Vieques, Puerto Rico

The Caribbean island of Vieques was home to a U.S. Navy installation until 2003. For Land Mark (Foot Prints) (2001–2), the artists Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, Philadelphia) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971, Havana) breached the facility to inscribe subversive marks on a bomb-testing site by treading on the sand with rubber stamps attached to the soles of their shoes. This was not the first time that opponents of the American military presence on Vieques had trespassed on the installation or sabotaged its operations: in the 1970s, fishermen unleashed an armada of sea monsters fashioned of buoys and scrap metal that “tangled propellers and crippled naval operations” (Bobrow-Strain 2015, 128). When the U.S. military shuttered the facility, they did not return the site to islanders but fenced it off as the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge. As of 2015, the landscape was still contaminated with uranium, lead, and PCBs (Bobrow-Strain 2015, 130).

C.S.H.