“A particular vanguard impulse persists. Poetry is transforming, but remains a weapon loaded with the future.”
– Esteban Valdes Arazate, La Otra PueRta, Editorial La Mano Negra, San Juan, PR, 2011.
by Jan Galligan & Lillian Mulero
The
location icon on our GPS Is flashing and glowing brightly. Siri says
“Drive straight for one-half mile and you have reached your
destination.” Meanwhile, we are stuck at the end of a dead-end cul
de sac in the middle of urb. Ramon Rivero “Diplo” near Naguabo on
the southeast coast of the island. We are trying to find El Bosque
Auxiliar and the Casa Club, a tree house in the middle of the
forest, the site of Poseia desde la Oficina de Desempleo, an
exhibition organized by curator Marina Reyes Franco featuring the
poetry of Esteban Valdes, with contributions from Jesus “Bubu”
Negron, Radames “Juni” Figueroa, Marxz Rosado, Beatriz Santiago
Munoz, and Chemi Rosado-Seijo.
“We
can't drive straight ahead,” I tell Lillian. “What do we do now?”
She suggests we turn around and drive back to the center of Naguabo.
“Turn right!” says Lillian. “Now, turn left.” I follow her
directions. “Good,” she says. “Now, one more left turn.” As
we turn the corner, we find Esteban Valdes standing beside the road,
cell phone to his ear. We stop, and he climbs into the backseat of
our car. “I was just trying to help a group coming down from San
Juan,” he tells us. “It is not easy to find this place, and once
you do, you still have to find the entrance into the woods. That's
it, you can park right here.”
El Bosque Auxiliar is a sustainable forest project organized by Luis Agosto Leduc. Casa Club Tree House was created by Radamés “Juni” Figueroa and opened to the public in June, 2013, as a haven, an outdoor art gallery in the midst of a tropical forest. Using materials found in the forest and items salvaged from throughout San Juan including his barrio, Puerta de Tierra, Figueroa built a large platform fifteen feet above the ground, sheltered by a transparent sloping roof. Perfectly located in the center of three Rainbow Eucalyptus trees, Tree House is painted with psychedelic colors to match the trees. Casa Club inspired two more sculptural installations: Breaking the Ice, featured in the 2014 Biennial at the Whitney Museum, and Naguabo Rainbow Daguao Enchumbao Fango Fireflies presented at the Sculpture Center, also in New York City. Both sculptures are informed by the rain forest and allow Figueroa to “speak of what I know best: life next to the sea – the heat, the music, and a relaxed aesthetic.” Both belong to what Figueroa calls tropical readymades, or the creation of an artistic language from the Caribbean tropical context.
Poet, artist, and labor rights organizer, Esteban Valdes has worked in that context since the early 1970s. Born in la Ciudad de Mexico in 1947, Valdes studied science and history at Universidad de Puerto Rico and in 1970, founded the literary magazine Alicia La Roja, dedicated to “those who oppose the capitalist order with a beautiful voluptuous disorder.” The work was presented as posters pasted to the walls near the university in Rio Piedras. In 1977, Valdes collected some of his contributions to Alicia along with many other examples of his concrete poetry in Fuera de Trabajo, the first book of concrete poetry published in Puerto Rico. Valdes explains his concrete poetry as “a conceptual visual appeal that has prevailed. I still insist that the style is free poetry, free words. My influences come from the archaic eras, but I stand in the second generation after Brazilian and European poets – if that makes any sense – also Mexicans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Argentines and other Latin American artists.”
In addition to writing and publishing, Valdes was involved in another art movement of the 70s called Mail Art, in which artists and poets created works they circulated among their peers. Each week, poems and art works were sent by the mail and every day, new works arrived in the mailbox from all over the world. Foregoing the decorative or illustrative, these works commented on events or politics of the day. Participants maintained lists of their correspondents, and the work, usually created in editions of 10 or 100, was limited to what would fit inside of a mailing envelope. The most interesting aspect of this work was the collaborative nature of the activity. Sending and receiving large quantities of work, the poets and artists were influenced by what they encountered and often chose to comment directly on works received, mailing their revisions and elaborations back to the original sender. Subsequently, many worked on projects together. A number of print journals collected and published these correspondence-art activities, the most subversive and well known was FILE magazine, published in Canada, from 1972-1989.
In
2001, Bea Santiago Munoz, not knowing the work of Esteban Valdes,
accidentally discovered a copy of Fuera
de Trabajo.
Feeling an aesthetic and intellectual affinity with the poems, she
worked with Michy Marxuach to include Valdes in M&M
proyectos 2002
island-wide
art survey PUERTO
RICO'02 [En Ruta].
Fourteen artists were chosen to recreate some of the poems as an
homage to one of the most interesting experimentations in Puerto
Rican art. One Valdes poem is a seven step list of The
process to get the signature of Pedro Albizu Campos reproduced in
neon.
Marxz Rosado followed those instructions to fabricate a six-foot
version of the signature in bright red neon.
As
the program in the woods begins, Valdes tells us he was recently
invited to submit a work for an international poetry anthology being
published in Afghanistan, in support of the oppressed Hazara. He
emailed them his biography and a photograph of the page Soneto
de las Estrellas from
Fuera
de Trabajo. They
wrote back to thank him for agreeing to participate, but asked,
“Where is your poem?” He replied, explaining about the picture
and concrete poetry, but wondering why, given that the asterisk
represents the deity in Mesopotamia, they didn't see it. As he says,
“The
development of technological innovation allows us accelerated
communication, as human beings in the global village, and to share
our feelings. The communication network is more direct and personal.
What you do in Puerto Rico runs around the world instantly and
presents you in Argentina or even Russia – even if they don't
always understand what you are saying.”
Having
arrived just before sundown, we are now watching a video by Jesus
“Bubu” Negron. First presented in January, 2014 at Sala de Arte
Público Siqueiro, Mexico City, this video homage to Valdes' poem,
recreates Soneto
de las Estrellas using
people holding burning torches and arranged in the same geometric
pattern as the asterisks representing the stars in the Valdes poem.
Lillian leans over and and tells me that I should turn around.
“Look!” she says, “The fireflies dancing in the air look just
like the people in Bubu's video, which look just like the stars in
Esteban's poem.” Of course, she is right.
Article in Spanish, as published June 9,.2014 in En Rojo, cultural supplement to Claridad, Puerto Rico's national newspaper.