Rethinking the “Transnational” Caribbean Curatorial: Politics of Space in “Caribe insular: Exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso”

Through a critical interpretation of “Caribe insular: Exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso,” one of the major Caribbean art exhibitions showcased in the 1990s, this essay examines the spatial politics of Caribbean art curatorship taking place abroad. It argues that any understanding of the spatial politics regulating the display of Caribbean art outside the region has to be approached from an ambivalent point of view. In this case, this implies recognizing how “Caribe insular” was inscribed within two different logics: one linked to the regional panorama of democratic Spain, marked by the anxiety of reframing a “postcolonial” image of the country within an European context, and other attentive to the distance from essentialist and “identity-oriented” views of artistic practice that Caribbean creators were developing at the end of the decade. Being burdened by the first conditioning, “Caribe insular” sketched, nevertheless, a new conceptualization for the large-scale Caribbean art shows of the 2000s.