Claim the memory, Claim the Land
Sendas en La Isla Nena (Trails in Nena Island): Use of Oral History as a means of Community Development
Rosina Santana Castellon
Artsgreenhouse.org (Puerto Rico)
The Caribbean island of Vieques led a sixty year struggle to get rid of bombing practices by the US Navy. Smart bombs guided through Global Positioning System technology (GPS) determined latitude and longitude coordinates to target the eastern and western parts of the island in daily bombing practices. The residents of Vieques were forced to live in the middle third of the island, where winds showered them with toxic dust and sand contaminated with depleted uranium and heavy metals. All streams and wells dried up, forcing water to be brought in by underwater pipes from the big island of Puerto Rico. Cancer rates soared to 27% higher than expected, along with other systemic immunodeficiency diseases.
After the Navy left Vieques in May 2003, high stakes developers caused property values to soar by selling Vieques as an undiscovered Caribbean paradise , downplaying the turbulent history written in the soil. Now, the people that fought and died to reclaim their island are in danger of losing it to investors planning touristic developments that will exclude residents from affordable housing or profiting from the budding tourism industry. Trails in Nena Island was a public art workshop sponsored by the Puerto Rican government as part of its Public Art program. It was a conceptual, performative, transdisciplinary piece in the form of a community art workshop seeking to insert the memory of the inhabitants into the discourse of land planning. Participants, residents of the island, used the same GPS technology (used by the NAVY to bomb the island) to mark significant places of their choice and to highlight historical, archeological, architectural and ecological sites. They wrote personal anecdotes associated with each site, then, designed and made plasticine bas reliefs based on their stories. These 3 ft by 2.5 ft. reliefs were cast as bronze plaques and mounted on 4.5 ft. high pedestals.
Each plaque has its GPS coordinates engraved on them to remember the death of David Sanes, a puertorican killed by a stray “smart” bomb. A tourist information map was printed with the oral histories associated with each site so that a tourist might be able to understand the meaning of each site. As a first response to the existence of these plaques, the youth are organizing a tourism cooperative to educate tourists and visitors into this still developing culturally sensitive story.
Since the plaques address topics still in contention in the public arena, the touristic experience becomes one of developing a sensitivity to local land re-distribution ploys –information far beyond the usual “pretty beach” concept of Caribbean tourism. A second response (still-in-the-planning-stages) is an elementary school geo-historical tour of Vieques based on a coloring book of the twenty plaques detailing the oral histories. To convey the story of the past struggles cross-generationally became of utmost importance in view of the long struggle ahead for sustainable development.
About Rosina Santana Castellon
Artist Rosina Santana Castellon does what she calls a “performative amalgam”-- a real life intervention in a socially sensitive situation in order to enter into a visual dialogue, not with the art world per se, but with a community. The chaos ( i.e. that state between the old and the new ) is the place of opportunity for the transdisciplinary artist : multiple levels of understanding of the art work can provide keys to understand the potential for inducing change in a colonized and marginalized community. Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, trans-disciplinary artist Rosina Santana calls her work a “performative amalgam” which is a blending of her varied skills into one purpose: to bring “Art” into the ‘real world’ and let It have its impact in that space that Robert Rauschenberg called “the space between the real world and the gallery”. A refugee by age 10, Santana has used the experiences of exile as a fulcrum or pivoting point to dialogue with communities who have or are suffering trauma due to urban redevelopment or, in the case of Vieques Island, sixty years of underdevelopment due to militarism. With a B.A. in Psychology and Anthropology, and a Masters in Community Organization from the Jane Adams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois, at Champaign-Urbana, and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plus a vast experience as a Video Instructional Programmer, Santana has worked in South America (Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico), Europe (in Spain in Valencia and Murcia, in Haid, Germany as part of a short term artistic residency, London, England at the Royal College of Art Summer Program) and the United States (Texas , Illinois, and Pennsylvania). Her work has been presented at the Society for Caribbean Studies in Newcastle, England, at the Globally Green Conference in Carnegie Mellon, and was asked to speak at the Public Art Observatory Conference, WaterfrontsIV in Barcelona, Spain, and at the Inter-Arts Conference Collision 2006 in Victoria, Canada in 2006. She is presently teaching a Transdisciplinary Seminar at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico in San Juan. Education • (MFA) Community Art, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • University of North Texas, Denton, Texas Basic Studio Curriculum • (MSW) –Community Organization (Social Work)University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois • (BA) Psychology/Anthropology, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois Selected Exhibitions • "Trails in Nena Island" UC Gallery,Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 2005 • Keynote Address Society for Caribbean Studies, Newcastle, England, 2005 • "Urban Mining" Eclectic Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA 2003 • "Museo del Cabanyal" Portes Obertes, Festival de Arte Público ,Valencia, España, 2002. • "Portes Obertes" Festival de Arte Público, Valencia, España, 2001. • " Agua Viva" Jardín Escultórico, Santomera, Murcia, España (European Community funded), 2000 • "Argonaut" Group Show, Purnell Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA. 2000 • "Six Deep" Group Show, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1999 • Cuban Dig #1, Dig #2: Cuba. Parte de Pittsburgh-Matanzas Sister Cities Project 1998 • "Matanzas: Mother's House / Mother was a Taylor" (Performance, video walk) • "This Sculpture in the Memory" Second Texas Annual, Contemporary Arts Museum, Fort Worth, Texas , 1997 Bibliography •Fuentes, Elvis. “De relieve el pais”, Plural, Centro de Investigaciones y Política Pública,Ag 2005. • Santana, Rosina."Museo y Anti-Museo", in the Catálogo del Museo del Cabanyal, University Politecnica de Valencia, 2003 • Benton, Mark. "Peace of Art", Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Feb 13, 2002. • Isenberg, B.J. "Technodrome", InPGH Weekly, abril 05, 2000. • Griffith, Diana. 'A Warm Welcome´, Dallas Morning News, Nov 24, 1999. • Dallas Morning News, "WWII POW Camp in Princeton", Dallas, TX. Nov'99 • Kutner, Janet. 'Exhibit gets more than Two Thumbs Up'. Dallas Morning News, Oct 03, 1997