Carlos Franco

In this installation, Puerto Rican artist Carlos Franco Maldonado reflects on time, climate, and landscape in agrologistics from colonial times to today’s post-colonialism. Drawing on a clepsydra (water clock), the work questions how European settlers confronted the climate and the different passage of the seasons in the Americas to make the land more productive for their commercial enterprises, and how that relationship based on extractivism expresses itself today in the island. Using a complex technological device including a sophisticated network of water tanks and circuits, as well as lamps and fertilized soil, Franco Maldonado has created a microclimate to grow a banana plant. The installation also includes videos with images of the US alt-right, data on the use of cryptocurrencies in the Caribbean, and documentation on the coqui frog—a symbol of Puerto Rico—as allusions to the unequal relationship between the United States and its neighboring countries. As an archipelago of interrelated systems, this work connects the political reality of Puerto Rico—a Commonwealth state—and climate change caused by global warming with the migration of Caribbean people to the United States, and points to neo-colonialism and capitalism as responsible for these phenomena.