Quisqueya Henríquez
Helado de agua de mar Caribe
Santo Domingo, 2002

Each man eating pieces of the island…
mist covering the scandal of the savannah with its icy disguise,
each palm proudly cascading in a green jet of water…
—The Whole Island. Virgilio Piñera

Quisqueya Henríquez is an artist with roots split between two islands. She was born in Havana and she grew up in Santo Domingo; she studied in Havana and she produced her work in Santo Domingo. Her production is extremely important to Caribbean art. Her pioneering work addresses critical issues that had largely gone unengaged in the local and regional scenes, among them the duality and bipolarity of islands and archipelagos; isolation and sound boxes; stereotypes and local types; migrant subjects and rooted subjects. Quisqueya uses a range of languages to discuss islandness. She reflects critically on the construction of fictions from spaces of power. She makes work that openly questions nationalisms. On the basis of the archetypical scenes she invents, she engages, and even questions, the ambiguity and antagonisms of current aesthetic logics. Her practice is rife with proposals that, from outlying territories, refer to discontinuity.

When she returned to the Dominican Republic at the end of the twentieth century, she worked on the Burlas series, a body of works that revolves around narratives of the tropics, mostly the Caribbean. The works address the stereotypes constructed in relation to the sea and islandness. But her art does not deal with just any sea. At the risk of seeming idealistic, I must clarify that the sea in her work—and the sea I am thinking of here—is exquisite and uncanny. Nor does Quisqueya refer to just any island. She addresses, rather, those emerging pieces of earth and their meaning as they bind and release her in turn. In the intimate relationship to islandness reintepreted in Burlas, then, strands of utopia exist alongside moments of violence. The utopianism lies in the formulation of impossible possibilities, not in resistance to the substratum of violence. The series is also highly autobiographical. It is a sort of logbook of her return, and everything it meant, the bitter and the sweet. In Ropa congelada [Frozen Clothes], a key piece in the Burla series, Quisqueya freezes every garment she owns in industrial freezers. Her daily life is frozen, subject to a radical thermic variation and anoxia that not only reshapes it in time, but also bares it of memory, scent, presences. The uncanny—that form of fright that affects things known and familiar—takes hold in pieces like Sangre congelada [Frozen Blood]. Blood, in all its scandal, undergoes sudden changes in temperature until it is solidified. In this bloodletting, consistency is the enigma. What does the blood tell us? What is in it?

Burlas recodifies and disassembles notions like temperature and the ephemeral. And that takes us to the story of the ice cream. Thanks to Quisqueya’s ability to alter established orders and throw off perceptive norms, ice cream—an ordinary object to be savored and desired—becomes, in her work, an instrument to question learned histories. Helado de agua de mar Caribe [Caribbean Seawater Ice Cream] asks questions personal and autobiographical, as well as historical and social, to name just a few. Key to making this ice cream a weapon is Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera’s The Whole Island and its “curse of being completely surrounded by water”—a phrase at the top of the artist’s mind when she was making the work. While it is true that that “curse” determines much about the ice cream’s configuration and poetics, both to its favor and its detriment, what Quisqueya is able to capture in her construction are incongruences and silences. This ice cream’s argument lies in the gaps between the Sargasso Sea and the Mona Passage. The act of conceiving, producing, and sharing the seawater ice cream is also the act of handing out—to those of us eager to take them—her doubts and certainties, and references to that fluid body. And among those eagerly shared notions is the understanding of the sea as source of histories. Its oft-cited characteristics—fluidity, endless movement, and changeability—are offset in this action by the idea of retreat, exclusion, and isolation.

I have lived with and tasted a number of versions of this ice cream. One of the photographs yielded by the action has been in the Centro León’s permanent collection since the work was awarded at the Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes. Thousands of people have walked before that image. Over the years, I have heard so many readings and accounts of it—and I have constructed my own, some of which have even earned Quisqueya’s approval. The one I have told here is only one of them.

It was just an idea jotted down in a notebook. Peter Doroshenko, the director of the Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA) at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee at the time, and I were looking through my notes on the projects I wanted to do in 2002, the year that had just started. We sat down on the carpeted floor of ArcoMadrid to discern which of all my ideas was best suited to his curatorial project. His choice was surprisingly bold for a show that would take place in the framework of an art fair. Back in the Dominican Republic, I couldn’t stop thinking about how difficult it would be to make saltwater ice cream, all the more so using Caribbean seawater.

The first version—and, as a result, all the others—was possible thanks to the vision of Claude Douyon and the chief chemical engineer at Helados Nevada. Claude Duyon was a gallerist and ice cream maker, a magical combination that conspired to produce the ice cream and, thus, the work. I didn’t have to mention the project to him twice. Fifteen days after I got back from Spain, his factory was making the first test batches. We marinated the seaweed to bring out the sea flavor, added whey and then stabilizers to get the right texture, and then did color tests. We made two batches, one that didn’t turn out because of bacteria and one fit for consumption. We reduced its fat content to 3% to meet FDA standards.

Shipping the ice cream from Santo Domingo to Chicago was a vexing problem. We soon embarked on the procedures and made the inquiries to ensure that the ice cream would each its final destination unmelted. Experts in the matter explained that the only way to do it was in a private plane that could hold an icebox that would, in turn, hold the four pints encased in dry ice. We had a stopover in New York on our way to Chicago. For the reasons described above, the icebox and its contents spent the night in the freezers of the kitchen at Hotel Carlyle—the owners of the plane also owned an apartment there. The ice cream was “set free” that night, just as it was "set free" at midday the next day when we reached Chicago; the Caribbean seawater ice cream did not melt.

The second version of Helado de agua de mar Caribe [Caribbean Seawater Ice Cream] was produced in 2007 for the exhibition The World Outside at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. This time, the manufacture and export strategies were different. I decided to ship only the water, instead of the finished ice cream. I put four gallons of water in a box and headed to Fedex. I paid the rate for next-day delivery, and the Caribbean seawater reached the museum one day later. Amy Rosenblum Martín, the show’s curator, received the package without incident. When I arrived one or two days later, the staff and the equipment of Delicioso Helado Coco, the company that had agree to make the ice cream, was ready to start mixing the ingredients. The Bronx version included coconut oil and rum, neither of which was in the original 2002 recipe.

This section of the archive contains four clusters written by Quisqueya Henríquez entitled ideas, processes. exhibition, and publication, respectively. In “ideas,” the artist discusses the work’s original context. “Processes” includes color references and recounts the process of collecting the water and making the ice cream. “Exhibition” encompasses images of the artist’s first public action. “Publication” presents the essay Tasting the Caribbean: The Art of Quisqueya Henríquez that Gabriela Rangel commissioned Isabela Villanueva to write in 2007, along with critical texts by Rachel Somerstein and Amy Rosenblum Martín.

These three pieces by Quisqueya Henríquez are tied, on conceptual level, to the ice cream. As part of the same series, they provide a framework for Helado de agua de mar Caribe [Caribbean Seawater Ice Cream] within Henríquez’s art.

The Burlas works explore visions of the tropics, the Caribbean in particular: from sayings or clichéd ideas that establish a deterministic tie between climate and ways of thinking to a relationship to the light, the sun, the landscape, and the sea, by way of the tourist vision and other factors that make up a discourse riddled with stereotypes.

Burlas formulates a dialogue with the discourses structured in previous decades around and from the Caribbean islands, ideas located and constructed, through parody, at the intersection of the cultural, the geopolitical, and the weather. With irony and humor, the works in this series revolve around Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera’s poem La isla en peso [The Whole Island, 1943], mostly that poem’s opening stanza that reads “the curse of water everywhere …”.

Others works from that 2001–2001 series include Ropa congelada [Frozen Clothes], Lucha térmica [Thermal Struggle], and El sabor de los estereotipos [The Taste of Stereotypes].

This section consists of seven of Quisqueya Henríquez’s observations regarding historical events and sociocultural constructions that inform, on a conceptual level, Helado de agua de mar Caribe [Caribbean Seawater Ice Cream].