigir la renuncia de Rosselló. Rosselló anunció su renuncia el 24 de julio de 2019, convirtiéndose en el primer gobernador en la historia de Puerto Rico en renunciar a su cargo.
5. Kurzweil, Ray. The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. Richmond: Duckworth, 2018.
6. Ferrer, Gabriella Torres. Mine your own business living sculptures. Accessed April 29, 2023. http://gabriellatorr.es/myob-living/.