Palm Trees on Both Sides of the Atlantic
When we look at palm trees, we inevitably allow ourselves to be captivated by their seductive power and begin an inner journey to other continents outside Europe. One of the trends in contemporary art is the existence of a line of research and artistic production that is increasingly focused on ecology, and which understands fauna and flora as a source of knowledge that can help us respond to the challenges posed by climate urgency. This development served as the point of departure for the roundtable discussion Palm Trees on Both Side of the Atlantic (Las palmeras a ambos lados del Atlántico: Usos y Significación) that took place on 11 September 2024 at Casa América in Madrid, a public forum for Spanish and Latin American culture. Among the participating artists were Dagoberto Rodríguez (Cuba, 1969) and Marco Montiel-Soto (Venezuela, 1976), who work together as Los Carpinteros. The discussion, which has been condensed and edited for publication, was moderated by Pablo Barrios Martínez (US, 1985). 1
PBM: (Pablo Barrios Martínez) As a motif in the Cuban landscape painting of the past, the palm tree often appears tall and nearly touching the sky. In your work El susurro del palmar [The whisper of the palm grove] (2018) it appears twisted. What motivated you to produce this work?
DR: (Dagoberto Rodríguez) There are two equally valid visions of life in the Caribbean. The first one is common in Cuban literature and is associated with Nicolás Guillén. According to this vision, life is a joke. In other words, life is a song to happiness. The second vision is summed up by a phrase by Virgilio Piñera: ‘damned circumstance everywhere’. My work is much closer to the second vision. The tropics are not the paradise we dream of. They are a much darker place, full of suffering and failed political experiments.
PBM: And in your opinion, what are the qualities of the palm tree? What characteristics are associated with it? How are palm trees different from, say, humans?
DR: Well, especially in nineteenth-century Cuban painting, the palm tree appears as an idyllic and melancholic object. I have selected palm trees that appear in many paintings of the National Museum of Cuba. There are painters from the Cuban Academy who frequently depicted the palm tree as a witness to events in the narrative of the painting, as in La Muerte del General Antonio Maceo [The Death of the General Antonio Maceo] (1908) by Armando García Menocal (1863-1942), or La Siesta [The Nap] (1888) by Guillermo Collazo, where the entire canvas is invaded by exuberant vegetation. In other words, the nineteenth century has a lot of artwork filled with palm trees. They are characterised by a single type of palm, namely the royal palm native to Cuba. It is very important in the life of peasants in the countryside. In a way, all the life of the Cuban countryside takes place around this tree. The wood is used to build houses, which also incorporate the leaves. All the country houses are covered with this type of palm, making it a tremendous witness to what the Cuban countryside is like.
PBM: Can you explain the creative process behind El susurro del palmar [The whisper of the palm grove] (2018)? What materials did you use? How has your collaboration with FACTUM Arte been like?
DR: El romance del palmar (1938) is one of the first films made in Cuba in the 1930s. It was like a tremendous soap opera made into a film. This inspired the that sculptures we made for the show at Galerie Peter Kilchmann (‘Whisper of the Palm Grove’, June–July 2018), which were made of palms that were brought from Cuba. They were cut from all sides. So, everything is related to my homeland of Cuba. In comparison, the palms that we got from the Spanish nurseries were very small. Therefore, we couldn’t make them curved or give them the appearance of being ‘carried by the storm’. We didn’t use them. In terms of technical details, we used an alloy with a lot of copper to give the palms this golden appearance. The cast was made leaf by leaf for each of the areca palm trees. This entailed making a wax copy of each tree. We used lost wax to make the palm grove. Some bananas were also used in the installation. In principle, we wanted to make a kind of complete palm grove that is being subjected to a hurricane. It was one of the last exhibitions we did as a collective in 2018 at Galerie Peter Kilchmann. We were planning to make one giant palm tree in the beginning, but we ended up making three.
PBM: How do you see yourself reflected in the palm tree? What does it mean to you, and how can that be extrapolated to Cuban identity?
DR: In my work the palm tree embodies the idea of ‘the human palm tree ‘. It doesn’t matter what kind of human it is; they exhibit human characteristics in the way that they appear subjected to this wind and this hurricane. I consider palm trees an extremely resistant species because of their ability to withstand storms in an incredible way. This is the idea that we want to put forward and especially in this piece. I give human characteristics to many of the objects I create.
PBM: Does this work represent a continuation of your current artistic production or is it rather a turning point?
DR: After 2018, my focus shifted from palm trees to hurricanes, which are also part of the same story. The hurricane work, Katrina (2021), is a watercolour of LEGOs, depicting the hurricane as if it were constructed out of LEGO bricks. It has a sculptural character. It depicts something that you can also do at home, as if it were a storm next to your house. Hurricane Florence seriously devastated the United States. I represented the hurricane’s centre in Florence (2022). The problem is that lately almost all hurricanes in the Caribbean are category five. Almost none of them are category three or tropical storms. They have winds of more than 200 kilometres per hour. It’s crazy. Cyclone season is from September until the end of the year. In consequence, the storms are like visitors with tremendous power in a place such as Cuba, with its political environment. The hurricane’s colours represent the life of the country in some way. In my town – I am from in the North Coast of Las Villas, Cuba – a hurricane isn’t necessarily a disaster for the people. I remember my father would gather friends together every time one came. It was kind of festive. Hurricanes had a certain morbidity. People would drink some rum. They would have a kind of party to see what the hurricane would bring them. What is it going to destroy? How was it going to change the geography of the place? A tremendous hurricane passed through that town, Hurricane Kate, many years ago, bringing devastation in its wake. Above all, it changed the historic part of the town; the beautiful stores were destroyed in 1985, when the storm came.
PBM: We must understand that Cuba is an island and the journey of immigration exerts a powerful attraction for Cuban citizens. Other concepts and realities may be more representative of these themes related the tropics. In his first exhibition outside of Havana, in 2000, Wilfredo Prieto used bananas and put them on a cart in Venezuela. José Alejandro Restrepo’s Paso del Quindío I (1991) used mainly palm trees as part of a pyramid-shaped installation with 17 monitors evoking the Quindío Pass in Colombia, through which explorers, chroniclers and scientists – including Alexander von Humboldt – journeyed in their time. So, it is a way of revisiting the ways in which history and memory are represented using an icon and symbol such as the palm tree. This question is directed to Marco: Can you introduce your artistic practice, and the media involved in the production of your work?
MM-S: (Marco Montiel-Soto) Caribe portátil (2013) is an image that I took in Berlin, of a bicycle carrying palm trees in a container covered by images of the Caribbean beach landscape. I made the image for an exhibition. In this case, my practice works on displacement, which can be geographical but also historical. My journey in search of this displacement leads me to many different places, where I collect objects, stones, seeds and plants. I mainly produce images and videos, and I am inspired by the popular architecture and popular music, as practised by native peoples. All this serves as a source of inspiration for installations, collages and a sound pieces. In my work Distancia sin guayabo [Distance without a hangover] (2013), the translation of ‘guayabo’ into English is hangover, expressing the absence of a person in Venezuela. But it can also be the distance from the country where you were born. In this case, it’s the distance ‘without a hangover’, because I don’t currently have a hangover. I’m living in Berlin. I don’t have a need for that melancholy that comes with a hangover for a country or for another person, but I have a portable Caribbean which I take around Berlin, which is like feeling at home. These palm trees are cocos nucifera, germinated coconuts. For the exhibition ‘Distanz ohne Guayabo’ at the project space Kinderhook and Caracas in Berlin (October–November 2013), I made an oasis that was destined to die. It was during the winter. These palm trees are sold massively in Ikea or in Lidl supermarkets. It’s normally very difficult to maintain them if you don’t have a greenhouse. So, they end up dying if they don’t find a home. In a certain way, it’s like representations of the Caribbean, which can be very beautiful but are destined for death and ruin. When these palm trees died, I dedicated myself to taking each one of the coconuts and carving them, inspired by the Guajira style of Maracaibo. The colours on the faces are the ones that the Guajiros painted on the coconut. They don’t stand as flags or symbols, but rather as a source of inspiration for the Guajiros themselves.
PBM: In what sense does your artistic practice allow us to rethink memory in relation to a territory or a landscape?
MM-S: There’s one work that might do this, called Venezuela, the most beautiful country in the tropics, which uses the cover of a book by a German explorer, painter and taxidermist named Anton Goering. He goes to Venezuela and stays there for eight years. And then he paints probably the most beautiful landscape painted by a European of Venezuela. When he returned to Leipzig, he published this book that had a longer name, but in the end, we simply called the work Venezuela el más bello país del trópico [Venezuela the Most Beautiful Country in the Tropics] (2014). Anton Goering’s works have inspired a lot of my works. Besides being a good painter, he was also a taxidermist. He was the son of a very important taxidermist in Europe. I imagine him painting the landscape with hunted birds in his classrooms. He captured birds, taxidermied them and then sold them in Europe, including to his father. He also traded them with museums in Germany and in London. When visiting natural history museums, you can usually find little birds that were sold by Anton Goering. There is a duality to the beauty of the landscapes that he painted, which are in the National Art Gallery in Germany or in England, because at the same time he took these live animals away to enrich himself later. In the Museum of Contemporary Art of Maracaibo, Venezuela, there is a central garden with many palm trees where I did an exhibition. A whole promotion campaign was set up so that the public would come to the museum to rest in one of the hammocks. In other words, they would be able to rest from the social, political and economic situation that Venezuela is experiencing. When the visitors entered the museum, the hammocks were located very high, and they were unreachable. So once again the Venezuelan public is being lied to. They will never achieve this Caribbean and exotic dream that we all talk about. This has been exoticised in Europe.
PBM: What possibilities that your artistic works open up for the future in terms of political imagination? Memory always speaks about the past, but what does it mean for the future?
MM-S: A good example is La Muerte en La Tierra Trópical [The Death in the Tropical Land] (2015). I bought a typical painting representing the Caribbean that is sold to tourists, but in my opinion, it lacked violence because it is a painting of Venezuela as an exotic landscape. So I took the painting and whacked it with a machete, a tool that is used to cut palm trees and open coconuts, but also one of the most common instruments used by murderers to kill their victims. There are many headlines with people who have been killed by machete blows in Venezuela.
PBM: Beyond the tradition of travelling artists, what significance does the journey of exploration – as a way to describe the experience of migrating artists who relive past explorations or expeditions from a contemporary perspective – have today?
MM-S: For those who go on expeditions, such a trip always means an unknown territory from which one is going to draw inspiration. Nevertheless, when I enter an unknown territory – one I don’t know at all – I also research the place’s history, its rituals and traditions. A new expedition always means multiple points of inspiration. I’ve made sketches of hammocks at higher altitudes, titled The Caribbean Dream is Another Utopia (2015). They speak about how the Caribbean is seen from the outside, as Dagoberto previously mentioned, as an idyllic place. We see a palm tree. We think of a place to rest or a beach, but it’s totally different, because the Caribbean is a place full of shortages, authoritarian politicians, violence, sometimes light and water shortages, and high inflation rates.
PBM: Dagoberto, the palm tree has been considered the symbol of paradise on Earth and has been widely used for political purposes. Do you think that it’s still a symbol that unites the entire Cuban artistic community and nation somehow? Is there another tree that could be more representative?
DR: It’s complicated. In my case, I can talk about my own artistic practice, which is based on the idea of the unfortunate Caribbean. The palm tree isn’t a symbol of the unfortunate Caribbean. As a symbol it possesses a high degree of validity. I hope that people will continue to use it. But let’s say that I also share Marco’s perspective, in that the reality is a lot bleaker than what the symbol of the palm tree usually represents.
PBM: What role do you think sound art, performance and theatre can play in the construction of the history and memory of stereotyped landscapes?
MM-S: The Caribbean is exoticised in the sense that it is always seen as a place to rest. On the contrary, it’s a place where you cannot find rest and all those deficiencies, I mentioned earlier are present. Performance and sound art are used to criticise current political and social situations. So it’s a bit like that, they always show us the Caribbean as a fantastic fantasy place and it’s quite the opposite.
DR: Is there something going on in Cuba? We are living in the worst situation ever. I don’t know what’s happening, but it rains more, and the landscape gets greener, and it even looks better. I just came back and it’s like a splendid vision of how beautiful the landscape can look in contrast to the situation of how people are living and what’s really happening. It’s a complicated vision that possesses a diabolical contrast at the same time.
PBM: The ideal and the reality don’t match.
MM-S: It’s like living in a paradise, but a deceptive one, full of shortcomings. The vegetation and the palm trees are still there. Hurricanes come. We have the worst government ever. Nevertheless, the landscape is incredible.
- 1 This roundtable was preceded by a series of exchanges among the members of the curatorial collective Corner Store EU_AU (Pablo Barrios Martínez, United States, 1985 and Michelle Mlati, South Africa, 1993) in Madrid that continued as an online atelier in the form of a call-and-response. The idea for the conference was inspired by the domestic garden of the Spanish painter Miki Leal (Spain, 1974) (Palm Beach, 2016).