Eye of the Storm
“If Maria is a teacher, this emerging movement argues, the storm’s overarching lesson is that now is not the moment for reconstruction of what was, but rather for transformation into what could be.” — Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On Disaster Capitalists, 2018
When a storm system forms, it begins with heat intensifying under the ocean’s surface and the rise of humid air gaining momentum through the spin of clouds caught in its pressure system. So, too, had disasters been brewing in Puerto Rico long before the monumental bands of Hurricane Maria charted a fatal trajectory to the island’s shores.
no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria opened at the Whitney months after the 5th anniversary of the storm’s landfall. Its selection of 50 artworks — spanning video, painting, sculpture, and textiles — were made by artists living in Puerto Rico and across the diaspora between 2017 and 2022. Although the show originates at Hurricane Maria’s immediate aftermath, the narratives of devastation depicted in these works go back decades, if not centuries, situating Puerto Rico’s present strife within a larger colonial history of political oppression and socioeconomic precarity enabled by its status as an unincorporated territory. In no existe un mundo poshuracán, the storm is not just a literal disaster but a symbolic one.
