La Perla del Caribe / La Caraqueña
- The Taut And Tame (Lüttgenmeijer), Berlin.
June 26 - July 27, 2013
- Frutta Gallery, Rome.
September 10 - October 5, 2013
La Perla del Caribe is an installation that brings together the complexities of cultural history with the mundane and the political in the form of a casual Caribbean beach restaurant installed in Berlin in the summer of 2013. Referencing the Good Neighbor policy and its cultural program of films, music, and propaganda, the work explores how Latin America was portrayed as a lush, exotic paradise with eccentric, erotic subjects. The restaurant, at once a facsimile and an actual functioning social space, articulated a universal coexistence with the absurd. Even the project’s title (The Pearl of the Caribbean) evokes contradictions as it implies an unassuming restaurant name while also alluding to the brutal Spanish pearl trade of the 16th century. At La Perla del Caribe, the piña coladas and fiestas live on in spite of it all.
The Taut And Tame (Lüttgenmeijer), Berlin.
