Armig Santos, Procesión en Vieques III (Procession in Vieques III), 2022 and Yellow Flowers, 2022 

Narrator: Armig Santos based these paintings on images of events that had taken place on the island of Vieques, when he was very young. 

Armig Santos: They’re some the images that I found on the internet about a procession that took place in 1999 with the death of a security guard named David Sanes, who was from Vieques and died because of a bomb. Because, for fifty years, Vieques was more like a bombing range.

Narrator: When Sanes was on his shift, he was killed by two bombs misfired by the U.S. Navy.

Armig Santos: And people were sick and tired of what was going on. So that was what sparked massive protests. So, those images, when I found them, left me in a state of shock because it was like finding these beautiful images of a procession. Which is how the political becomes the poetic, and the poetic becomes political. And while the images had an incredible impact, those images are extremely important to Puerto Rico’s history, and to the rest of Latin America as well.

If you look at the paintings, they both have the effect of bioluminescence, since there is a bioluminescent bay in Vieques, which for me is the most important place spiritually in Puerto Rico. I use that effect to also include it in the image, which is like two very powerful symbols, spiritually, in Puerto Rico’s history, and also in Vieques’s history. Hence the procession painting: where there’s sort of the idea of developing, it’s a highly optimistic image, but it’s filled with great sadness; there’s optimism about reunification, but sadness about the events.