The architectural project for the exhibition ‘The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean’ is part of the 43rd edition of the annual contemporary art fair held in Madrid known as ARCO. This year it runs from 6 to 10 March, as usual at the IFEMA premises.

In dialogue with the curatorial theme and the works of the artists on display, the pavilion presents on one hand the flows, encounters, and confluences, and on the other hand the divisions, distances, separations, and dismemberments that make up this sea. The design translates the heterogeneous reading of the overlapping contexts found in the Caribbean through spaces that expand and compress, as well as surfaces that cut, fold, and twist.

The text written by the curators, Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann Morera, states: “The Caribbean is not a sea, it is oceanic. To tackle the Caribbean as an ocean is to refute its insular, fragmented, and disconnected character, to instead take on its continental and reticular dimension. Its currents open out to the Atlantic, and other breaches generated by our species indissolubly connected it to the Pacific. This continental nature of the Caribbean highlights the colonial relationships that archipelagos have with continents, the trade winds that facilitated colonial expansion, and the land and subterranean currents that facilitated human and non-human movement.”