'Short & Quick Talks' With Lilliam Nieves by Pedro Vélez

Conversación corta y de prisa con Lilliam Nieves

por Pedro Vélez

Lilliam Nieves makes sculptures, installations, Net Art and video. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico and a Master of Fine Arts in New Media from Donau-Universität Krems in association with Transart Institute (Austria / Berlin / New York). Nieves was the co-founder (with Daniel Arnaldo-Roman) of Trance Líquido (2005-2008), one of Puerto Rico’s venerable culture blogs. In July of 2017 Nieves was invited to do a residency at La Embajada in Mexico. Then came the hurricanes. In May 2018 she was one of the artists selected to participate at MASS MoCA residency for Puerto Rican artists impacted by Hurricane Maria. Today Nieves is super happy because she just won an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant.

Lilliam Nieves at POFSJU studios.

Photo by Gretchen Ruíz

How did the hurricane(s) find you? After many years of work at La Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Old San Juan I suddenly didn’t have a job and decided to embark on a residency at la-embajada.org in México. There I worked and performed at el Zócalo developing beauty crowns made of tortillas. Sculpturally speaking, once the tortillas are cold, the crowns fall apart. I wore them outdoors. I was outside of my comfort zone. But people would talk to me and we would have conversations about beauty standards in Latin America and the Caribbean. I made two video pieces and brought the crowns back home. I had to wrap them in jeans and a Frida Kahlo bag. TSA thought it was funny. A couple of weeks later, the hurricanes visited the island.

What damages did you suffer during María? Water came through the windows of my apartment. Everything was soaked. We had to use furniture to barricade a glass door leading to the balcony. The door bended but didn’t break. Water pushed by the winds leaked through the ceiling anyway. I lost 11 photographs, some dating back to 2010.

You also suffered a different kind of tragedy as a consequence of the havoc left after the hurricane. In October 10 a diesel truck hit my car in the middle of the highway. It was a 3 car pile up. The truck, which was escorted by state police, was on its way to a hospital during the big blackout and fuel shortage. The truck had a leak, there was a sudden stop once the police realized the danger of the situation. We were trapped by the truck, a van and a another car. Our car was a total loss. It was like a scene in Mad Max. I needed therapy for neck injuries and my boyfriend (artist and designer Arnaldo Román) hurt his back.

The woodcuts and monolithic sculptural pieces you have been making after the hurricane seem to deal with death.

Frustration. I feel the hurricane was a pirate, or another colonization. That’s why I use the metaphor of Columbus and his three ships: La Niña, La Pinta and the Santa María. I have also been making crowns. One is of a skeleton hand giving the middle finger.

A middle finger to disaster capitalism? Promesa?

Of course!!! Promesa is a disaster for Puerto Rico, we are a territory of USA, we represent money for them. Tantas contradicciones, tantos frentes hacen que uno sienta más frustración. En la isla estamos viviendo un constante experimento de maltrato. (So many contradictions, so many walls that makes one feel even more frustration. In the Island, we are living a constant abusive experiment.)

How come wood is your favorite medium?

I think I’m a termite. I prefer drawing and the process of making a xylography, inking the wood and leaving it like that as a unique piece.

Woodcuts in process. Photo by Gretchen Ruíz

Lilliam Nieves in her balcony in Santurce weeks after the hurricane. Photo by Gretchen Ruíz

Do you miss being a cultural critic/ blogger?

Not so much. What I don’t miss is the little support we had from the scene and how we were mistreated. Me desanimé mucho y dejamos de escribir. (I got very disappointed and we stopped writing). But we left a legacy. Another thing that made me quit was not being invited to be in exhibitions. There were no voices (blogs) when we started so being a journalist ended up being a full time job. I think one of the best decisions we made was to shut it down. Trance Líquido was great because I got to see so many good shows and bad shows. It was a school for me. It was a way to polish my aesthetic and conceptual framework.

What’s the status of art criticism in our island today?

There’s no criticism anymore. Younger writers are letting fear control their narratives. They fear retaliation by people from the cultural sector who work in government. So what we have is silence from the new voices. Even Visión Doble has shut their mouth. It’s a serious problem.

How do you see this tragedy reshaping cultural production in the island?

Autogestión (Self-management) by diverse groups of creatives has been spectacular. The government was collapsing even before the hurricane. There’s an educational crisis. Maria destapó la olla. (María blew up the pot’s lid.) La educación es la clave para amar y conocer nuestra cultura, pero será la autogestión lo que le dará forma. (Education is the key to love and know our culture, but self-management will be the one to shape it up.)