Remapping Coloniality: The Puerto Rican Art of Decolonial Cartography
AlienNation (2022) by Brenda Cruz and Geo Dis/connect 5 (2020) Nayda Collazo-Llorens at Cartographies of Displacement, Art Miami. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
When Nayda Collazo-Llorens removes and repurposes Puerto Rico and Caribbean islands from maps and images in her 360-piece installation series Geo Dis/connect (2020), she remaps the dislocated existence of the colony of Puerto Rico and beyond. Brenda Cruz’s AlienNation (2022) series and Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s blindfolded (2021) series further contribute to the conversation by recrafting territories of de/colonial history, politics, and culture in the spaces of the body. Edrimael Delgado Reyes also reinterprets colonial subjectivity in his work, specifically in his performance Jueguitos de Cariño (2022), where he charts the map from a queer decolonial affectation.
Together they craft a cartography that engraves the denied reality of Puerto Rican and Caribbean peoples that coloniality endeavors to erase.
Curators Helen Ceballos and Abdiel Segarra in front of Tony Cruz Pabón’s photo installation Archivo SJ 13-23, 2013-2023 at Cartographies of Displacement. Courtesy of Ten North Group.
These boldly eloquent Puerto Rican artists and 13 more spoke as one voice at the Cartografías del Desplazamiento (Cartographies of Displacement) exhibition at Miami Art Week 2023, a show Hellen Ceballos and Abdiel Segarra superbly curated. As one of the few Puerto Rican exhibitions at Miami Art Week last year, Ceballos and Segarra wrought a material metaphor for art displacement that rose against the erasure of Latinx art by the global art market concerted at an event like Art Basel.
Collazo-Llorens’s, Cruz’s, Sterling-Duprey’s, and Delgado Reyes’s artworks affirm the meaning-making territory of living communities¹—one that is at odds with the Western idea of nationalism defined as imagined political communities.² The Western notion of maps is a representation with no connection to the living reality of the territory; instead, the State heavily influences, if not dictates, everyday life through prescribed ideas of national identity (for instance, peaceful renderings of mestizaje in Latin America/the Caribbean that gaslights European colonial subjugation).
“Representations have become self-referential and do not tie to reality.”
According to postmodern thinkers, the crisis of representations (such as maps) no longer has a connection to any kind of reality or lived experience. For former or current colonized subjects, this dilemma affects us two-fold: the crisis of Western representations and how colonization historically aims to erase and replace our realities with globally dominant interests. Western thinkers argue that representations no longer refer to anything real but a circulation of simulations that allude to each other. In other words, representations have become self-referential and do not tie to reality, which creates meaning. Jean Baudrillard describes the downward spiral of meaning:
“Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum.”³
Representations, like maps (of special interest here), become simulacrum as they don’t speak to the (real) territory they should relate to but to other maps. These other maps tend to represent the history of Empire and thus, settler colonialism. Further, these settler colonial representations fail to properly illustrate the people these territories contain and by extension include approximations of peoples, especially those who directly feel the effects of colonization. Through the relationship of these representations with the history of colonization, these maps back the interests of Empire and target colonized peoples. In doing so, they categorize colonized people as sub-humans or as Panamanian philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff states:
“…binary of Self/not-Self in which the other is reduced to a negative, comparative feature. This is what spurred debates about whether the indigenous were human beings, capable of personhood, endowed with even a modicum of rationality or even self-regard. Such a construction constitutes a radical form of epistemic injustice, as it follows from one’s very identity or being.”⁴
Thus, the result is the denial of the reality of our humanity while the interests of the Empire supersede our needs. This is at the very core of what Collazo-Llorens, Cruz, Sterling-Duprey, and Delgado Reyes face as they aim to weave together places where we can see the humanity of our realities in a living cultural, political, historical, and affective territory.
Geo Dis/connect 5 (2020) by Nayda Collazo-Llorens. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
Geo Dis/connect 5 (2020) by Nayda Collazo-Llorens. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
Collazo-Llorens’s Geo Dis/connect series systematically deconstructs the settler colonial practice of mapping and brings it back to the real through 360 carefully assembled images of maps of the sea, islands, regions, and planets. The Puerto Rican artist, based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, designs disassembled representations of colonial territories that through its form saturates its self-referential meaning and makes evident the willful disconnection between real and living territories and mapping.
In each of the images of representations of locations, there is a comment on the symbolic value of an atlas, a satellite picture of the sea, land, and the moon as historical settler colonial objects of consumption. Further, Geo Dis/connect makes an even more interesting suggestion than making apparent the system of signs that constitute maps, being self-referential; it proposes a form that can renew the Islander-Caribbean territory as a place of conceptual reinvention. The framed images assembled in island form disconnect mapping from a continental mentality (one that Western culture draws on to call this planet “Earth”) and sculpts this remapping into our three-dimensional, 360-degree reality.
The proposal is that maps can outline the real if the framework corresponds to the territory it’s trying to refer to. Thus, an islander framework becomes the form in which we can rethink territory and, therefore, reorients knowledge-making to a decolonial cartography from the founding act of thinking.⁵ From Collazo-Llorens’s deconstruction and the proposal of a map that highlights the living territories of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans we can reframe mapping.
AlienNation (2022) by Brenda Cruz. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
blindfolded (2022) by Awilda Sterling-Duprey. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
blindfolded (2022) by Awilda Sterling-Duprey, New York. Courtesy of the artist.
Zooming into the territories of the body, Cruz in AlienNation and Sterling-Duprey in Blind folded map a counter-narrative to established representations of the history of Puerto Rico or Boriquen (its Indigenous name). Sterling-Duprey, one of the most important artists of Boriquen, performatively navigates the living territories of Afro-Puerto Rican cultural formations leaving traces of color in her works. Sterling-Duprey, once one of the main performance artists of the Rompeforma collective, ritually and reflectively moves blindfolded using improvisation and paints the traces of her movements without seeing. These painted traces become an affirmation of Afro-Puerto Rican pathways documenting the navigation of the body in the territories of our culture, history, and politics. Cruz, a Madrid-based Puerto Rican artist, projects from the face of the history of coloniality in Boriquen, suggesting the imprinting lived experience of being a U.S. colony. Cruz depicts archival images of colonialism, for instance through footage of the U.S. military invasion of Puerto Rico. They both target the cultural and historical dimensions of colonialism that transits from the social to the individual and from coloniality to internal colonialism.
AlienNation portrays a futuristically fashioned and amplified subjectivity—through bannerlike photography— with the face being the space where the identity carries colonialism, yet with a dignified powerful posture. Sterling-Duprey wisely circumnavigates the spaces of coloniality, with ancestral kinetic improvisation. What remains in blindfolded are sagaciously powerful traces that lead the way out of internal colonialism and into the Afro-Puerto Rican cultural and epistemological majesty. Sterling-Duprey calls us in to explore these pathways using color, carving a chromatic map that can wisely command the body. Together they remap the living territory of Boriquen’s history, culture, and politics so these maps can accurately reflect our lived experiences, especially those that function as counter-narratives to coloniality.
Jueguitos de Cariño by Edrimael Delgdo Reyes, performed December 8, 2023. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
Jueguitos de Cariño by Edrimael Delgdo Reyes, performed December 8, 2023. Courtesy of Abdiel Segarra.
This remapping of living territories ends in the heart of decoloniality, crowned by the founder of Borivogue, Edrimael Delgado Reyes, through Juegos de Cariño. The performance expunges colonial rationality through emotions or affect. Affect is decolonial because historically, coloniality and patriarchy perceives it as a lesser form of thinking, gendered, and even pathologized. Feminist cultural theorist Sara Ahmed offers a decolonial and anti-patriarchal understanding of affect/emotions:
“In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.”⁶
Affect not only represents attachment, emotions or mental states, it connects people with their wider (living) social territory and assembles the social. Delgado Reyes’s display of affect through the Juegos de Cariño performance immanently remaps connection, showcasing how emotions do things in the way that they connect with community. The performance narrates the story of basketball, masculinities, love, self-hatred, and transcendental beauty in the form of a queer embodied narration. Delgado Reyes becomes a map of affect through striking and highly aestheticized body forms, movement that creolizes hip-hop through voguing, bomba and plena music, as well as its mesmerizing connection with its spectators. In this performance, a true model of queer decolonial territory is possible, since it comes from denied lived experience and a direct connection with what is most real; the magmatic substance that connects social life, emotions, or affect.
“Artists then can be the new cartographers.”
The (western) assertion that “the map is not the territory” says more about the contemporary condition of modernity/coloniality than its logical intended initial purpose—something that astoundingly insightful artists like Collazo-Llorens know all too well. It says that maps are not the territory, but in fact, they chart imperial power. This suggests that remapping through showcasing the dislocation of imposed representations territories is a prerequisite to any kind of decolonial project, as shown so eloquently in the Geo Dis/connect series and most of Collazo-Llorens’s work at large. A call for a turn to reality in her 360-spheric suggestion functions as an artistic nod—seen in the number and form of the framed images—to weld back to a reality that is inherent to the territory’s maps and other representations claim to relate back to. In the case of Puerto Ricans/Caribbeans, then, if it’s an island-territory where reality lives, then this is how we should understand reality.
This affirmative deconstruction provides the conditions of possibilities to conceptually rechart the territories of Afro-Puerto Rican/Caribbean, colonialism/ity, and decolonial queer realities through the space of lived experiences where the map becomes the territory, yet we must recraft and create. Artists then can be the new cartographers, as Sterling-Duprey, Cruz, and Delgado Reyes demonstrate.
This new decolonial cartography draws on the dignified view of a living territory, one that is not charted by representations solely drawing on coloniality and Imperial power. Thus, in this decolonial cartography, the map is the territory through drawing on the worldviews of living communities that these settler colonial maps did not desire to represent. To reinvent the map is to understand it as one with the territory through a decolonial cartography. Thus, the map is embodied and one with living histories, cultures, and politics. Art becomes embodied territory or as the leading Puerto Rican artist and incredibly attuned decolonial cartographer Awilda Sterling-Duprey states in an interview: “…history is in the body and in dance. Each step is a story of the deity that has as many levels as the elements of nature it represents… My wholeness is visible and expressed within all those contexts.”
¹ In Un mundo Ch’ixi es posible (2018) published by Tinta limón, Indigenous-Aymara scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui differentiates between the nation-state and the Western idea of imagined communities from Abya Yala (Americas) Indigenous political perspectives of peoples as living communities suggesting a biocentric perspective.
² Anderson, Benedict. "Imagined communities." Nations and nationalism: A reader (2005), pp. 48–60.
³ Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 6.
⁴ Alcoff, Linda Martín. "Philosophy and philosophical practice: Eurocentrism as an epistemology of ignorance." The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. Routledge, 2017, pp. 402.
⁵ Alcoff, Linda Martín. "Philosophy and philosophical practice: Eurocentrism as an epistemology of ignorance." The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. Routledge, 2017, pp. 397–408.
⁶ Sarah, Ahmed. "Affective economies." Social text 22.2 (2004), pp. 119.
Carlos Rivera Santana is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary and 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 Puerto Rican/Caribbean visual culture, Indigenous Studies 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, theory, and essays on Puerto Rican art.