For five months I lived with open windows in a suburb of San Juan, air ventilating through my apartment on days of both intense heat and rain. During one particularly dense rainstorm, the circulating air was so cool I uncustomarily wrapped myself in thick blankets as the wind moved from the lower balcony to the bedrooms on the second floor. In the morning I was reminded of the sun’s intensity. The condensation left the floor and walls damp. At the end of my five-month lease, as I was getting ready to move from the apartment, I noticed how the pages of my favorite books were punctuated with water marks as I pulled them from their shelves, constellations of specks on the books’ top and bottom edges. A new system of punctuation emerged. I searched the books for cartographic traces of floods, dust, and saline reaching from the coast many miles away to assert their presences here. My books on philosophy were now carrying the indelible mark of the Caribbean climate.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Azucar. Image courtesy the artist.
In Puerto Rico, climate is a central consideration in archival practice. Governmental repositories are tasked with immunizing documents, sealing them from surrounding environmental conditions with the intention that they will endure and remain available for future reference by both agents of bureaucracy and public audiences. This requires a thermal infrastructure, increasingly difficult to sustain, that offers a controlled setting that works against humidity’s wilting, saline’s corrosion, and the sun and heat’s fading. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor posits that archival memory “exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change. Archive, from the Greek, etymologically refers to a ‘public building,’ a place where records are kept. From arkhe, it also means a beginning, the first place, the government.” Climate, despite being ever present, is meant to be outside of archival memory.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Ataud. Image courtesy the artist.
The filmmaker Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s most recent exhibition, Unknown Unknowns, at PROXYCO gallery in New York contends with the fundamental discrepancies in preservation that occur between state-backed archives and personal archives, and the effects of this on the creation of collective memories. In loose slips of yellow notes, pinned directly to the walls of the gallery, she wrote:
Some police films survive time and humidity thanks to freezing air conditioning at government offices backed by generators in case of a blackout.
Later they become memories.
In contrast, another note highlighted:
Militant filmmakers lose many of their films in hurricanes, fires, divorces, bankruptcies, moves, infighting, floods and dissolutions.
Few images survive the political and atmospheric climate.
These notes remind me of a moment I think of often in Gallisá Muriente’s film Celaje (Cloudscape) (2020), an intimate meditation on individual and collective loss shot on Super 8 and 16mm and developed by hand. Part of her ongoing series Asimilar y Destruir (Assimilate and destroy), the film laments deaths of family members amid the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. In one scene, Gallisá Muriente tells her viewer that due to the power outages caused by Hurricane Maria, the celluloid film she had stored in her freezer had started rotting. The camera focuses on the branches of trees and still water at dusk as Gallisá Muriente narrates, with mourning and equanimity, that “nothing lasts forever here.” Expressed in this lament is a question: What happens when climate residue becomes part of the archival document?
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, flordecaña. Image courtesy the artist.
To create works on paper in the Caribbean, the artist Tony Cruz Pabón told me in 2024, is to be in an ongoing dialogue with atmospheric conditions. In dense humidity, paper absorbs moisture from the surrounding environment, wrapping, curling, and changing shape. Reconciling his medium of choice with the ecological context in which he creates his work, Cruz Pabón’s practice considers atmosphere as subject.
His installation Nube (Cloud, 2014–23) is a collection of drawings created over the course of nearly a decade that specifically focus on clouds. Depicted in contours, lines, smudges, and stains, the intricate abstract and minimalist drawings evoke the cloud through its various stages of formation. Presented in a nonlinear fashion, the drawings become denser to signal how water particles gather and congeal right before rainfall.
Tony Cruz Pabón, Nube, 2014-23. Collection Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. Compra, 2024. Photograph by Raquel Pérez Puig.
Cruz Pabón often creates through accumulation. He collects everyday materials and creates work through a prolonged period of artistic investigation, and his installations register the unfolding of processes. Nube forgoes a singular, static depiction of a cloud in favor of a plurality. A cloud is the result of ongoing evaporation and condensation that causes it to continually change form on a molecular level. Cruz Pabón, in depicting many clouds in different stages of formation, echoes the cycles of weather. How he chooses to display his selections from hundreds of drawings is also meant to establish a dialogue between the personal archive and the conditions of its surroundings. The drawings that comprise Nube are directly adhered to the walls of a gallery space. Avoiding frames or other mediators, Cruz Pabón leaves open the possibility that his work registers the very atmosphere it depicts. This approach to drawing is in part informed by his recent experiments in land art, which he considers another form of drawing in landscape.
Si por mí llueve (2024) features two such land drawings at his family’s home in Maricao, Puerto Rico. Next to the house is a drainage pipe beneath a downspout that he filled with concrete, designed to be removed in thirty years, that serves as a record of advancing erosion. The work’s counterpart, a piece of lawn where Cruz Pabón has strategically chosen to let the grass grow freely, is a register of unmitigated progression. Each work depends on the shaping brought by its surroundings.
Land sketch by Tony Cruz Pabón. Photo courtesy the artist.
Like Nube, the other video works in Gallisa Muriente’s Asimilar y Destruir series—Asimilar y Destruir (Assimilate & Destroy) I and II (2018–19)—trace the effects of climate on a specific medium. Part of an ongoing interrogation of biodeterioration in analogue film and how the ecological conditions of the Caribbean affect memory, these video works expose 16mm footage to salt, humidity, and mold. Gallisá Muriente then takes pictures of each manipulated frame to construct a new film. In Asimilar y Destruir I, salt leaves scratches, like flecks of snow, on the celluloid of a home video of skaters on Puerto Rico’s first ice-skating rink. As two figures stumble across the rink, supporting each other as they continue to slip, they are enveloped by a blizzard of white gashes. In Asimilar y Destruir II, Gallisá Muriente buried in her backyard a home video that documents a day at the beach with her grandmother in Levittown, Puerto Rico, along with leaves, fruits, and insects, following her grandmother’s passing. Thus, as the film progresses, the images disintegrate; Gallisá Muriente’s grandmother stands in profile as the edge of the coast behind her is awash with formations that resemble the undulations of geologic layers. The title of the series references the consequences of salt’s corrosive qualities. Through a process known as assimilating, smaller particles latch on to larger particles and change their composition, eventually leading to their decay. Each living organism and process that left impressions in the celluloid becomes a collaborator. Like Cruz Pabón, Gallisá Muriente opens her work to the agency of the climate, and, in turn, it becomes a key informer of her artistic process.
The environmental-history professor Sunil Amrith, in a lecture titled “The Air as an Archive,” proposed that air pollution can be read as a complex archive of social, economic, and political histories. The dust in the archive, if we can find a way to read it, contains at a molecular level as much information as the archival material itself. Air, incapable of being contained, denies the archival. And yet, considering the air as a record is a way of evidencing the Global North’s ongoing exploitation of the Global South, and registering unchecked development, colonization, and environmental racism. In their practices, Gallisá Muriente and Cruz Pabón index atmospheric conditions. And these markings become a part of how we must read the work itself. This is a reminder that the corrosion of archival documents caused by increased climatic instability is, too, a marker of extraction.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, A&D II Sombrilla. Image courtesy the artist.
As Cruz Pabón’s and Gallisa Muriente’s work presents the conditions of climate, they also put into question whether systems of climatic control used widely by institutions tasked with preserving historical and cultural material can be sustained. At the center of the normative standards for archival preservation is energy—the ability to have continually functioning dehumidifiers and air conditioning to create an environment where documents are not exposed to corrosive elements. The increasingly frequent power outages in Puerto Rico caused by a poorly managed electrical grid have made sustaining these already difficult-to-sustain conditions increasingly challenging.
Likewise, air-conditioning’s role as a key emitter of CO2 presents a fundamental irony: attempts to ignore the specificities of one’s environment have made it unignorable. To attempt to control climate has resulted in its increased instability. And yet, to read Cruz Pabón’s and Gallisa Muriente’s work only in relation to climate’s destructive capacities is to do a disservice to their esteem of the tropical climate and the attention they devote to working with their conditions.
In 2016, as co-directors of the San Juan art center Beta Local, the two artists organized a dialogue titled “Humedad y Memoria” (Humidity and memory) between the mycologist Paul Bayman and archivist Marcos Nieves. Founded in 2009 by Tony Cruz Pabón, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Michelle Marxuach, Beta Local continues to be a platform for knowledge exchange and experimentation for artists in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Co-founder Santiago Muñoz, also a filmmaker, takes up biodeterioration in her practice, as evidenced in 10 years, Long Exposure (2014) and her short text Historia natural de un fotograma (Natural history of a frame). Historia natural de un fotograma offers an expanded reading of a 16mm frame found on the floor of a cinema in the deaccessioned US military base of Roosevelt Roads during the filming of what would become Santiago Muñoz’s video work Post-Military Cinema (2014). This context nurtured and still informs Gallisá Muriente and Cruz Cruz Pabón’s practice. Recalling the dialogue “Humedad y Memoria” (Humidity and memory) to me in 2024, Gallisá Muriente noted further that part of the impetus for the event was a conversation with Cruz Pabón in which he argued that artistic creation in the Caribbean should embrace ephemerality to better attune itself with climatic conditions.
Tony Cruz Pabón, Si por mi llueve, 2024. Photo courtesy the artist.
In the final moments of Celaje (Cloudscape), two people clear the overgrowth on an abandoned site. The film’s scenes continue to progress from cement structures to birds gliding over the top of palm trees as Gallisa Muriente narrates in a voice-over that “in a living system, information is sustained, replicated, and responsive to the surroundings. The conditions imposed by the surroundings on the survival of the species are transformed into chemistry and adaptation.” It is this change that assures longevity. For me, this speaks to a fundamental archival lesson I glean from agroecology. As state archives of seed banks become more common in efforts to preserve the genetic diversity of plant species—the most well-known being Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault—farmers emphasize that to preserve a seed also means to plant it in soil. It is only by growing that a seed is able to respond itself to the specificity of an environment and survive. Longevity in this context necessitates a release from the tight grip of immutability that is proffered by normative preservation work.
As I was writing this essay, a series of images began to circulate on social media of the structural damage in Puerto Rico’s Archivo General. Water damage and mold, due to a failing filtration system, mostly a result of governmental neglect despite the arduous work being carried out by individual archivists, put at risk some of the most historically important collections held in the archive. Nonprofit and governmental organizations like Centro de Conservación y Restauración de Puerto Rico and HASER, as well as the Alianza de Museos de Puerto Rico, are carrying out the essential work of capacity building for archivists and developing emergency plans to safeguard historical and cultural archives in the case of another catastrophic climatic event. These initiatives form part of an essential claim by Puerto Rican cultural institutions that they are equipped stewards of their own cultural heritage, rather than being defined by US institutions about what constitutes effective preservation work. This is not just a matter of self-determination but also of caring for the afterlives of documents.
Diana Taylor, in a later section of The Archive and the Repetoire, reminds us that while documents stored in the archive are meant to be immutable and structurally unchanging, their content, the text itself, is subject to be “interpreted, even embodied” differently with each reading. She notes that “insofar as it constitutes materials that seem to endure, the archive exceeds the live.” This is an important reminder that to continue to activate and reread is, too, part of a regenerative process. The invitation, thus, to reread the terms of preservation more broadly, to think about ways in which one can preserve that are in dialogue with environmental context, is to remember that a document’s fragility is an indicator of its dependence on a wider ecosystem. Climate need not only be viewed as destructive if it is esteemed as a collaborator. To read the “live” in the archival is also an act of preservation.
