“Harder than it Looks: Esto no es un Mamey”
Negron Pizarro Projects, San Juan, Puerto Rico Nov. - Feb 2025
On Luis Rivera Jimenez and the allegory of archiving
By Alexandra Méndez García
There is a moment in an unfinished short story by Luis Rivera Jimenez; where a man, terminally ill and on the precipice of life and death, stumbles into Puerto Rico’s General Archive. There,
amidst objects covered in dust and mold, he chooses to lay down between two stacks, presumably in a section where some of the rarest and most delicate documents—those that comprise the archipelago's cultural patrimony—are stored. He takes some of his final deep breaths, as if to see if through some process of osmosis, he can internalize that which punctuates the air of the archive. An attempt to see if what has been sealed and sequestered an coat his airwaves, transmuting his physical structure, and become part of his very composition. The failure of traditional measures of preservation results in an irreverent yet
poetic attempt at a new transference of information.
Harder than it Looks: Esto no es un Mamey is an exhibit that in itself challenges the conventions of the retrospective. It is more of a consideration of whether the works that Rivera has been
developing for the past years through iterative processes have the possibility for further iterations. Rivera’s works—reflections on epistemology, race, and the encounters between the two—are subject to continual revision and change as they reflect the artist’s thinking. Here, in the unique opportunity and curatorial approach offered by Negrón Pizarro, Rivera steps back to
ask: What are the works' afterlives? How does this project continue?
Part of the story of Harder than it Looks: Esto no es un Mamey, is Rivera’s role as a custodian and keeper of family archives and objects. Repercución plana I, incorporates his father’s clothing, using art as a funnel for the continuity of these objects. By embedding his father’s suit in the base of one of the works, perhaps as part of a collection, Rivera transmutes the objectinto an artistic fixture that ensures its continued existence. Playing with the conventions of art world standards of preservation, Rivera’s sculptures become an attempt at safeguarding his family’s material legacy.
This interest in the social history of objects continues in “Yesterday, being a politician was just a patriotic duty, today it is a profession. Pg. 23” , where Rivera considers the material’s subtext. Purchased in a Palestinian pharmacy, one of many in Puerto Rico, the hookah, as Rivera notes, evidences networks of historic trade and migration. His consideration of various found objects functions as a sort of mind map, a way of structuring thinking—displayed in the titles of his Red histórica 4—where he traces the interconnected networks of subjects ranging from family photographs, anime characters, mythological figures, landscapes, found objects, and snippets of personal texts. Through this methodology, any object becomes an archive unto itself.
“Yesterday, being a politician was just a patriotic duty, today it is a profession. Pg. 23” also invites the participant to smoke a boiled and distilled version of Antonio S. Pedreira’s seminal text Insularismo. Influential and controversial, Pedreira, in Insularismo, argues that Puerto Rico’s geography informs thinking, leading to a mode of thinking that can be unquestioningly self-referential, as if caught in a continual loop. “I have a very big problem with the work,” Rivera has noted, “and my problem is that it is right.” Noting a reluctance to engage with the primary text itself, that is, a lack of readership, Rivera experiments to see if the information can be transferred by other means. He invites the text to be internalized and metabolized through the body. This, too, like in his short story, forms part of the extended life of the document.
The fourth iteration of Rivera’s Función fatica, is also an extension, acting as a connective thread on the walls of the gallery space. A reference to the phatic function, known as the contact function, a verbal function that confirms the communicative connection between two participants
in the conversation. The assertion at the entrance of the gallery space “Todo esto debería ser diferente” a statement that continues to be fleshed out in the text that runs through the walls of the gallery space: Vivimos en guerra/ en la intersección de la no-humanidad y el terror; a pesar de, somos nosotres los dueños de las abstracciones: igual, eso no quita aun nuestro apego emocional a nuestra infraestructura y a la falta de, y eso es un problema por que las formas de representación no permiten la ausencia: “¿Como puedo mostrar lo que ya hemos perdido?
In the midst of negotiating an emotional attachment to our infrastructure and lack there of; how can we show what we have already lost? Alongside Función fatica, El mar editado, a work of video art that combines YouTube videos to create a visual collage that includes images of young black men enjoying the sea on a small boat, alongside advertising videos from cruise companies. The video highlights how navigation carries different implications depending on who carries it out as it renders the series of found
footage as feverishly absurd. The helm of a boat in the gallery space, sawed off with the assistance of Loíza fisherman Ivan Cirino Hernandez, is also meant to be a future platform for a
soapbox performance. The boat’s helm itself becomes re-signified, it’s longevity assured amidst the continued ecological threats to fishing communities.
¿Como puedo mostrar lo que ya hemos perdido?
Amidst the uncertainty of our infrastructure, and lack thereof, todo esto debría ser diferente.
And yet, Rivera bets on the capacities of artistic practice to communicate amidst loss- that is, to foster continuity.