Olympic Island Dreams
Remembering PR04, an experimental biennial on a Puerto Rican beach.
The opening of the Summer Olympics in Paris had the traditional quality of a hyper-nationalistic celebration— and the French, who are particularly proud of their heritage, took Versailles-scale pains to display it. While some are still arguing whether the Dionysian tableaux was or not a mockery of Christianity, what the ceremony reminded me of was another Olympic-themed event, this one about contemporary art, that started with a play on national identity but that came to become defining, in my view, to my generation of contemporary artists in Latin America. I am speaking of an art event that took place in 2004 in the town of Rincón, Puerto Rico, under the title of PR04.
Michy Marxuach, the mastermind of this project, launched into the art world with an organization in San Juan called M&M Proyectos in 1999. Like many art professionals in San Juan at the time, she was frustrated by the prescribed and limited way in which art was supported and presented in local museums and other institutions, and thus sought to create something of her own. By securing the use of a building in Old San Juan, Michy invited artists to develop projects in an organic way. As she told me recently, “there was no one then who would invite an artist to make non-exhibitable objects, and there was no wherewithal to produce community-based projects.” This way of working, focusing on the social process as the product, was very much aligned with the social practice spirit of the moment.
To me, Michy has never comfortably inhabited the traditional labels of “director” or “curator”, but was always much more interested in an integrated process of collaboration with others, where she often took the mixed role of producer, instigator and co-conspirator. This was the case when, once while visiting the beach town of Rincón in the west coast of Puerto Rico, Michy and a group of artist friends found an abandoned “Yola”, or small vessel, just like the ones that were used by Dominicans to migrate, legally or not, to Puerto Rico. A group that involved artists that named itself “La Flexible” (Charlie Casellas, Olga Casellas, Carolina Caycedo, Raymond Chaves, Jesús Bubu Negrón, and Chemi Rosado Seijo) decided to retrace the usual migratory routes from the so-called “third world” to the “first” but in an inverse way (i.e. from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic), displaying the vessel at the 5th Caribbean biennial of Santo Domingo, as well as video documentation of the journey.
With this same organic way of working, M&M proyectos produced three major international events that would have a significant impact in the contemporary art of Puerto Rico and beyond: PR00, PR02, and PR04. While these projects were structured like biennials in scale, time structure, and international participation they differed from the conventional bi-annual international exhibitions that became commonplace in the 1990s. Their fluidity not only had to do with their rejection of the usual state sponsorship of other exhibitions (as it is the case, in Puerto Rico itself, with the Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan, an exhibition focusing mostly on drawings and prints): it also had to do with the non-traditional approach to funding, venue, working process, and administrative hierarchy itself. At all times, each of these editions was both a critique of the lack of institutional imagination that stems from a cultural economy of scarcity, as well as an affirmative and imaginative approach to creating art with models of community collaboration, exchange and mutual support. It was also, as Michy mentioned to me, a challenge to the colonial narrative that has been assimilated in the island. This perhaps became clearer with the creation of PR04. Starting in 1989, Puerto Rico had developed the far-fetched dream of hosting the 2004 Olympics, for which it developed an Olympic Committee. The committee organized an international regatta, and commissioned a fancy logo (“Hope is the stuff from which a colony survives”, mentioned Michy, “it was like proving that we can be a country, even though we are not a country”). That bid would unfortunately not be successful, and for that edition the 2004 Olympics was in fact awarded to Athens. Michy thought, nonetheless, that they could still do the Olympics in their own way.
Michy had worked with Pablo León de la Barra, now a renowned curator who at the time worked as artist (in PR00 he had done a project based in creating a photographic archive, and in PR 02 developed a tropical museum project). They went back to visit the town of Rincón where Michy and her friends had found that abandoned vessel. The area belonged to a factory, behind which there was a plot of land with an abandoned building. The Casellas Badillo family, friends and supporters of Michy, purchased the property, later allowing them to develop an art project in that location. Pablo and Michy moved in and lived there for 8 or 9 months. “We drew giant electrical cables from the factory to bring power to the house”, she mentioned, and also got plumbing installed. Outside of what would become the headquarters of the project. They installed 30 camping tents with external lights, all of which became, in their words, a “Villa Olimpica”.
I reproduce here Pablo’s description of the project at the time, which is a better summary than what I can provide:
“Puerto Rico 04 was not an event constructed around a series of exhibitions in the
way of a conventional event, but an event in which a series of situations or
activities would happen in much more organic way. In a similar way to the
organization of the architecture of the Olympic Village where the event happened,
it was much more like a free way of organizing things, and where spaces were
created in order to be appropriated by the different situations that happened
without trying to pre-establish exactly what would happen. It was about opening
up this space and then letting things happen. And in this space different activities
could insert themselves in a much freer way. It was about how in that free
space things start to acquire their own order to create new conditions of dialogue
and creation. So yes, what I learned was about opening up this space and creating
this free structure that lets things happen and because you have these spaces for
experimentation where the users can start creating new experiences and situations
without knowing exactly what the outcome will be, things start to happen. For me
that was the important thing - to open up the space where things could happen.”
It was within this non-structure that I also invited 24/7, Federico Herrero, Maria
Papadimitriou, Marjetica Potrc and Pedro Reyes to create structures,
infrastructures and suprastructures that contested the traditional forms and
expectations coming from the construction of space and place in order to create
new and yet unknown spaces, places and situations. Contrary to the idea of art
tourism under the banner of an art event or biennial , the Olympic Village at
PR04 created a temporary utopian community, a space and place where things
could or could not happen. In doing this, for a moment and unknowingly, it
recreated paradise , a place where for a moment artists and curators could stop
thinking about how to advance their careers, and where they could actually start
relating to themselves and to the other through their work.”
The projects that developed from within this organic encampment/artist residency often had the spirit and vibe of an art school, with games, performances, navigation projects, curated dinners and actions that evolved into charades and celebrations (“there was a kamikaze quality to it”, Michy remembers). PR04’s satirical version of an Olympiad replaced competitiveness with community, national display with the elimination of national identities and borders, as Michy said, “nurturing other forms of being and making.” The projects were multi-varied and playful: Maria Papadimitriou documented Greek-themed architecture in Rincón; Pedro Reyes built a floating styrofoam pyramid that was put out onto the sea and that you could go inside to relax; Carolina Caycedo organized a dance competition titled Gran Perretón (a combination of marathon and Perreo, itself a Puerto Rican version of Reggaeton based on erotic hip movements); Julieta González organized a fashion show; the Peruvian collective La Culpable built a giant surfing board.
Michy had also contacted me to invite me to participate in PR04. Because I was at the time the head of public programs at the Guggenheim and my practice concerned experimental public programming, she thought I could organize a symposium of sorts. Given the Greek olympic theme, I thought, why not organize The Symposium? I told her. The Symposium, also sometimes known as The Banquet, is a Socratic dialogue by Plato, considered one of his major works. Structured like others in a format akin to a play, the dialogue is of a banquet scene attended by prominent Athenian men, including Socrates, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and the statesman Alcibiades. In this rather raucous and festive context filled with food and lots of wine they enter into a friendly contest wherein each guest must give a speech about love. I thought the context of Rincón, with the Olympic village and the artist community around it, would make a great environment where to restage the Symposium. I invited a number of artists, curators and writers to participate, with the request to each to pick a character in the original text of the Symposium and write a speech that would reinterpret that position from the standpoint of art — so, instead a speech about love, one about the love for art. The participants I invited included the artists Christine Hill (Alcibiades), Ryan Hill (Pausanias) Nelson Rivera (Phaedrus) the curators Hamza Walker (Erixymachus) Xandra Eden (Aristophanes) and the art historian James Elkins played Socrates ( I thought Jim would do a good job at Socrates with his vast wisdom and nonchalant demeanor). We drank white sangria throughout the symposium. Particularly memorable was Hamza’s speech, where he, at some point, extrapolated from Eryximachus’s speech to do a “love is in the air” portion where he inhaled helium and, with cartoon-character voice, performed portions of Li’l Kim and James Brown (“Ha! I don’t care/about your past/I just want a love that last deep/I don’t care darlin’ about your faults/I just want to satisfy your pulse.”). The night after the symposium there was an artist-curated dinner, as I recall themed on Klingon food (flourescent green-tinted udon and some odd octopus tentacles protruding from the dish).
Going back on the experimentation and fluidity of that moment, I think of Domingos da Criaçao, the experimental monthly programs organized by Federico da Morais at MAM Rio in the early 70s of which I have written often. The space they created was defining in many ways for a generation of Brazilian artists who gravitated toward participatory and process-based practices. I also have been thinking of the important exhibition organized by Thomas J. Lax at MoMA in 2022, documenting Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown Gallery that set the stage for many important Black artists to experiment and grow.
So here is yet one more free historical exhibition idea for curators: I hope that one day a museum takes on the similar work of documenting PR00, PR02 and PR04 outlining the transformative work it generated.
When I look at the photos of the project, from the catalogue as well as elsewhere, some of them remind me of the nostalgic Instagram feed @90sartschool, candid moments of art students interacting, eating, playing, having fun. The community that was created, which, while brief, established strong bonds outside of the bureaucratic, transactional and publicity and commerce-driven art world, was lasting in other ways that we would always look back as a generation of artists that came of age in the early aughts, all congregated in that camping site. For that I will always be thankful to Michy, Pablo and their gang. They proved, with determination, imagination and a healthy dose of humor, that art is not a sprint, but an Olympic Village.