Loíza is Universal: The Old Griot Tells an Afro-Indigenous World Story
Talegas de la memoria, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Vacía Talega beach, Loíza, Puerto Rico, January 11, 2020. Photo: Raquel Pérez Puig.
“As a ‘Griot’ I bring historic events from the past to the present, in a kind of timeless syncretism where the future would be perpetually remodeled by our past actions. There is a quest for new aesthetic forms of orality, and the questioning that ensues: what is the place of orality in the contemporary sphere? Is orality an architecture of language? [...] Is this important for the survival of the human species? A lure? A fiction.”
–Pélagie Gbaguidi 2017¹
—
Following in the griot tradition of West Africa, Daniel Lind-Ramos reconstructs an expansive world history that originates in Loíza, Puerto Rico in his solo exhibit El Viejo Griot: Una historia de todos nosotros at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. The 2021 McArthur “Genius” Fellow assembles an evocative story with material art language from his Loíza community, while centering an Afro-Indigenous worldview that expresses a world history of imperialism and colonization, Black beauty and resistance, (climate) disaster and renewal, and the global pandemic. Ultimately, El Viejo Griot tells a truly global history by genuinely engaging with histories of the Global South and without claiming the universality imposed by imperialist, Eurocentric narratives.
Daniel Lind-Ramos. El Viejo Griot (The Elder Storyteller). 2022–2023. Photo: Steven Paneccasio
"El Viejo Griot” (The Old Griot, 2022-23) welcomes us to the space magnificently, setting the tone of this worldly voyage. A boat is surrounded by branded coffee sacos (coffee bags) with years of historical events ‘arriving’ to the shores of the town of Loíza in the archipelago of Puerto Rico or Boriquén (its Taíno-Indigenous name). These branded sacos portray the year of Spanish colonization (1493) and U.S. annexation (1898), one of the first Indigenous insurrections in the Americas (1511), the establishment of Haiti as the first Black Republic in the Americas (1804), and many other sacos of ‘time,’ crowned by a saco that represents Black resistance to the British Armada’s attempt to conquer the Spanish Caribbean (1797). The video “Tocones” (2019) sets the rhythm for the story that The Old Griot will tell through sculptural assemblages. Like a conjunto, each artwork has an ‘instrument’ that suggests the sounds of a siren, a trumpet blow, a ring, an alert, or a conversation in Loíza during a community gathering, a bomba event, across an alcapurria stand, etc. Eventually, The Old Griot will take us to a coconut-like unbranched ‘memory lane’ in “Talegas de la memoria” (2020), in which a video shows the stories of colonialism brought to the present. The custodian of this knowledge then appears before us in a newer form, Sentinelas de la luna nueva (New Moon Sentinels, 2022-2023), its design informed by the post-human guardianship philosophy of mangroves. Because of our 550+ years of colonialism that have sought to re-appropriate Indigenous and African knowledges, “Sentinelas de la luna nueva” functions as an eco-ancestral custodian of the story of the Old Griot.
Daniel Lind-Ramos. Centinelas de la luna nueva (Sentinels of the New Moon). 2022–2023. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
Daniel Lind-Ramos. Figura emisaria (The Emissary) (detail). 2020. Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
The sentinel guards “Piñones” (2013), “Figura emisaria” (2020), and “Armario de la memoria”—all sculptural assemblages directly referring to Loíza’s iconic beauty and cultural majesty, as well as a history compounded by centuries of colonialism and an internalized racism among Puerto Ricans that renders Loíza’s Black legacy largely invisible. Palm trees, coconuts, a traditional cassava grater (almost a Taíno guayo²), a heated glass display of fritura, Orisha iconographies, prints and colors, decades-old communal pots, bricks, and a 30-year-old TV set all compose the material language of objects given (and not just found) to Lind-Ramos from the Loíza community. The sculptural assemblages pertain to spirits of and in community that Lind-Ramos creates as visual poetry to hail the environment, culture, and history of Loíza.
Daniel Lind-Ramos. María Guabancex. 2018–2022. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
In this exhibit, The Old Griot shows us a post-hurricane María world by drawing from an eco-critical and Afro-Indigenous perspective in “María Guabancex” (2018-2022), “María de los sustentos” (2021), and “Baño de María” (2018-2022). Lind-Ramos was one of the first artists to respond to the colonial disaster that hurricane María accelerated in 2017 in the exhibit PM (2018) at the San Juan gallery Embajada. Further, “María, María” (2019)³ was featured at the Whitney Museum’s 2019 Biennial and in post-hurricane solo exhibits such as Daniel Lind-Ramos: Las Tres Marías (2022) at the Sarasota Art Museum. The Old Griot shows us “María Guabancex,” a hurricane name juxtaposing matriarchal Taíno and Christian deities. Guabancex is a feminine goddess of hurricane winds, an all-encompassing figure who tells the story of both destruction and restoration simultaneously. “María de los sustentos” geometrically re-orders the renewal that destruction calls for by drawing on ancestral knowledge of how disaster was managed before humans caused climate change. “Baño de María” majestically displays the double boiler effect in hurricanes, one powered by the heat of Africa (where hurricanes originate from) and warm summer waters, and the other by increasing water temperature due to climate change. The blue tarps of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) are ubiquitous in Lind-Ramos’ post-hurricane artworks as the material symbol of U.S. colonialism and imperialism, simultaneously suggesting the role of capitalism in climate disaster, a reality we all face now.
Daniel Lind-Ramos. Baño de María (Bain-marie/The Cleansing). 2018–2022. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
Through these three examples Lind-Ramos draws on Taíno-Indigenous as well as Afro-Puerto Rican perspectives. Loíza’s name derives from the female Taíno-cacique Yuiza. Afro-Puerto Rican bomba music integrates Taíno influence via instruments like the mayuacán and maracas and in Taíno sacred spaces such as the batey and in caves. Hurricane or huracán is a Taíno word (jurakán) that refers to the climatological phenomenon (not the deity) ruled by the feminine deity Guabancex who, in turn, commands the lesser powerful male deities Guatauba and Coatrisquie to add to the power of the hurricanes. In all three “Marías,” there are Yoruba iconographies, colors, and forms that suggest an Afro-Indigenous alliance or a type of guaitiao⁴ of perspectives that show us a way to understand the complex story of destruction and renewal. In art, this is framed as destructive creativity and creative destruction. In the Caribbean, hurricanes are part of our lives. When it comes to climate disaster, however, the current colonized perspectives don’t work. Lind-Ramos calls us to examine Afro-Indigenous perspectives on disaster to reframe or at least rethink the current logic of our lifestyles.
Ambulancia (Ambulance) 2022-2023. Photo courtesy of the author.
The global pandemic alarm of “Ambulancia” (2022-2023) and “Alegoría de una obsesión” resonate the loudest given our shared experience with COVID-19. “Ambulancia” evokes the terror of the global pandemic through its soundscapes of places like New York City, where one could hear the ambulances incessantly. The mattress carcass of the piece, along with the boots, ambulance lights, loudspeaker, and construction tools, is a comment on the accelerated necropolitics of the State that coincided with pandemic responses around the globe. “Alegoría de una obsesión” poetically portrays compulsive cleaning to inject a dose of humor and critical analysis to the global pandemic, a cathartic reaction formation that is embodied by the ancestral Loíza character of ‘La loca’—an Afro-Puerto Rican trickster archetype who imbues the community and society with the healing capacity of performing absurdity to entertain, with the simultaneous capacity of telling truth to power.
Daniel Lind-Ramos with Armario de la Memoria. 2012. Pick, shovel, machetes, steel, palm tree trunks, dried coconuts, TV monitor, palm tree branches, DVD player, wood panel, and fabric. 108 × 65 × 36 inches (274.3 × 165.1 × 91.4 cm.). Photo: Raquel Perez-Puig
Sylvia Wynter explains that the colonizer tries to subject the colonized to its memory,⁵ in other words, colonization continually imposes a counterfeited universal history. The Old Griot thinks and embodies a History that—by virtue of starting from a place, Loíza, and thus, counter-Herodotean⁶—becomes true to everyone and authentically universal. Immanuel Kant’s world history and subsequent Western incantations claimed to be universal, but, in truth, the claim was a mask that hid a European and (later) American will to dominate. The recently deceased subaltern studies scholar Ranajit Guha stated in a lecture that the truth in human life was not to be found in an established view of history, instead, the truth of life is to be found in literature, the arts, and in the lives of everyday people⁷; Lind-Ramos understands this all too well and renders the truth of life into his sculptural assemblages. The Old Griot transforms everyday Loíza into a story of all of us that eloquently conveys to the world: Loiza is universal.
—
El Viejo Griot — Una historia de todos nosotros will be on view at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY from April 20 to September 4, 2023. For more information, visit their website.
—
Notes
¹ This quote by Pélagie Gbaguidi was part of an artist statement at Documenta 14 Kassel, Germany.
² Grater in Spanish, guayo is likely to derive from the Taíno word guaio. Taíno graters were made out of stone or coral and used to prepare foods like cassava.
³ María, María (2019) is part of the Whitney Museum collection. This artwork did not feature in this exhibit, El Viejo griot… at MOMA PS1 nor in the Whitney Museum exhibit No Existe un Mundo Poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria.
⁴ A Taíno cultural identity blending and cultural adoption ritual that means an alliance or friendship.
⁵ Sylvia Wynter is a Cuban-born Jamaican intellectual and novelist. See essay by Wynter entitled “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” published in CR: The New Centenial Review Vol 3, No. 3 pp. 257-337.
⁶ Herodotus is a Greek historian and considered to be the first historian (484-425 BC) in Western tradition. Counter-Herodotean is a History that does not claim universality from a position of imperialism.
⁷ This idea can be read in Guja’s book History at the Limit of World-History (2003), published by Columbia University Press.
Carlos Rivera Santana is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary and currently is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges (CAIK), UTS at Sydney, Australia. Rivera Santana is a Latin American/Caribbean cultural studies scholar specializing in Indigenous studies, visual culture and decolonial theories. He is the author of the book, Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics and is currently working on a second book with renowned artist Diógenes Ballester entitled Puerto Rican Visual Arts and its Decolonial Diasporic Character: An Arteologist Approach, signed with Centro Press—among other peer-review publications on decolonial aesthetics and interviews with other LatinX artists.