Puerto Rico : The Opening of the Nick Boricua Museum

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A project by Kostis Stafylakis, Panos Sklavenitis, Alexis Fidetzis at Omonoia, the 5th Athens Biennale

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Each single object or act of the Puerto Rico project is a semblance of Greece as a “Bolivarian country” on European Ground. The project was partly inspired by the incident of a chat between the German minister of finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, and his American colleague Jack Lew. During a Bundesbank conference at Frankfurt, Schäuble mentioned that he proposed to Lew an interesting exchange. The USA would host Greece in the dollar zone while the EU would welcome Puerto Rico to the Eurozone. By improvising on this reversal the project proceeded to a syncretization of Greece as Puerto Rico and vice versa.

On the evening of 28th May 2016, the passerby at Varvakios Market Place, the central market of Athens, encountered a renovated façade on one of the houses belonging to the municipal police of Athens: the place was decorated with Greek and Puertorican flags while big banners advertized the Nick Boricua Museum of Athens. The artistic director of the Athens biennial cut the red ribbon and the audience entering the museum encountered a large construction of a flag reminiscent of both the flag of the “Grito de Lares” Puertorican native uprising against the Spanish and the first flag of Greece’s War for National Independence. According to the story written on the museum’s walls, this hybrid symbol of transnational revolt was first conceived by the legendary Nick Boricua in order to signify the “Puerto Grico” movement – his vision of a transantlantic national upheaval of peoples against empires.

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on display boricua
portrait boricua
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boricua map detail
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dancing with Boricua
cabaret moment
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