Gabriela Salazar, Reclamation (and Place, Puerto Rico), 2022

Gabriela Salazar: So specifically for Reclamation all of these steps are interweaved through elements of architecture and the built environment from Puerto Rico and from New York City.

Narrator: Gabriela Salazar finds resonance in the fact that Puerto Rico and Manhattan are both islands, and both vulnerable to rising water.

Gabriela Salazar: And I was looking specifically at architectures that were in some way related to resilience, as a tool kind of to survive something.

Reclamation (and Place, Puerto Rico) comes through the process that I developed using used coffee grounds and making these forms that are inherently sort of unstable out of these coffee grounds, flour, and salt. So it’s sort of like this air-dry clay.

So the drying rack forms, which are these large stilted wood pieces, have a relationship to mangrove trees and the kind of root structure that adds resilience on the coast and also the images of El Fanguito, a neighborhood that was in the outskirts of San Juan in an area that flooded a lot. And so “el fanguito” is sort of like mud flats. Fango is mud. It was a neighborhood that was very large but incredibly impoverished. People, to be able to live there, created these homes that were often 2, 3, 4 feet above the ground and had walkways that were constructed between to lift them up above the mud flat, that would flood often.

Narrator: Salazar has molded the coffee into a form that she associates with New York.

Gabriela Salazar: I decided to to use the form pavers, ground pavers, which for me growing up near Central Park and in the city it’s always kind of been this material that marks a kind of space that’s not the sidewalks is kind of this between the nature and the hard scape of the city. They’re made to be a little bit more flexible—the tree roots kind of shift them and push them, water can seep in and they’re actually kind of recyclable really easily, kind of removed and replaced. So them being this sort of also kind of metaphor for something coming together and being able to recombine.