Under Discussion (2005)

Overview

The Puerto Rican island of Vieques was used by the US Navy for sixty years, leaving its landscape scarred with bomb-craters and its ecosystem severely contaminated. In 2003, a civil disobedience campaign was successful in forcing the military out, and the land has now been designated as a federal wildlife reserve. But this designation entails its own violence, marginalizing the demands of island residents that it be fully decontaminated and turned over to municipal management. This conflict is the point of departure for Under Discussion. An overturned conference table has been retrofitted with an engine and rubber grafted from a small fishing boat. In liberal thought, the table is a common architectural trope used for symmetrical communication and the non-violent resolution of conflict. Yet it often fails to account for the inequalities that structure spaces of negotiation.