Painting (Painting)

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Westminster Agua Viva is made from Westminster City Council(‘s) recycling bin bags, glued together, that the artist has painted and cut or cut and painted. Although, they hang on the wall they possess a strong sculptural quality as the fringes float away from the wall. This is part of a series of works that refer to Brazilian concrete and neo-concrete art as well as Arte Povera in a playful manner while demonstrating a strong identity of its own.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Another curious element is that it seemed that I was seeing images from the dreams I had that afternoon. But these images were appearing from end to beginning, like a film reel running backwards. I also couldn’t properly situate them.

Photography (Photography)

In Hsu’s work, Colonia China (2014), the artist documents a Chinese cemetery of Costa Rica’s Limón Province, along the country’s Caribbean coast. Serving as the final resting place for Chinese migrants who came to Coast Rica during the late nineteenth century as indentured laborers working to construct the Transatlantic Railroad, the Colonia China speaks to a long but divided history. Hsu’s photographs of the burial ground also echo her interest in typography, with blocky black lettering and painted Chinese characters marking the cemetery as a space belonging to two different worlds.

Installation (Installation)

Map of the Universe from El Cerro continues Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s long-term engagement with the community of El Cerro , a rural, working-class community living in the mountains of Naranjito, Puerto Rico. The project was initiated in 2002 by painting the exteriors of residents’ homes different shades of green, paying homage to the way the community has been built in harmony with the topography of the mountains where it stands. Through negotiation and collaboration with community leaders, volunteers, students and residents, over 100 homes have been painted.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her work Al final del arcoiris (At the end of the rainbow, 2015) is a bundle of bills from Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, arranged by color to form a tight spiraling rainbow held close with a rubber band. Here, Martinez uses these various currencies to gesture towards questions of capital and value, the accumulation of wealth, and regional economies. Beneath the surface of her playful visual propositions, Martinez asks us to consider not only the monetary costs of international goods, but also the real, human consequences of a global economic culture that privileges some and devastates others.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

Photography (Photography)

Adrien Missika follows in the footsteps of the Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), a designer of gardens, parks and promenades who introduced modern landscape architecture to Brazil. Marx’s work is characterized by the use of native tropical vegetation as a structural element of design. He worked with Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, the architects of Brazilia, and with them, the tropical plant became a motif in urban architecture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan areas and contributing to a loss of cultural sites and practices that once took place along the Route.

Painting (Painting)

In her geometric paintings on wood panel, Madriz employs the Fibonacci numbers to illustrate, in simplified form, the pattern of natural plant growth—beginning from a single stem, and growing exponentially, rationally, and efficiently outward from there. Tinting the underlying wood but not covering it, Madriz’s delicate cubes seem to hover on the surface of the warm wood surfaces, drawing more attention to the grain and its own natural pattern. Always drawing the attention back to the natural world, Madriz’s multimedia works aim to reassert the natural, and our own links to it.

Installation (Installation)

Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph is part of the series titled “Iris Tingitana project” (2007) focusing on the disappearance of the iris. If Yto Barrada was initially interested in the architectural heritage of the city, today the core of her research focuses on risks around landscape and its heritage. The iris, found bordering the city, carries the name of the city, and is an emblem of Tangier.

Photography (Photography)

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe. They become like abstract paintings that recall Modernist formal experimentation. They are somehow symptomatic of the circulation of goods and people that is made to sound so abstract.