Ordenamiento Silvestre: Ir y Retornar (Wild Ordering: Going and Return) is an ongoing project for the arrangement and daily documentation of wild plants that I randomly select and isolate as an exercise of meditation and reflection in response to social distancing for the COVID-19 pandemic. With this I seek to make a catalogue and a calendar of leaves, with which I keep memory of the pass of time, the fragility of life and the change of an organism when it is separated from its natural state.. I keep the count of the days in quarantine by the amount of leaves that I collect. This documentation is progressive and it is part of my art practice which is focused in the memory and experience of the social and political construction of the contemporary landscape of Puerto Rico.

Sarabel Santos-Negrón
March, 2020

"Mitigaciones/Mitigations" it is a research on plans and proportional impact in response to erosion and urban planning development on the coasts. It is a project that takes as a reference the containment constructions (or lack thereof) in order to develop a body of work that sublimates and questions their function, material, place and those who are involved. This with the aim of promoting reflection and analysis of policies and legislation for the approval of permits in maritime-terrestrial zones and the relationship of our bodies, actions and thoughts facing the structures that serve as dikes to placate the transformation of soils and coasts.

Groundscapes (2017-2018) is a reflection on the experience of the landscape and the place where I'm standing or stranded. This refers to a locations, social situations, circumstances and events or incidents faced in particular places. It is a look at the ground where we walk, with which we have daily contact and from where the reality of the inhabited territory is contemplated. It is not a landscape at a distance, but an extension of a landscape of the here and now. This is an ongoing project.

The photographs of this stage of the work were taken in the towns of Vega Alta, Vega Baja, Morovis and Bayamón after the devastation of Hurricane Maria on the island of Puerto Rico. 

The Accidental Landscapes are a series of landscapes constructed from impressions of real landscapes that have been affected or transformed by the hand of the man, industrialization, urbanism and pollution of green areas, river basins or coastal zones in Puerto Rico.  

The works titled Effluvium I (2017) and Efluvio(a) (2018) are sites specifics installations made with plastic bags collected. The pieces are developed in response to the study of the shape of the channel, history and transformation of the Bayamon River and its overflow in the past in Puerto Rico.  

The work titled Ínsula: island, isolated house, place of little importance seeks to depict the affliction, reality, and the isolation of the social landscape of the Island of Puerto Rico.  The work was made through drawings and collage of photographs based on ground surfaces and debris found in different places on the island. These are presented in a composition that takes as reference semiotics and symbols. The work is presented together with the sound piece Paradise for Sale in which I combine government propaganda, advertisements, and comments from people in the community, music and sounds from the environment.

The Accidental Landscapes are a series of landscapes built from impressions of real landscapes that have been affected or transformed by the hand of man, industrialization, urbanism and pollution of green areas, river basins or coastal areas of Puerto Rico. The works titled Effluvium I (2017) and Effluvio (a) (2018) are specific facilities for the site made with plastic bags collected. The pieces are developed in response to the study of the shape of the channel, history and transformation of the Bayamon River and its overflow in the past in Puerto Rico.

"Pronósticos/Forecasts", it is a body of work with which I seek to safeguard a visual memory of how I observe the atmosphere at different times of the day for the months that make up the hurricane season in Puerto Rico, from May to November 2021. During this so-called season, for many years, the Puerto Rican community, as well as our sister islands in the Caribbean, have been on the lookout for any change or development of weather systems. There is a collective sense of concern about the post-traumatic stress of recent hurricanes and the need to predict what might happen in the future, which leads us to be continually on the lookout. But are we really? What do we use to know the state of the weather? Are we observing? The accessibility of tracking systems for climatological issues has made us trust and rely almost entirely on these forecasts, which have been developed, to a large extent as a form of understanding / control / dominion over nature and in search of an eventual good for the human being. On the other hand, the immediate experience of observing has taken a back seat. We move further away from our senses and therefore from the reception of the natural world. In this works, I ironize with language and the image the possibility of imagining or describing the states of the weather for any given day based on hundreds of documentary images of the atmosphere collected over the past months from Puerto Rico.