Sarabel Santos-Negrón
MFA in the Studio Art (summer low-residency), 2019︎ ssantosnegron@mica.edu
︎ sarabelsantos.com
Ordenamiento Silvestre: Ir y Retornar (Wild Ordering: Going and Return) is an ongoing project for the arrangement and daily documentation of wild plants that I randomly select and isolate as an exercise of meditation and reflection in response to social distancing for the COVID-19 pandemic.
With this I seek to make a catalogue and a calendar of leaves, with which I keep memory of the passage of time, the fragility of life and the change of an organism when it is separated from its natural state.
The project was started on the first day of quarantine in Puerto Rico on Monday, March 16th, 2020. It consists of visiting a small yard that I have in my residence/studio in Bayamón where I collect different leaves and deposit them in tiny sealed plastic bags. The activity becomes a ritual: I wake up, I go to the yard, I search, I select, I count, I cut, I return to the place of origin and I safeguard what I found. I keep the count of the days in quarantine by the amount of leaves that I collect. This documentation is progressive and it is part of my art practice research which is focused on the memory and experience of the social and political construction of the contemporary landscape of Puerto Rico.
Ordenamiento Silvestre: Ir y Retornar (The Catalogue and The Calendar), 2020 (on-going)
Photograph of 35 different wild plants of an ongoing site specific for the days in quarantine until April 19th, 2020 in Puerto Rico
Picture: 5.063x5.617 inches
Installation: 26x23 inches
Photograph of 35 different wild plants of an ongoing site specific for the days in quarantine until April 19th, 2020 in Puerto Rico
Picture: 5.063x5.617 inches
Installation: 26x23 inches
Ordenamiento Silvestre (The Catalogue), 2020 (on-going)
35 different photographs of wild plants
5.063x5.617 inches
35 different photographs of wild plants
5.063x5.617 inches
Ir y Retornar (The Calendar), 2020 (on-going)
Photograph of an ongoing site specific installation made with wild plants for the days in quarantine until April 19th, 2020 in Puerto Rico
26x23 inches
Photograph of an ongoing site specific installation made with wild plants for the days in quarantine until April 19th, 2020 in Puerto Rico
26x23 inches