Twenty Points on Invisible and Fictitious Fields
In 2020, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, co-founders of WAI Architecture Think Tank, launched the alternative education and trade school platform LOUDREADERS, following the radical practice of education in the tobacco factories of the Caribbean where traveling performers like anarcho-syndicalist organizer and utopian author Luisa Capetillo would read emancipatory and anti-capitalist literature to workers who were denied formal education. Through publishing, curatorial, pedagogical, and antidisciplinary projects, Garcia and Frankowski construct critical imaginaries for the “becoming Puerto Rico of the world” as the improvisation, extraction, and violence imposed on colonial regimes increasingly become a planetary norm.
Bahía Chiva, from the narrative “Six Buildings on an Island.” Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank.
1
Electromagnetic fields combine electric currents and magnetic fields of force. They can be produced by the inherent features of the Earth or by human-made devices that generate and conduct electricity. [1]
2
In the third volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx introduces how credit, shares, bonds, different forms of paper money, and speculation make value flow beyond what can be realized in the form of commodities. He called this value fictitious capital. [2][3]
3
Electromagnetic fields and fictitious capital are both invisible; their effects are not.
4
Scientists claim that the first magnetic fields in the universe arose within 370,000 years of the Big Bang. The Earth’s magnetic field or geomagnetic field is estimated to be at least 3.5 billion years old.[4] The island of Borikén (the Taino name for what is now known as Puerto Rico) is part of a volcanic island-arc terrane which started to grow approximately 190 million years ago. [5]
5
Recent research estimates that the majority of gold in planet Earth is around 3 billion years old. [6]
Loiza Dorada, from the narrative “Six Buildings on an Island.” Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank.
6
Gold was in the Earth’s mantle and crust before Puerto Rico even existed. Magnetic fields precede gold by half a billion years.
7
Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world. Invaded by Columbus and crew in 1493, the archipelago within an archipelago was occupied by Spain for over 400 years and, since 1898, has been forcefully controlled by the United States.
After extracting over 2 billion USD worth of gold in a mere 70 years, Spain turned Puerto Rico into a slum-plantation producer of sugarcane, coffee, and tobacco. Following this brutal practice, the US government and its appendix corporations added modern military test-ground and tax-exempt laboratory of neoliberalism to the practices enforced on Puerto Rico.
8
Although copper and silver are the best conductors of electricity, gold outlasts them. However, while gold is not attracted to magnetic fields, exceedingly powerful magnetic fields will make gold move slightly. [7]
9
In 2016, US President Barack Obama signed legislation that created the Fiscal Control Board, an oversight and management committee that has been dismantling and privatizing public schools and hospitals, robbing worker pensions, and sequestering any funding geared towards critical infrastructure, such as roads, water collection and distribution, and electricity. [8] The “junta,” as it is locally known, has imposed, among many things, the closure of over 673 public schools and the privatization of the electrical grid in the aftermath of the most devastating hurricane in the archipelago’s recent history.
El Yunque, from the narrative “Six Buildings on an Island.” Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank.
10
The word hurricane comes from the Taino Juracánes, the storms that were created by the Zemi goddess Guabancex. Hurricanes have always been part of the history of Borikén, unlike fictitious capital, which is a recent product of colonialism. [9]
11
Following the imposed bankruptcy of the AAE (Puerto Rico’s public electricity agency), the US-annexationist government of Puerto Rico (led by the first ousted governor in the archipelago’s history, Ricardo Roselló) worked out an agreement with LUMA Energy without public knowledge or support.
12
A consortium owned by a private company in Canada and another one in Texas, LUMA energy has been simultaneously increasing the cost of local electrical service. Meanwhile, constant blackouts have been plaguing Puerto Ricans, such as when 11,537 people from Orocovis, including people of advanced age and poor health, didn’t have electricity for several weeks after hurricane Fiona. [10]
13
LUMA's invoices have a fixed part and a variable part that includes subcontracted services and goods. This fluctuating variable in the electricity bills (used to pay lawyers, strategic planners, and other services) has resulted in many consecutive monthly bill increases, to the point of more than doubling in Puerto Rico (at 34 cents per kilowatt-hour) the price of electricity in the continental United States.
Cerro Cayey, from the narrative “Six Buildings on an Island.” Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank.
14
The price of an ounce of gold is $1,860.90 USD as of January 5, 2023. An article released by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo revealed that LUMA’s lawyers are getting paid over $1,245 per hour. [11] LUMA’s CEO Wayne Stensby’s salary is $1.1 million dollars. [12]
15
Out of the twenty companies that have invoiced LUMA the most, only one is from Puerto Rico.
16
Like the gold the Spanish appropriated, the fictitious capital claimed by LUMA has only been flowing in one direction: outside of the archipelago.
17
Electromagnetic Field (January 5, 2022) is also a work of “attraction and repulsion, strength and weakness, accumulation and dispersal,” produced by Allora & Calzadilla in their studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico. [13]
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Electromagnetic Field (January 5, 2022), 2022, iron filings on linen.
18
Orchestrating the pulsing arrays of invisible electromagnetic fields in the field of fictitious capital that is the art market, Electromagnetic Field (January 5, 2022) lays out a path to talk about colonialism to potential industry power players, investors, and beneficiaries from the privatization of Puerto Rico, as they sit on museum boards or gather at any of the many art fairs or international Biennales.
19
In Puerto Rico, art inhabits the realm of fictitious capital and literature imagines capital as fiction. While one displays material proof, intentionally avoiding specific political explanation, the other imagines the convergence of geology, physics, capitalism, and colonialism without providing too much forensic evidence.
20
If Electromagnetic Field (January 5, 2022) were to have a counterpart in utopian fiction, like the stories by Luis Othoniel Rosa, Rafael Acevedo, or Ana Lydia Vega, Puerto Rico would be a giant canvas onto which, instead of iron powder, colonizing powers would repentantly drop gold dust in the form of reparations. Billions of 24-karat particles would dance to the pulsating rhythm of old-school reggaeton (or, more likely, Bad Bunny during the summer of 2019), responsively shaping the invisible waves of a power grid that goes on and off ad infinitum.
Costa Monitorizada, from the narrative “Six Buildings on an Island.” Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank.
References:
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_layman/en/electromagnetic-fields/index.htm#1
[2] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/i.htm
[3] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III, Part V Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital Chapter 25. Credit and Fictitious Capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch25.htm
[6]
[7] https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~wbreslyn/magnets/is-gold-magnetic.html
[9] https://pueblosoriginarios.com/centro/antillas/taino/guabancex.html
[10] https://periodismoinvestigativo.com/2022/10/luma-doesnt-follow-its-own-emergency-plan/
[12] https://www.latinorebels.com/2021/11/16/lumaceosalary/
[13] https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-allora-and-calzadilla?lang=en
