Hidrante is pleased to present Estudios de erosión: Laja sobre mar, with works by Andrea Gandarillas, Carina del Valle Schorske, Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Javier Orfón, and Ramón Miranda Beltran.

Estudios de erosión: Laja sobre mar is a collective ode to that most mysterious island of the Puerto Rican archipelago: Mona Island. At once forbidding and alluring, Mona Island stands apart as an enigma on the sea, a desertic cave isle floating over the water, a historic hideout for Taino ancestry and pirates, a guano treasure chest for fertilizer and gunpowder production, a protected space for endemic wildlife, and a final resting ground for those who’ve wondered off path. In December 2023, a group of five friends set out to venture into this landscape, and this exhibition is an invitation to relate to this most special of journeys.

Amoná, 2023-2024, by Andrea Gandarillas, is a visual poem about a collective experience that transports us to this brief space of time and space. The forces of erosion, the landscape, the time, the coincidences of human life, and their encounters inform her short film. Chito, a fellow traveler whose soliloquy accompanies the Super 8 images, describes the allure of Mona Island in a slow drawl of sensations and thoughts relating to this transformative experience.

Dios Hizo Muchas Cosas is an essay by Carina del Valle Schorske that introduces the reader to various conceptual ideas behind this trip to Mona Island. This version, an extended cut from an original essay published in the New York Times Magazine and translated on this occasion by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, raises concerns about the anthropocentric fingerprint found throughout the island, the slowing down and recentering experience of going off-grid, and describes the natural wonders found on this remote point. The island is often described as uninhabited, but the palimpsest of human activity has never been felt so acutely.

In Christopher Gregory-Rivera’s photographs, delicate rock stalactites and bejuco tendrils creep down, the hazy sea wears down the edges of cliffs and reflects the light of a full moon, and light trails highlight people’s passage through atemporal landscapes. These photographs highlight the varied lasting qualities of Mona’s rugged landscape, which is an accretion of organic and inorganic matter in processes that entail erosion and growth. Gregory Rivera’s images hint at the maze-like, turned-around sensorial perception of speleological exploration, where what comes down relates to what happens above.

Lápida, by Javier Orfón, is an aggregate of granite slabs inscribed with opaque white ink drawings and cursive writing, seemingly mingling with found objects. The sculpture harkens to the traditional funerary traditions of gravestones as markers that chronicle the passing of humanity through Earth, fixing in time and space the ephemeral passage of life. In Orfon’s work, these markers come together as a collective remembrance of this journey to Mona Island, with inscriptions that point toward specific locations, nicknames of friends and fellow travelers, and botanical drawings of the endemic flora, the granite itself presenting its mineral accretion over time, bringing forth the idea of its own life.

Ramón Miranda Beltrán’s works contrast seemingly unrelated sources, overlaying Mona’s natural flora and geologic formations with imperial portraiture of Napoleon Bonaparte sourced from art historical textbooks as an exercise to relax the Cartesian separation of the Human from the Natural. This mashup highlights and obscures Bonaparte and the First French Republic as key figures in establishing the centralized state in the Era of Modernity and the Age of Empire, as well as the role of art history in reifying imperial histories. At the same time, the almácigo tree and the cave rock formations point towards the natural world’s heterogeneity and resistance to this consolidation of power and the impossibility of the Modern desire for total control.

Estudios de erosión: Laja sobre mar is the second entry in Hidrante's Estudios de erosión exhibition series. This series uses landscapes to understand the cultural overlay of human presence and reflect a living synthesis of people and place.