Featured Cultural Partner: Art of Transformation
Cartographies of Displacement

Brenda Cruz‍
AllieNation 7
Digital photography on PVC canvas
24" x 35"

On View: Dec 2nd – Dec 10th, 2023
Curated by: Helen Ceballos & Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos

Location: The Pavilion, 650 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka, FL 33054

Displacement has historically shaped important aspects of the Caribbean. In the particular case of Puerto Rico, beyond the coloniality that for centuries has conditioned our culture and the gentrification that reconfigures life in our neighborhoods, we refer to the actions that physically and sociologically determine the flux of the present. However, it is not necessarily from an accusatory point of view that we are interested in exploring this phenomenon; it is from the recognition and conviction that despite the violence implicit in these movements, but also because of them, we produce knowledge that we are rarely able to value.‍

Cartographies of Displacement brings together the work of Puerto Rican artists who, through their respective practices, reflect on what is produced in the junctures that displacement provokes. The exhibition comments on the experiences that accumulate in the everyday —the ways in which we live and negotiate with the forces that displace us—, the changes that undergo the landscape —politically and infrastructurally inside and outside the city— and the ways in which we conceive geography —within the archipelago and in the diaspora, physically and temporally—. Alongside these observations on the setting, the curatorial work reflects on the production of subjectivities and the questioning of hegemonic identities —individual and collective—, and on how this in turn has repercussions on the articulation of historical narratives and the right to remember.