Javier Cambre

Hábitat en Tránsito: Piñones

Piñones is a beachfront area just outside San Juan where for decades vendors have sold seafood and refreshments at small roadside kiosks. Familiar to Cambre from his youth, these structures — and the working-class recreation area they support — are threatened by the development of luxury resorts. For this installation, Cambre has simultaneously accelerated and memorialized the disintegration of Piñones by dissecting one of the kiosks and moving half of it to New York City. The half of the kiosk remaining on the beach in Puerto Rico and the half transported to New York have been made whole again by the artist; however, in place of the traditional, informal design and construction, Cambre has substituted sleek Modernist forms to create peculiar hybrid buildings.

The juxtaposition of these two elements is not a simple matter of new versus old, modernity versus tradition, global versus local, or rich versus poor. “My artwork,” says Cambre, “intends to establish a dialogue between the poetics of space and the social and economic implications of architectural frames as the blueprint for our behavioral activities.”