In Conversation with Eric Rivera Barbeito
by Gabrielle Tillenburg
Puerto Rican-born artist Eric Rivera Barbeito’s multimedia practice interrogates the regulation of Puerto Rico’s status as a colony, and conversely, deregulations harmful to the Puerto Rican people such as governmental policies, those related to environmental crises, and disaster capitalism. This interview discusses his political research and process, highlighting crucial tensions relevant to contemporary discourse on sovereignty, climate change, and decolonization. Rivera Barbeito received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
Interview Transcript:
Gabrielle Tillenberg: To begin, in your work you examine the relationship between the free-associated state, Puerto Rico, and the United States and the history of this relationship is incredibly complex. The neocolonial impacts of US regulations, and deregulations (in some cases), continue to have long-lasting impacts on the island. Much of this converged and became globally visible after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and your series of objects entitled Temporal (2017–18) addresses this confluence. How have you conceptualized these objects, and considering the possibility for engaging these objects individually outside of their context in terms of their relationship to the series, how has conceptualizing many varying issues affected your artistic process?
Eric Rivera Barbieto: Temporal was mostly intended as a series of recordings of the new reality after the hurricane. I think if you speak to a lot of people who were on the island while Maria was passing through (for example, my parents), everyone gauges time now as pre-Maria and post-Maria. So, I was thinking of these small objects as signifiers of markers of time, of these new understandings of daily life or just small shifts of how people go about their business. Some of them are a little bit easier to pick up in an individual setting. One of the sculptures in that series is called Después (2017) and it’s very plain—you have the blue tarp in a house-like structure, so it’s very easy to get to the idea of a post-Maria landscape with that one (fig. 1).
But some of the other ones—there’s a miniature version of a shipping container and that could take a whole set of different meanings, especially now with the whole Suez Canal situation happening (fig 2). It alludes to a lot of different things. When I made it, it was talking about how getting first-aid supplies to the island and the aftermath of the hurricane was a complete mess, and then that situation happened again when Puerto Rico was experiencing the earthquakes in the south of the island. And then, shipping containers are a personal object for me because my parents [. . .] they’ve been in the trucking business for a while, so you always hear these international shipping firm names while you’re riding with my dad in the car. You hear “Hapag-Lloyd,” “Merx,” and “Evergreen.” Some of them stand on their own, some of them are a little bit more hyper-specific, and some can be taken in a different context, but generally they’re made with the intention of alluding to Maria, but the goal is to also speak to the issue of climate change which obviously is one of the big causes for why Maria was as bad as it was. It’s not going to be the last instance of where we see a natural disaster of this calamity. We’re just going to continue to see ever-worsening cataclysms like that happening on a more regular level.
GT: You speak of pre- and post-Maria. Post-Maria. About post-Maria, the former governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló tweeted in 2018: “Puerto Rico is open for business. Our goal is to minimize bureaucracy to promote investment and economic development.”[1] Your piece, Campamento (2018), responds to this proclamation (fig. 3). Can you speak about the work and how your artistic process addresses such a deregulatory position?
ERB: Campamento is a play into how essentially anything under our economic system can be commodified to an extent. If it can be commodified, it will be commodified. It was thinking mostly as how land and tropical spaces are very susceptible to that commodification, and it was using the medium of painting as a vehicle for that. Painting, I would argue, is one of the most commodified mediums of art making.
It was thinking of using painting, and seventy-eight square acrylic paintings, as proxies for each of Puerto Rico’s municipalities. Initially, I was trying to assign a value system to them. Each municipality in Puerto Rico has its shield insignia that’s a holdover from Spanish colonial times. A lot of municipalities will have a castle-crown on it and depending on the amount of castle-crowns, it would signify the importance to the Spanish crown. San Juan, for example, has five towers in its castle-crown. Initially, I wanted to play around with this weird value system and auctioning off these plots of land, through each painting and I also have [a] certificate of authenticity that would go with them and all that stuff. The main idea was to mock this liquidation process and this willingness on the part of the local government to just sell the land so givingly.
It’s all tied into the whole history of being a colony and that land never really being yours and always belonging to someone else or being at the mercy of someone else. It was also a critique of how private interests flock to the island because it’s a tax haven. It’s still part of the US but there [are] a lot of tax incentives given to private interests, so it’s seen as a tax paradise but it’s also matched with [. . .], Puerto Rico is a very beautiful place and it [is] warm weather all throughout the year and it’s always fetishized as a destination from mainland US. Currently you have the instance of “Portopians” which are cryptocurrency technocrats that are flocking to the island with the pretext of rebuilding the island and white-savior complex. It’s like, “Don’t worry, we’re here to improve the island. We’re benevolent, a benevolent force to enhance the island.” It’s a very bizarre thing to see. Campamento is talking about that process of who gets to assign value to a place, who’s in charge of dictating that place, and ultimately who has autonomy over that space. I think with Puerto Rico, time and time again you see that the actual people living there don’t have autonomy over the space that they live in, over their own backyard that they should by right of living, growing there, and being raised their entire lives—that they should have. You see that throughout Puerto Rico’s history where time and time again, an outside force or an outside external legislative body is always dictating what happens in Puerto Rico and, as a result, the courses of the lives of the people there.
GT: We met for the first time at your studio at the beginning of summer 2019. At that time, a private chat which included detestable comments from Rosselló had only just been released, and this included evidence of corruption as well. This sparked the ongoing protests that summer which called for his resignation and he stepped down that August. Did the events that took place that summer affect your work?
ERB: I think to an extent it did. It was amazing to see people getting together and seeing the energy behind the protest. That was pretty amazing and very inspiring, especially when you’re dealing with a systemic problem [. . .]. Rosselló was just one of many.
I did make a painting in response to it (fig 4). This is a momentous moment in Puerto Rico, you ousted a governor, rightfully so—and that had to be celebrated—but I also wanted to refrain from making too much work in response to that because I wasn’t present there and I didn’t feel like I could speak rightfully to the whole process. I was more of a spectator from the outside looking in and I think when you’re not on the street getting tear-gassed like a lot of Puerto Ricans did in Old San Juan, you don’t want to take the reins and make work as if that’s something that you’ve lived through (fig. 5).
But you definitely have to acknowledge it. I think there’s definitely a shift culturally that’s happening, and I think mentally, people are just absolutely exhausted of dealing with the same thing and the switchback from pro-statehood and status-quo party. I think that shift—you’re starting to see it more and more and people are rejecting that binary that’s existed for fifty-plus years. I think that the protests were a big catalyst to that. It really showed a lot of people that this is unacceptable and there’s really no reason we have to continue living with this.
I think now you’re seeing the results of that a lot more with the past recent elections. There are two other parties, the pro-independence party and then another party that’s a little bit more recent, [which] got a bigger share of the votes in comparison to the current governor, Pierluisi. He only won with a third of the total votes, so it’s a ruling minority right now in Puerto Rico and I think that’s a big signifier of change, culturally and generally—where people are in regard to their attitudes with the way politics have been played [on] the island and getting rid of that standard system of operation in the island.
GT: Back when we met that summer, you recommended Naomi Klein’s informative work, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on Disaster Capitalists. The text describes how laissez-faire economic incentives, austerity measures, and climate disasters have created a disaster in its own right. Importantly, she describes how Puerto Ricans are resisting disaster capitalism. Has disaster capitalism continued to be influential in your work?
ERB: Absolutely. Lately, I’ve had a string of research where I’ve been very interested by the idea of manifest destiny—this idea that everything that we see is ours for the taking—and how that concept wasn’t a widely spread idea in the early years of the United States. I think a minority of people (and early on, the young United States) actually supported it, but it was prevalent enough where it’s in the DNA of this country: the way this country manifests itself across the world, and the way it carries out its foreign policy with the neoliberal export of economic practices. Throughout the world you can see that this is our economic ruleset, this is the way you’re going to play, and these are the rules you’re going to play by [. . .]. You could see [an] early instance of this with the Jakarta Incident in Indonesia which I think Naomi Klein goes into in Disaster Capitalism.
The idea of manifest destiny is very interesting to me because the US [is] pushing its military presence across the world and through that, it’s preserving its hegemony and power status in the world. But then through the way it does that—the Department of Defense has a massive carbon footprint and running bases across the world is contributing to climate change. It’s this very interesting vicious cycle where they recognize climate change as probably the biggest existential threat that they could possibly face but at the same time they’re actively contributing to it. The way they go about it is very nonsensical. It’s like, “We’re going to preserve our status across the world even if it means dooming us all.”
Tanquesito (2021) is a very direct output of doing those readings and going into that frame of thought (fig. 6). There’s never a lack of funds for weapons but then when it comes to a simple stimulus check, they got to go back and forth and debate it, trim it down, and compromise. It’s amazing to me how that’s accepted here and Tanquesito is a response to that. It kind of looks like a toy. It’s kind of the size of a toy. It’s referencing the general figure of a tank. It’s phallic. It’s a response to the big macho attitude that the US takes. It’s just kind of absurd. It’s a weird little object that’s awkward and takes too much space for what it is because it protrudes out in a couple of directions. It’s hopefully the first of many sculptures that speaks to that obscene amount of spending, the absurd set of priorities that the government in the US has in terms of how it uses taxpayer funds, where it allocates those funds, and how it consistently throughout its history has always favored warfare and not so much providing the actual services that you would expect a government—a functioning government—to provide to its citizens.
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Gabrielle Tillenburg
Gabrielle Tillenberg (she/her) is a MA/PhD student studying modern and contemporary Caribbean and diasporic art at the University of Maryland. Her interests include artist activism in independence movements, interpretations of time in photographic media, and contemporary use of craft materials. From 2015 to 2020 she served as the exhibitions coordinator at Strathmore.
Eric Rivera Barbeito
Eric Rivera Barbeito is a Puerto Rican-born artist. His multimedia practice interrogates Puerto Rico’s status as a United States colony. Rivera Barbeito received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Footnotes
[1] Ricardo Rosselló, “#PuertoRico is open for business. Our goal is to minimize bureaucracy to promote investment and economic development. #VisionPuertoRico,” Twitter, July 14, 2018, https://twitter.com/ricardorossello/status/1018210691600338951?s=20.