On the Coastlines of Caribbean-yet-to-come
Curated by VisArts’ 2022 Emerging Curator Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué
Kaplan Gallery
November 9, 2022 – January 8, 2023
On the Coastlines of a Caribbean-yet-to-come is a curatorial research project that takes an embodied look at Caribbean islanders’ contemporary geographical performance practices enacted on, with, and through the submerging archipelagic stage of Puerto Rico’s colonial coastlines, mangroves, and littorals. While the exhibition pays material attention to islanders’ terraqueous entanglements with the oceanic, telluric, and atmospheric forces constantly on the move across tropical islands, the curatorial proposal centers on how Caribbean artists re-signify their forced intimacies with coastal erosion into Antillean performance practices that approximate climate-change-inflected oceanic forces’ ruinous effects as a Caribbean geo-poetic. As a curatorial research project, On the Coastlines of a Caribbean-yet-to-come seeks to trace a series of Antillean performance practices that speculatively ruinate Caribbean islands’ colonial-built-environments and transforms them into Antillean refuges below Caribbean islands’ oceanic horizons.
Participating Artists: Eduardo Alegría, Javier Cardona, Teresa Hernández, Carlos Martiel, Johan Mijail, Lydia Nichols, La Nietas de Nonó, nibia pastrana santiago, Elizabeth Robles, Pó Rodil, and Luis Vasquez La Roche.
About the VisArts 2022 Emerging Curator:
Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué (They/Them/Theirs) is an artist, curator, and researcher from San Juan, Puerto Rico. They completed a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology (2006) and a MA in Cultural Management and Administration (2015) from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Currently, Rodríguez Bagué is a performance studies doctoral candidates from Northwestern University. Their doctoral research, titled “Caribbean-yet-to-come”, explores the relations between Caribbean performance, materialism, and territory in a geohistorical moment marked by colonialism, climate change, natural disaster. While their visual art practice is animated by a documentary gesture that explores the relations between Caribbean region’s colonial and natural histories through moving-images, texts, and installations, their curatorial practice researches Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latinx dance, theater, performance and visual art practices that explore counter-hegemonic and speculative approaches to colonial territories and institutions. Rodríguez Bagué has curated the “Foro Permanente de Performance” (performance curatorial platform, 2013 to 2015), “Area de Ensayo” (performance-based curatorial research, 2015), “Pisotón: antes de todo género” (experimental dance retrospective, 2016), and, along with Puerto Rican performance artist Mickey Negrón, co-curated Asuntos Efímero’s “QUIEBRE: Festival Internacional de Performance” (performance festival, 2016). They also has exhibited their own work: “la labor arenosa de las dunas” (2018) in Beta Local (Old San Juan), “Des-continentalizar el archipiélago” (2018) in Hidrante (Santurce), and “on the coast’s lines” (2019) in Alvina Krause Studios (Northwestern University). Along with Ramón Rivera-Servera and Pepe Álvarez Colón, Rodríguez Bagué is co-curating the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative (two-year-long performance platform for Puerto Rican artists, 2018-2020/ 2020-2022)
Image Credit: Po Rodil, Dibujando un mapa en una isla del Caribe 2, 2022
About the 21st Century VisArts Emerging Curator Program: The VisArts Emerging Curator Program pairs an emerging curator with an experienced mentoring curator to produce new exhibitions and related programming.
Generous funding for this exhibition has been provided by
