Grito transhemisférico: remediación de Juracán // Transhemispheric Call: Hurricane Remediation

The following sound work is a debriefing of the public event “Hurricane Remediation” that was presented by the authors at the UmArts/VR Hurricanes and Scaffoldings conference of 2024. The soundwork begins with “El Cacique”, a conch shell piece by master Puerto Rican musician Dr. William Cepeda Román performed with his students in Loiza, Puerto Rico.^[1] The parallel conch shell call and ensuing voices are set to a background recording titled “Morning sounds from Rio Maricao Forest Nature Reserve, Puerto Rico”, a biosphere that was hit particularly hard by Category 5 hurricanes Irma and María (September 5 & 19, 2017, respectively). The recording is by conservation biologist Omar Monzón Carmona,^[2] and in it, birds such as the Puerto Rican Vireo (Vireo latimeri), Spindalis (Spindalis portoricensis), Woodpecker (Melanerpes portoricensis), Parrot (Amazona vittata), and the Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola),  among others, can be heard, or are mentioned during the soundwork by the authors. The voices are from the conference participants: marine biologist Juliann Rosado Pagán, curator Raquel Torres Arzola, and artists Karla Claudio and Luis Berríos Negrón (the latter as producer of the conference event, of this text and the soundwork).

In all, the work is set to reenact and review the breathless transhemispheric call and presentations performed at “Hurricane Remediation” during the conference. This becomes a backdrop to the way in which we want to position the word “hurricane”, which in English is drawn originally from Juracán—a force shared between the mythological triad of Guabancex, a high divinity of the Indigenous Taínos who lived across the Caribbean—a civilisation almost-eradicated during the early years of the invasion of the Americas (1492-ca. 1530). As it is common with many words, “hurricane” is loosely used by Western languages without reference to its ancestry or Indigenous context to represent the powerful, reoccurring storms specific to the Atlantic Ocean, as an analogy to impending doom. In the case of our role in the conference, we looked to re-position Juracán specifically in decolonial contrast to Nora Khan’s loose use of the word in her “Towards a Poetics…” essay that inspires the eponymous conference.^[3] We challenge Khan and the conference to consider “hurricane”, not as “a most sublime metaphor” to prop up the plausible cataclysm of AI—or the future of the visual arts through artistic research—but as a force and divinity with far broader values that, through more careful consideration, may aid in better engaging environmental co-inhabitancy, as well as challenging the long-drawn void of colonial memory that continues to drive the hemispheric injustices of global warming. That is to say that “hurricane” is more than just an example of Western “symbolic language”. It is an ancestral and thermodynamic portal embodying the still deeply unresolved, unjust scars of colonial trauma. With that in our minds and between our bodies, we play this soundwork to ask the question: sublime to whom?