Elated to have been selected as a fellow for Bridging the Divides: Post-Disaster Futures study group. Bridging the Divides is “a program funded by a 1.2-million-dollar Mellon grant that was awarded to CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College-CUNY, to support the establishment of collaborative, interdisciplinary study groups composed of artists, scholars, and journalists from across Puerto Rico and its diasporas.” In its second iteration, “the second group, which focuses on the theme of Post-Disaster Futures, is now hosted at Princeton University and led by current Princeton Professor Dr. Yarimar Bonilla and Dr. Deepak Lamba-Nieves, who is the Research Director and Churchill G. Carey, Jr. Chair in Economic Development Research at the Puerto Rican think tank, Center for a New Economy. Deepak is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Planning.”
My project, titled Cemented Dreams: Material and Ecological Stories in Puerto Rico, critically examines the material, extractive, climatic, and cultural realities of cement in its combined role of casting dreams of modernization and condemning the archipelago to the material that, while heroic to resist hurricanes in concrete form, is one of the worst in heat transfers and embodied carbon. Looking critically at concrete’s entangled histories, this project—with outcomes in an exhibition, aims to uncover connections between Puerto Rico’s architecture and the “pre and post” disaster life of ruins, the coloniality of disaster, and the paradoxes of life conservation and climate adaptation.
More info here.
Cemento Ponce Logo, FLMM Archives.
Marcelo López–Dinardi 