River Rail
Las Playas Son Nuestras (The Beaches Are Ours)
Experimental dance pioneer Viveca Vázquez’s 1989 video highlights the coastline as a site of contention.
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Translated from the Spanish by Nicole Delgado
Women on the beach are summoned by the voices of the sea. Maybe this call is an urgent invitation to gather … to take action against the abuses that occur on the seabed of Isla Nena, Vieques.
The women who bathe in the ocean change their outfits into their work attire, and, literally, they start entering the underwater space.
The women gradually start adopting another-body, metamorphosed, turning into guard fish, or possibly into warrior fish.
We warn our habitat, little by little our limbs undergo changes. A highly dangerous mutation occurs. We feel it in the depths of our bodies/our gills.
You can see the evil on the horizon, a sense of destruction, a lack of purity in the water-air. The USA gray warship-monster in our Caribbean waters.
Dubious beauty—evidence—floating body—inevitable sign of death—
The fish-bodies, the women-bodies are brought to the shore by other women. Or are they the same? They are no longer fish. What are they?
