Depresión Tropical

The works of Karlo Andrei Ibarra and Roberto Yiyo Tirado, question the neocolonialism ways exercised by the United States over the "free" and associated state of Puerto Rico. Both works take as a conceptual trigger the disaster caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017. They talk about the serious crisis left on the island, which has turned it into a tax haven benefiting foreign investors. 

Karlo Andrei Ibarra in the works of Palimpsesto alludes to different layers of information, but in this case paintings, making a mosaic with the memory of architectural spaces affected by this abrupt process of change. Roberto Yiyo, on the other hand, makes aesthetic counterpositions that refer to the double standards and the exoticization of the landscape within the Caribbean tourist market within the framework of the disasters caused by the hurricane.

 

An example of this is the work Hostil (Hostile) which is arranged in a luminous panel like those that usually say hostel. It is a nod to the wave of hospitality in the Caribbean, produced by the aforementioned phenomena, and its relationship or not with the communities that surround them.

Ivan Sikic, through a performance, simulates a working day in which he inflates balloons with the colors of the American flag to fill a room. This is about labor understood as work and the labor it takes to adapt to American culture and society. This performance was accompanied by the paintings included in Depresión Tropical, which depict the process and labor of blowing up the balloons.

Stephanie Williams (Costa Rica, 1987) through the work of the series Portadas invites the viewer to question the ways of writing history through popular statements and graphics taken from advertising of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Through these works she invites us to reflect on written history, historical sources and discourses or ideologies to which society is accustomed to take them as truths due to the historicist character of the sources.