Rest Ashore

Rest Ashore
^{Locust Projects, Miami, FL}

Locust Projects presents Rest Ashore, a new large scale multi-channel video installation by LatinX multi-disciplinary artist Juana Valdes. Rest Ashore reexamines the Cuban migration experience over the past sixty years and how it relates to the current global refugee crisis. The installation explores similarities in how the refugee crisis has been documented and disseminated in mass media throughout the years, both past and present, while creating a new visual vernacular honoring those who died at sea in their travels. Rest Ashore marks Valdes’s first significant expansion into video and a dramatic shift in her artistic process.

While this project differs significantly from Valdes’s past work, it continues her thematic explorations of the sea, ocean, rivers, and “bodies of water”, which have always played a significant role in her practice and shifted the way in which she perceives and reimagines the Caribbean.

Upon entering the space, visitors will encounter Waves of Migrations (Olas de Migraciones), a multimedia sculpture of stacking CRT (cathode-ray tube) televisions, each screen depicting a different decade of Cuban migration—the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Repurposed archival footage tells the story of each wave of migration: the first wave of Cuba’s elite executives between 1959-1962; the second wave between 1965-1974 when America and Cuba negotiated the orderly departure of Cubans; the 1978 Cuban government’s agreement to release political prisoners and allow Cubans in the U.S. to visit

Cuba, resulting in the chaotic flotilla exodus in 1980; and the most recent fourth wave resulting from America’s updates to the embargo in 1992, during which Cubans made a dangerous journey to America by sea on drifting balsas- makeshift rafts created with wood, doors, tires, and other repurposed floating objects and cloth sails.

Walking past the tower of CRT screens, visitors enter a vast space in shades of green and blue, creating the feeling of being suspended deep beneath the waves of the ocean. On opposite ends of the space, two video walls display Eternal Sunshine/Dreams of a Foreign Landscape (Eterno Resplandor del Sol/Sueños de un Paisaje Extranjo), a new video work portraying a man looking out to sea beyond the horizon and a never-ending sunset over the ocean.

The floor is covered in shipping pallets in various sizes, with several reconfigured and connected into three larger functional structures that welcome visitors to stand or sit upon their rough wood. Once situated on the pallets, viewers are in perfect position to look upwards towards massive canvas screens reminiscent of sails. Suspended in the air over each structure, the sails show a video projection of brand new film Rest Ashore (Descansar en la Orilla) by Valdes, confronting viewers with imagery of objects lost at sea, descending into the ocean and washing ashore, referencing loss, sacrifice, and the loss of human lives).

Using the Cuban-American rafters “Balseros” experience as a starting point and reflecting upon past and current migration by sea, Rest Ashore aims to address the current refugee crisis worldwide, remembering and recognizing those refugees who died at sea in their journeys. The project pushes past the conventional beliefs of what it means to be a refugee and questions how these experiences are chronicled in the media and recorded in our memories.

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