Terrence Musekiwa
Puerto Rico, 2019

Where is Home? highlights a land ridden with political, environmental, and economic challenges, yet simultaneously upheld by the rich culture and social fabric of its thriving Latino community. An American colony plucked from its Caribbean roots, its contemporary context is not unlike other post-colonialist territories and nations around the world. Musekiwa reflects on San Juan as an echo of the many cities around the world where endemic corruption, unfettered gentrification, and short-term profits have left havoc in their wake.

The story:

The gallery ventured to San Juan in early November 2019 to get a “lay of the land” and support Musekiwa in his research and search for materials as he attempted to make a work responsive to the current moment in Puerto Rico.

For much of his career, Musekwia has been interested in collecting materials from within his surrounding landscapes. Encountered in the streets, abandoned spaces, and scrap yards, these found materials feed his appetite to challenge ongoing socio-economic realities.

The significance of the tarp was illuminated as we walked through the many barrios of San Juan in search for discarded objects to combine with the carved stone heads Musekiwa made in Zimbabwe. As we dove deeper into the social and spacial fabric of the San Juan, we realized each neighborhood had one thing in common: a dependence on tarpaulins. We soon learned that while these plastic bandaids were intended to serve as temporary relief structures for houses and buildings damaged during Hurricane Maria, today, two years after the devastation, an estimated 30,000 tarps remain as integral structures of Puerto Rican housing.

The language of these large-scale tarp works, the remnants of a visible violence not yet remedied, first appeared in Terrence’s work this past summer in Lagos, Nigeria, another city where temporary tarpaulins have taken on more permanent roles. To offer context the large work, Musekiwa collected other materials from sites abandoned after Maria to made sculptures using things like phone receivers from inside a partially-demolished school building, and broken glass from a boarded up home.

With Where is Home?, Musekiwa pays tribute to the inescapable reality of environmental turmoil sustained by a lack of financial aid and government support throughout Puerto Rico.