Pablo Delano is a visual artist and photographer with a keen interest in archives and the lives, histories, and struggles of Latin American and Caribbean communities. The Museum of the Old Colony (2024), an archival-based conceptual installation, examines the enduring colonial structures through the lens of Puerto Rico’s experience. The Caribbean island has lived through over five hundred years of colonial rule, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1493 which led to Spanish dominion. Following the Spanish– American War in 1898, Puerto Rico became a US unincorporated territory, facing various adverse political and economic effects, including capitalist expropriation, racial hierarchy, and an idea of citizenship without the right to vote in US presidential elections. The installation’s title ironically references the complicity of museums and a US soft drink brand that is very popular in Puerto Rico, while highlighting how the power and presence of the US is grounded on colonial exploitation, social hygiene, and racial hierarchy in multiple ways, from the circulation of goods, peoples, and values to the recruitment of anthropologists, missionaries, photographers, and politicians in sustaining a colonial matrix. The Museum of the Old Colony includes myriad objects, photographs, newspapers, films, and magazines from various sources that tell multiple stories related to Spanish and US domination over indigenous and native communities as well as people of African descent, picturing an intricately woven tapestry of Puerto Rico’s troubled histories.
This is the first time the work of Pablo Delano is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Amanda Carneiro and Adriano Pedrosa
