Arts Thread

“El suelo en duelo” is a series of visual works that outline resistance tactics against colonialism in the context of the United State’s occupation of Puerto Rico. Using sand as my weapon of choice, I articulate relationships between legibility as a condition of colonialism, play as a tactic for resistance, and how these strategies construct the experience and perceptions of the colonial subject and landscape. The ground becomes an active agent, a space of resistance, and a place for mourning our histories. Sand occupies without hesitation. It slips between our toes and invades the most intimate parts of our bodies. By shifting and blurring sand refuses legibility, countering the flattened readings of historically othered spaces essentialized by the process of colonization. As a tactic of defense, it dissipates or compacts, delineating the shore between the recognized and recognizable. It reclaims what has been made visible and consumed by others. Sand proposes a strategic retaliation and a rupture between the legible and illegible. El suelo en duelo translates to both “The dueling ground” and “The mourning ground.”