ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Thesis: PICTURING ISLAND BODIES UNDER US 
IMPERIALISM  
  
 Gabrielle Robinson-Tillenburg, Master of Arts, 
2022 
  
Thesis Directed By: Professor Abigail McEwen, Art History & 
Archaeology 
 
 
Since the end of World War II, the US has maintained the naval occupation of Okinawa, 
a small island off the coast of Japan. Across the globe in Puerto Rico the US operated 
what was at one point the largest naval station in the world during World War II and 
through the Cold War until ceasing operations in 2001. Islanders in Vieques, Puerto 
Rico face alarming cancer rates, speculated as due to pollution from offshore explosives. 
Women of Okinawa experience recurrent acts of sexual violence at the hands of US 
servicemen. In both archipelagos, public protests against US occupation have disputed 
land ownership and environmental damages. Taking a transnational approach to the 
survival of US imperial violence, this paper examines how contemporary video artists, 
Okinawan Chikako Yamashiro, Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla, and Puerto 
Rican Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz picture island bodies both human and geographic. In 
Seaweed Woman (2008) by Yamashiro, Under Discussion (2005) by Allora & 
Calzadilla, and Post-Military Cinema (2014) by Santiago Mu?oz, liminality, as a space 
between life and death?a condition particular to colonized bodies, is pictured as an 
  
aesthetic and durational refusal of death and destruction to the island body. The 
condition of liminality is portrayed through visual and sonic engagements of 
hyperrealism, that is the confusion between the artists? reproduced images/sounds with 
the real experiences of island bodies. In Post-Military Cinema, liminality is used by the 
artist to produce a repossession of the island body, and in all artworks, to picture 
resistance. Broadly, this comparative study challenges notions of ?American Art? and 
reflects on how US imperial ideology enacts violence, but via the creation of binary 
oppositions creates liminal spaces from which the island body resists and survives. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PICTURING ISLAND BODIES UNDER US IMPERIALISM 
By 
Gabrielle Robinson-Tillenburg 
 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment  
of the requirements for the degree of  
Master of Arts 
2022 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisor Committee:  
 
Professor Abigail McEwen, Chair 
Professor Alicia Volk 
Professor Joshua Shannon 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
? Copyright by 
Gabrielle Robinson-Tillenburg 
2022 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
Table of Contents 
 
 
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... ii?
Disclaimer .................................................................................................................... iii?
List of Figures .............................................................................................................. iv?
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1?
Historical Overview ...................................................................................................... 5?
Liminal Island Bodies ................................................................................................. 12?
Hyperreal Island Bodies .............................................................................................. 23?
(Re)possessing Island Bodies ..................................................................................... 31?
Epilogue: Binaries and Borders .................................................................................. 43?
References ................................................................................................................... 47?
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii 
 
 
Disclaimer 
 
The thesis document that follows has had referenced material removed in respect for 
the owner's copyright. A complete version of this document, which includes said 
referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College Park's library 
collection.
iii 
 
 
List of Figures 
Figure 1.  Paz en Vieques 
 
Figure 2. Vicinity Map (detail) from Naval Facilities Engineering Command 
Atlantic Division, U.S. Naval Complex Roosevelt Roads Puerto Rico 
Master Plan, Paul Schember, RR-0057-1.02-01/01/88, 1988. 
 
Figure 3.  U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa Today from Okinawa Prefectural 
Government, What Okinawa Wants you to Understand about the U.S. 
Military Bases, March 2018. 
 
Figure 4. Chikako Yamashiro, Seaweed Woman, 2008. Installation at White 
Rainbow Gallery, London. 
 
Figure 5. Seaweed Woman. Installation at White Rainbow Gallery, London. 
 
Figure 6. Seaweed Woman 
 
Figure 7. Seaweed Woman (0:00:55) 
 
Figure 8. Seaweed Woman (0:03:16) 
 
Figure 9. Seaweed Woman (0:03:45) 
 
Figure 10. Seaweed Woman (0:05:44) 
 
Figure 11. Allora & Calzadilla, Under Discussion, 2005. Compilation of video 
stills. 
 
Figure 12. Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010 
 
Figure 13. Under Discussion 
 
Figure 14. Under Discussion 
 
Figure 15. Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010 
 
Figure 16.  Community Center Complex from Naval Facilities Engineering 
Command Atlantic Division, U.S. Naval Complex Roosevelt Roads 
Puerto Rico Master Plan, Paul Schember, RR-0057-1.02-01/01/88, 
1988. 
 
Figure 17. Former baseball field and stands at Roosevelt Roads site 
iv 
 
 
 
Figure 18. El Coqui Theater ca. 2002 
 
Figure 19. Entrance to El Coqui Theater ca. 2020 
 
Figure 20. Allora & Calzadilla, Returning of a Sound, 2004 
 
Figure 21. Map of areas pictured in Returning of a Sound 
 
Figure 22. Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz, Post-Military Cinema, 2014 (0:01:32) 
 
Figure 23.  Post-Military Cinema (0:02:15) 
 
Figure 24.  Francisco Oller, Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885 
 
Figure 25. Post-Military Cinema (0:06:32) 
 
Figure 26. Francisco Oller, Hacienda Aurora, 1898-99 
 
Figure 27. Post-Military Cinema (0:03:24) 
 
Figure 28. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, 1996 seats, opened as H.C. 
Miner?s Newark Theatre as a vaudeville house (1886), remodeled by 
architect Thomas Lamb in Adam style (1917), starting showing movies 
and renamed Paramount theater (1932), closed (1986), lobby used as 
retail PARAMOUNT THEATER, NEWARK, NJ, 2011, 2011 
 
Figure 29. Romance Tropical (1934) Movie Poster 
 
Figure 30. Post-Military Cinema, (0:10:23) 
 
Figure 31. Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz, 10 years, 2014 
v 
 
 
Introduction 
In my family home hangs a screenprint by an unidentified Puerto Rican artist 
in which a young boy wishfully holds up a flag reading ?Paz en Vieques? (Peace in 
Vieques) (Fig. 1). 1 It is through this artwork that I, at a young age, became informed 
of the United States military occupation of Vieques, Puerto Rico and the injustices it 
imposed on the island. This fraught history conflicts with the great American 
narrative that, through history books and museological canon, touts ideals of 
democracy, equality, and freedom as central to the nation?s practices and global role. 
In attending to artistic production from the edges of US empire, such as Paz en 
Vieques, I present a counter-narrative to this American mythology.  
While I launched this study with pointed attention to examples of Puerto 
Rican artistic production under US imperialism, I draw further comparisons to work 
from another site of US military occupation: Okinawa, Japan. Through a transnational 
approach, I analyze three video-based artworks that varyingly picture island bodies 
under US occupation: Seaweed Woman (2008) by Chikako Yamashiro (b.1976, Naha, 
Okinawa, Japan); Under Discussion (2005) by Puerto Rico based artist-duo Allora & 
Calzadilla (members Jennifer Allora b. 1974, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Guillermo 
Calzadilla b. 1971, Havana Cuba); and Post-Military Cinema (2014) by Beatriz 
Santiago Mu?oz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico). There are many locations impacted 
by US imperialism, but a transnational comparison between Puerto Rican island 
bodies and Okinawan island bodies illuminates unexpected commonalities. Both 
 
1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 
1 
 
 
islands had been colonized prior to US occupation--Puerto Rico by Spain, and 
Okinawa, by Japan.2 In ?Reimagining Islands: Notes on Selected Works by Oh Hoaji, 
Soni Kum, and Yamashiro Chikako,? art historian Rebecca Jennison references 
Satoshi Ukai's call for "new and careful readings of ongoing conditions of 'double 
colonization' [on] islands linked by the shared experience of having been colonized 
by Japan that continue to face neo-colonial pressure from military superpowers which 
in turn are also continents and states (such as the US bases in Okinawa)."3 In this 
thesis, I answer Ukai's call and extend the notion of "double colonization" beyond the 
islands colonized by Japan to understand the US imperial effect in multiple contexts. 
In Okinawa and Puerto Rico, the trauma of the islands? histories as colonies of Japan 
and Spain, respectively, are doubled by the trauma of US occupation, a "double 
colonization" worth studying for what it can reveal about the effects of doubled and 
enduring imperial harm.  
The subject of each video is the ?island body,? which I define as dually the 
human body (the islander) and the geographic body of land that is the island itself. 
This connection is indeed related to the many (sometimes constructive and sometimes 
problematic) conceptual linkages between humans and land in the discourses on and 
of Indigenous bodies, art, and culture.4 Notwithstanding, my argument does not rely 
 
2 Under General Douglas MacArthur, the US occupied Japan after the end of World War II. When 
sovereignty was returned to Japan in 1951 under the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the Ryuku Islands, 
including Okinawa, remained under occupation until 1972 when it was returned to Japan. At the end of 
the Spanish-American War, the Treaty of Paris of 1898 transferred rule over Guam, the Philippines, 
and Puerto Rico to the US In 1947, Japan gained its constitution, and in 1952, the US granted Puerto 
Rico a constitution. Both constitutions were primarily drafted by the United States.  
3 Rebecca Jennison, ?Reimagining Islands: Notes on Selected Works by Oh Haji, Soni Kum, and 
Yamashiro Chikako,? Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 3, no. 1?2 (2017): 156, 
https://doi.org/10.1163/23523085-00302008. 
4 Examples of the problematic include early modern decorative map cartouches produced by Dutch, 
British, and European map makers that visually linked Indigenous Caribbean island bodies to mapped 
2 
 
 
on an essentializing homogenization of island bodies?as nations equally impacted by 
imperial oppressions or even as a group of alike individuals that make up each nation. 
Other, non-military-based forms of US pseudo-occupation such as tourism, political 
interference, and agricultural, industrial, or trade-based occupations are beyond the 
scope of this essay. Nonetheless, I present a study of US military occupations of 
doubly colonized islands as a framework for understanding global imperial conditions 
and expanding transnational solidarity. In the following case studies, I draw upon the 
scholarship of art historian and curator Ta?na Caragol who considers how 
contemporary artists engaged in the subject of US empire can expand the American 
art genre.5 This framework, to which I adhere to, is one which considers empire as a 
central aspect of any study of the US, be it history or art. 
Each artist here engages video, a medium that not only distinctly produces the 
hyperreal (as closely reproducing the real in image, sound, and movement) but 
represents a strategic choice for island artists. Practicing where physical art objects 
are endangered by the effects of climate change (i.e., hurricanes, tsunamis, extreme 
heat, rising seas), these artists produce virtual documents that survive through 
duplication via digital file copy and reach across borders via the internet. Video?s 
 
territory, equating these bodies to the resources that the land contained and that the European 
colonizers sought to exploit. The most constructive examples of these connections are drawn from the 
communities they seek to represent and maintain considerable appreciation for both the similarities and 
differences between various indigenous cultures. 
5  For the forthcoming Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery exhibition, 1898: Imperial Visions and 
Revisions (working title), curated by Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay, Caragol promises a chapter in 
its catalog dedicated to highlighting contemporary artists engaged in the subject of US empire (in 
relation to Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hawai?i, the Philippines, for example). Significant 
is her treatment of the subject as worthy of inclusion in a museum deeply engage din telling the story 
of the US. I worked with Caragol in summer of 2021 as the Catto curatorial intern for this exhibition. 
Ta?na Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay, ?Imperial Visons and Revisions,? Bully Pulpit, Panorama: 
Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020), 
https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10096. 
3 
 
 
reproducibility and ease of transfer hold the potential to upload the presence of island 
bodies into the global collective memory and spread like a (computer) virus. 
Historically overlooked, and at times strategically silenced, island perspectives have 
been systematically excluded from international archives, large collecting institutions, 
empirical historiographies, and the art historical canon. These exclusions directly 
stem from Western bias, white supremacy, and patriarchy rooted in the imperial 
expansion of Europe and are compounded by Europe?s successor as global power: the 
neo-imperial US. In foregrounding the documentation of island bodies, particularly 
island bodies under US imperialism, video resists such exclusionary practices and 
simultaneously corrupts the imperial system itself. 
Following a brief historical overview of US imperial forces in Okinawa and 
Puerto Rico, I present three case studies that illustrate these island bodies under 
occupation. The discussion of Seaweed Woman by Yamashiro demonstrates the 
picturing of liminality, specifically the liminal island body under US pseudo-
occupation between the poles of sovereignty and dispossession. Under Discussion by 
Allora & Calzadilla exemplifies the role of hyperreality, which I define as the artist?s 
reproduction of real, abstract conditions of the Viequense (Puerto Ricans from 
Vieques) through a narrative-based performance captured on video. Finally, an 
analysis of Post-Military Cinema by Santiago Mu?oz reveals how the hyperreal 
liminal island body can repossess formerly occupied lands by subverting an imperial 
desiring gaze often turned towards island bodies. Ultimately, I contend these forms of 
picturing constitute a transnational resistance to a neo-imperial force of the US 
birthed during World War II and active to this day. 
4 
 
 
Historical Overview 
 
The Cold War, a monumental instance of binary ideology, was the powerful 
driver for US global domination post-World War II. While US imperialism has its 
roots in its eighteenth-century founding, the Soviet threat offered justification for an 
imperial project that has resulted in what Daniel Immerwahr, in How to Hide an 
Empire: A History of the Greater United States, refers to as the "Greater United 
States," a "hidden empire" with about 750 military bases in at least 80 countries 
around the world.6 While situated almost entirely antipodally, Okinawa and Puerto 
Rico function similarly in how they each continue to serve US (Cold War) interests. 
The US military presence doubles down on the dispossession that each island, 
previously colonized, endures. The geographic, environmental, political, social, 
physical, and emotional impacts of this enduring dispossession on Okinawan and 
Puerto Rican island bodies are what draws them together.  
While grassroots activists have drawn connections between islands such as 
Okinawa and Puerto Rico under pseudo-US military occupation, due attention is 
needed to artistic production at these edges of US empire. Recent art historical 
scholarship has opened avenues for such transnational dialogue within the field.7 
 
6 Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: a History of the Greater United States (New York: 
Picador, 2020); and Mohammed Hussein and Mohammed Haddad. ?Infographic: US Military Presence 
around the World,? Aljazeera, September 10, 2021. 
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-
interactive#:~:text=The%20US%20controls%20about%20750,the%20next%2010%20countries%20co
mbined. 
7 Notably, this includes the International Women?s Network Against Militarism which comprises 
?women activists, policy-makers, teachers, and students? from the peripheries of the US empire: 
Guahan (Guam), Hawai?i, Japan, Okinawa, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and includes 
supporters from the continental US The network turns its focus to shared issues including, ?military 
violence, sexual abuse, and trafficking; problems arising from the expansion of US military operations 
and bases; the health effects of environmental contamination caused by preparations for war,? among 
5 
 
 
Joseph R. Hartman?s edited volume Imperial Islands: Art, Architecture, and Visual 
Experience in the US Insular Empire After 1898 acts as an art historical and visual 
culture-focused follow-up to Immerwahr?s How to Hide an Empire: both are critical 
pieces of scholarship that contribute to an understanding of the formation of US 
empire during and following the years of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the 
annexation of Caribbean and Pacific islands.8 More attention is also needed to the 
contemporary visual rhetoric of resistance and reclamation among artworks from 
these islands, as the aftershocks of these past and active occupations continue to be 
felt by island bodies today. 
Puerto Rico served a key Cold War function due to its proximity to the Soviet 
stronghold of Cuba and to the Panama Canal, which it protected from enemy control. 
After the Spanish-American War, the Treaty of Paris granted the US control of Puerto 
Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, all of which became sites for US military bases. In 
Puerto Rico, shortly after the annexation, naval exercises began in the waters of 
Culebra, another small island off its coast. In the following years, a naval station was 
built on Culebra (1904); a naval base, later named Roosevelt Roads, was ordered for 
the area of Ceiba on the main island (1940); and the naval training range in Vieques 
was opened (1941). While a series of local anti-military protests forced the closing of 
the Culebra station in 1971, the acreage of military installations in Puerto Rico in the 
1980s remained large totaling 72,634 acres held by the Army, National Guard, Navy, 
 
others. International Women's Network Against Militarization, February 15, 2015, 
http://iwnam.org/about/. 
8 Joseph R. Hartman, Imperial Islands: Art, Architecture, and Visual Experience in the US Insular 
Empire after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai?i Press, 2022); and Immerwahr, Hide an Empire. 
6 
 
 
and Air Force (Fig. 2).9 On Vieques, seventy-six percent of the land was restricted to 
the US military and unavailable for civilian use. These installments, along with more 
than fifty others in Guant?namo Bay, Antigua, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Trinidad, 
Tobago, and the US Virgin Islands, transposed what began as a distinctly island and 
resource-focused imperial expansion of the US to the preservation of power in the 
Caribbean basin.10 This presence sought to secure the nation and its allies from Nazi 
threat in World War II; train its fleets in new tactics in response to communist threats 
in Korea; secure Panama Canal centered trade routes from Soviet control during the 
Cold War; and position US nuclear forces close to a Soviet-backed Cuba.11  
 After World War II, the United States established a naval base on the island of 
Okinawa, securing a stronghold in East Asia during the Cold War that remains 
operational today. However, the US was not the first to occupy this island. Okinawa, 
the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, is home to a unique ethnic group called the 
Ryukyuan. The unified Ryukyu Kingdom, dating back to 1429, was invaded by 
Japanese forces in 1609 and officially annexed by the Japanese Empire under Meji 
rule in 1879.12 The Ryuku archipelago, stretching from southern Japan to Taiwan in 
the southern gateway between the Philippine Sea and the East China Sea, was one of 
many areas colonized by Emperor Meiji who rapidly expanded the empire during his 
 
9 Humberto Garc?a Mu?iz, ?US Military Installations in Puerto Rico: An Essay on Their Role and 
Purpose,? Caribbean Studies 24, no. ? (1991): 85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25613040. 
10 Immerwahr notes that the US acquisition of islands began with a large number of unpopulated small 
Caribbean islands for the harvesting of guano, used as fertilizer to grow food for a booming US 
population. US interest later expanded to larger islands after a young Theodore Roosevelt, inspired by 
the 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History by Capital Alfred Thayer Mahan, 
influenced President William McKinley to enter the Spanish-American war.  Immerwahr, Hide an 
Empire, 47-70. 
11 Mu?iz, ?U.S. Military Installments.? 
12 George H. Kerr, Okinawa, the History of an Island People (Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle, 1958). 
7 
 
 
rule. The island of Okinawa, now a part of the Okinawa prefecture of Japan, would 
remain under Japanese rule until a major turning point of World War II: the Battle of 
Okinawa (1945). A notoriously bloody conflict lasting eighty-two days, the Battle of 
Okinawa claimed the lives of approximately half of the Okinawan population. 
Civilian deaths greatly outnumbered those of the military due starvation, illness, and 
even Japanese-forced mass suicide. It was after this battle that the US controlled 
Okinawa under military occupation until 1950 through a more formally organized 
?civil administration? through 1972, maintaining a strategic presence in Asia against 
Soviet and Chinese communist influence and during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. 
The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, a memorial to the Battle 
of Okinawa, clearly summarizes the transition from Japanese to US occupation: 
?Okinawans directly experienced the absurdity of war and atrocities it inevitably 
brings about. This war experience is at the very core of what is popularly called the 
?Okinawan Heart,? a resilient yet strong attitude to life that Okinawan people 
developed as they struggled against the pressures of many years of US military 
control.?13 Despite ending an oppressive Japanese rule, the establishment of US 
military bases in Okinawa for the purposes of building hard power and maintaining 
wartime outposts made the US presence particularly unpalatable for a population so 
profoundly opposed to war. The US returned the island to Japan in 1972, but despite 
Okinawan opposition Japan allowed the US to continue to expand their military 
bases; in 2017, the US occupied approximately seventy-two square miles, or around 
 
13 ?The Basic Concept of the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum,? Okinawa Prefectural 
Peace Memorial Museum, April 1, 2000, http://www.peace-museum.okinawa.jp/english/. 
8 
 
 
eight percent of the land in the Okinawa Prefecture overall, including fourteen and a 
half percent of the land on the island of Okinawa (Fig. 3).14 Thus, even after the end 
of the official occupation in 1972, the US presence remains significant. The 
?Okinawan Heart? and the island?s anti-war stance remain as the continued US 
military presence, which has had damaging impacts locally as well.15   
In both Okinawa and Puerto Rico, US military installations used island 
locations as sites for weapons, bombs, and training experiments that led to 
immeasurable environmental damages as well to the physical harm of residents, a 
harm that lingers to this day. In Japan, the infamous Bikini Atoll Lucky Dragon 
Incident (1954) brought awareness to the harmful effects of bomb fallout when 
fishermen of the Lucky Dragon boat were irradiated, resulting in one death and in 
cancer in the others who were on board. In Vieques, cancer rates are 27% higher than 
that of mainland Puerto Rico, a disparity thought to be related to the presence of 
residual carcinogenic weapons materials.16 In 1999, civilian David Sanes Rodriquez 
was killed in Vieques by a test bomb.17 Okinawa saw 676 accidents involving US 
aircraft, including the 2004 incident in which a US Marine Corps helicopter crashed 
into Okinawa International University, Ginowan City.18 The sexual violence against 
 
14 ?What Okinawa Wants You to Understand about the U.S. Military Bases,? Okinawa Prefectural 
Government, March 2018, http://dc-office.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/E-all.pdf.  
15 Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum. 
16 Valeria Pelet, "There's a Health Crisis on This Puerto Rican Island, but It's Impossible to Prove Why 
It's Happening," The Atlantic (Atlantic Media Company, September 3, 2016), 
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/vieques-invisible-health-crisis/498428/. 
17 Associated Press, "Navy Attributes Fatal Bombing To Mistakes," New York Times, August 3, 1999, 
sec. A, p.12, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/03/us/navy-attributes-fatal-bombing-to-mistakes.html. 
18 ?Base-Related Data,? Okinawa Prefectural Government Washington D.C. Office, accessed February 
20, 2022, https://dc-office.org/basedata; Okinawan artist Mao Ishikawa (b. 1953), who deserves similar 
attention to her commentary on US occupation in Okinawa, rushed to the site of the helicopter accident 
in 2014 without her usual camera equipment. Using her cellphone and instant cameras (brought to her 
onsite by a friend who she asked to quickly purchase some nearby), she captured a series of gripping 
9 
 
 
Okinawan women by US forces is an ongoing problem: in 1955, Sergeant Isaac J. 
Hurt raped and murdered six-year-old Okinawan Yumiko Nagayama, and in 2016 
marine Kenneth Franklin Shinzato raped and murdered 20-year-old Okinawan Rina 
Shimabukuro. While these events are the most violent and well-known accounts of 
sexual violence against Okinawans, they exclude other, more minor sexual offenses 
and the unreported infractions that occur in the context of sex-work catering to US 
servicemen.19 Finally, both islands have been negatively impacted by polluted sea life 
and diminished fisheries.20 Without question, Okinawan and Puerto Rican island 
bodies remain impacted by US military forces through residual toxic contamination 
and direct assault by weapons and sexual force. For these reasons and more, these US 
naval bases have both been met with opposition by anti-base and anti-imperial 
movements, led by a host of organizations including International Women?s Network 
Against Militarism, International Network Against Foreign Military Bases, Okinawa 
Women Act Against Military Violence, Hawai?i Okinawa Alliance, Okinawa Peace 
Appeal, Vieques Libre, Artists for Peace, Committee for the Rescue and 
Development of Vieques, the Puerto Rican Independence Party, Vieques Women?s 
 
images documenting the immediate damage and military response, which was to block civilian access 
to the university area.  Mao Ishikawa, Fences, Okinawa (Tokyo: Mirai-sha Publishers, 2010), 76. 
19 Tomomi Tomita, ?Okinawan Women's Civic Group Chronicles Sex Crimes by U.S. Military,? The 
Japan Times, March 18, 2021, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/03/18/national/social-
issues/okinawa-women-military-violence/; and Anonymous, ?The Journey of Recovering from 
Gender-Based Violence: The Ecstasy of Triumph and the Agony of Defeat,? January 4, 2011, 
https://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/Anonymous.pdf. 
20 Jon Mitchell, ?FOIA Documents Reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, Toxic Dumps, Fish Kills on 
Okinawa Base. Two Veterans Win Compensation, Many More Denied,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, 
Vol. 13, Issue 40, no. 1, October 5, 2015; and Marius Palz, ?Okinawan Coral Politics, Henoko Base 
Construction and a Japanese Political Strategy of Ignorance,? The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 19, Issue 
24, no.2, December 15, 2021; and David Griffith and Pizzini Vald?s Manuel, ?Roads Less Traveled: 
Proletarianization and Its Discontents,? in Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea: A Puerto Rican Journey 
through Labor and Refuge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 
10 
 
 
Alliance, and more. The artists? voices, in each of the three works I describe, 
contribute to these movements, and picture a form of resistance. While not an act of 
protest or civil disobedience, this artist formed resistance comprises the 
documentation of the effects of imperialism on island bodies, combatting the erasure 
of such stories through systematic exclusion from international media attention and 
sufficient academic study. 
 
   
11 
 
 
Liminal Island Bodies 
 
In Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between, Danish 
anthropologist and social scientist Bj?rn Thomassen defines liminality as ?refer[ing] 
to moments or periods of transition? opening the way to novelty and imagination, 
construction and destruction? In liminality, the very distinction between structure 
and agency ceases to make sense; and yet, in the hyper-reality of liminality, 
?meaning-formation take[s] form.?21 For Okinawan and Puerto Rican island bodies, 
it is US neo-imperialism that has distorted just structures of agency in the form of 
ownership and autonomy and produced a liminal state between subjugation and 
sovereignty. Engaging the liminal, Chikako Yamashiro in Seaweed Woman, and 
Allora & Calzadilla in Under Discussion, picture the islander in or on island coastal 
waters. Yamashiro and Allora & Calzadilla both employ hyperrealism, which aligns 
with Thomassen?s description of liminality. While the meaning of hyperreality has 
been transposed by many scholars, in this case, the hyperreal is the visual 
representation of the real conditions of islanders and islands through imaginative 
performances such as the artist as a ?Seaweed Woman,? and in Allora & Calzadilla?s 
video a fisherman who drives an upside-down table through water. In these 
imaginative performances, the fictional narrative is a more accurate representation of 
the real experiences of island bodies than what may otherwise be documented in 
traditional media. 
 
21 Bj?rn Thomassen, ?Into Liminality,? in Liminality and the Modern Living through the in-Between 
(London: Routledge, 2018), 1. 
12 
 
 
Especially if the viewer equates the islander a with the island?a body also in 
or on water, this hyperreal visual rhetoric draws attention to the ways in which US 
occupation has impacted the island body. Through a visual analysis of Seaweed 
Woman, I examine the politically liminal position imposed on the Okinawan body; 
the construction of binaries and borders that create the liminal Okinawan; the 
gendered liminal position; and the liminality between life and death in relation to the 
livelihoods of Okinawans threatened by US occupation. Through the picturing of a 
hyperreal Seaweed Woman, a mythical stand-in for the Okinawan island body, 
Yamashiro calls attention to and draws power from the liminal space occupied by this 
body. 
Chikako Yamashiro, a native Okinawan, graduated with a bachelor?s degree 
in oil painting from the Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts in 1999, by which 
time she had already begun to move away from painting to performance and video-
based methods. Her works have been exhibited globally in solo shows hosted in 
London and Singapore and in group shows in San Francisco (From Generation to 
Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, 2016-17) and Tel Aviv 
(Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed Wartime Memory, Performativity 
and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art, 2015), 
among others. While she has been exhibited by mainland Japanese museums such as 
the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Mori Art Museum, the 
museum that has most frequently displayed her work is the Okinawa Prefectural Art 
Museum in Naha, where she was born. Her oeuvre functions as a long-term 
investigation into the complex relationships between past and present in Okinawa, its 
13 
 
 
history of colonial violence, and its continued resistance. Her consistent engagement 
with the island of Okinawa not only centers the experiences of Okinawans, but 
centers the artist herself as mediator, highlighting the difficulties that arise with such 
an endeavor.  
Her 2008 work Seaweed Woman comprises a looped film (0:7:15) and eight 
Lambda chromogenic prints (Fig. 4). As exhibited in her solo show Shapeshifter at 
White Rainbow gallery in London (2018), the video is projected to the left of the 
photographs, which are mounted at varying heights, mimicking the shape of a small 
wave (Fig. 5). The sound of the video, discussed later, is of repeated human breath 
and fills the gallery space, allowing the viewer to hear the soundtrack while engaging 
both the video and the photographic components. The photographs are shot from 
above and look upon the artist from the chest up; her body is positioned diagonally in 
the frame as she floats in clear water amidst a mass of vivid green seaweed. In some 
photographs her eyes are closed and her face lies fully or partially submerged just 
under the surface of the water. In others, her face, partially above water, is covered in 
seaweed as she stares emptily above. In the second to last in the row of eight, her 
head rises fully out of the water, eyes looking intently into the camera with seaweed 
forming a beard around her mouth (Fig. 6). 
The video?s rhetoric, with its handheld cinematography and accompanying 
breathy soundtrack, portrays the entire narrative from the point of view of the artist in 
water. Viewing the video alongside the photographs, the viewer easily connects this 
point of view to the pictured artist, or ?Seaweed Woman? as the title suggests. The 
narrative arc parallels the order of the photographs displayed on the wall to its right, 
14 
 
 
where her face, submerged partially or fully under the water, finally emerges in the 
last image. A handheld camera captures views of the area from the artist?s position in 
water, dipping under frequently and surfacing to multiple vignettes as waves splash 
against the camera lens. These scenes, shot at various locations around Okinawa and 
its peripheral islands including beaches and resorts, include visions of areas not yet 
claimed by military or private ownership ("designated sites of reclamation," in the 
words of the artist). 22  Her quick and frequent video edits from one image to the next 
mimic the rhythm of ocean waves as the narrative content bobs in and out of view. 
In an interview, Yamashiro explains the origin of the Seaweed Woman, who 
first emerged from an interest in mirrors and view of the self and evolved into a 
character embodied by the artist.  "Seaweed woman was born, first appearing in still 
photos,? she recalled. ?It felt like I had the eyes, the vision, of someone other than 
myself."23 Through performance and video, in Seaweed Woman and throughout her 
oeuvre, she practices and documents an attempt to embody Okinawan history and 
experience in a form of hyperreal self-portraiture, traversing the boundary between 
individual and collective to picture yet another form of liminality. I will refer to the 
perspective of the camera, of the artist, and of Seaweed Woman as a character and as 
a stand-in for the Okinawan body, interchangeably.  
In the video, the camera/artist/Seaweed Woman continuously dips underwater 
and re-emerges with the force and rhythm of the waves. Like the waves, the images 
 
22 Yamashiro lists the Awase flatlands, Mokuninhama Shore Connivance (artist's term) in Urasoe, 
areas around the Naha military port, Sesoko Beach, Kise Beach, and Henoko as film locations. 
Chikako Yamashiro, DVD Interview, in Still Hear the Wound: toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to 
Come (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, East Asia Program, 2015). 
23 Ibid. 
15 
 
 
are choppy, and a slow shutter speed blurs and confuses the definition of the waves, 
much like water in the eyes would do (Fig. 7). In the first eighteen seconds of the 
film, a distant horizon of mountains can be made out, but it soon disappears under the 
waves. In succession, the waves hit the camera from a forward direction, then from 
the left, the right, and above, the artist dipping under the water after each directional 
force is applied. When considering multidirectional forces on the island body, this 
author reads the waves as representative of the multidirectional forces on the 
Okinawan people: Japan as colonizer, the US as military occupier, and the current 
conservative Japanese government catering to the desires of the US.24 The waves 
push the artist under the water. The soundscape, a continued rhythm of water splash 
and troubled breath, carries throughout the film, and implies that the artist, the 
Okinawan body, is barely managing to keep alive against the force of the waves, and 
the forces of the imperial political and occupational powers.25 
 The artist emerges from the water looking up to find a Japanese Coast Guard 
boat, the same vessel that enforces US Marine exclusion zones in Okinawan waters 
 
24 Former Prime Minister of Japan, Abe Shinz?, who served in office 2006-2007 and 2012-2020, is a 
member of Nippon Kaigi, the largest conservative, far-right lobby. In 2019 he continued in support of 
the relocation of a US military base in Okinawa despite a vote of rejection by over 70% of voting 
Okinawans. Justin McCurry, ?Okinawa Referendum Rejects New US Military Base but Abe Likely to 
Press On,? The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, February 25, 2019), 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/okinawa-referendum-rejects-new-us-military-base-
but-abe-likely-to-press-on. 
25 This reading of the artist?s body as ?the Okinawan body? is informed by Yamashiro?s frequent 
performance in video works in which she attempts to relate her body to the Okinawan people at-large: 
lip-synching to the words of an Okinawan elder and projecting his image onto her face in Your voice 
came out through my throat (2009); and performances documented in the series OKINAWA TOURIST 
(2004) in which she enacts clich? images of Okinawan people such as dancing a traditional Okinawan 
dance often performed for tourists or eating American ice cream in front of a US military base. She has 
stated, ?I have used photography and video for works using my body and other people's bodies because 
I believe that they can fuse the border between reality and imagination as well as generate multiple 
meanings between the image and the audience.? This interpretation is one such meaning. Chikako 
Yamashiro, ?Yamashiro Chikako,? Tokyo Arts and Space, March 18, 2022, 
https://www.tokyoartsandspace.jp/en/creator/index/Y/1476.html. 
16 
 
 
(Fig. 8).26 The guards on the boat note the artist's presence, and one guard directs a 
camera her way. The artist dips again underwater and emerges to view the Japanese 
Coast Guard approaching a second boat, that of the anti-base resisters who occupy 
water areas, one of whom dons a fishing cap. The scene cuts to the Coast Guard 
intervening as one of the protestors aboard, an older man, makes eye contact with the 
camera in a glance. The artist's gaze then turns to the seafloor, where what should be 
covered in coral reefs and sea life is barren (Fig. 9). The camera finds and focuses on 
a tread, or piece of equipment, long and stretched across the seafloor like a barrier or 
border, covered in sediment. The image articulates the construction of borders 
imposed on the natural island body, both physical, as in the borders placed by U.S 
forces to separate bases from the rest of the island, and political, as in Okinawa?s 
status between Japanese and US rule. 
 Rising from the water again, the artist turns her gaze to the sky, floating and 
bouncing in the waves. In a repetition of submersion and emersion, a succession of 
flashes builds tension - of another boat and city coastline, a village coastline, 
shorelines polluted with discarded equipment, snorkelers and beachgoers (Fig. 10). 
As the repetitive sound of the artist's breath seems to skip a beat, she is once again 
submerged in the water. This time the sound of her breath ceases as if finally 
overcome by external forces; yet it returns once again as the artist emerges for the 
final time. The sound of the breath is no longer unnatural but normal in its rhythm: 
with this edit, the viewer is brought out of a hypnotic state into a present reality. At 
 
26 Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, "Where Japanese Fight a US Military Base with Kayaks," BBC News 
(BBC, April 28, 2015), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32476954. 
17 
 
 
this moment, the artist's gaze is turned to the sky and the underwater soundscape 
ceases, implying a body that has either survived the forces of the waves and resisted 
drowning, or has drowned and is reborn. 
 This narrative of survival continues in the accompanying 8 photographs taken 
in the waters of Henoko, one of the sites of the US base. The last of these pictures 
Yamashiro with a beard of wet green seaweed around her mouth and piled upon her 
chin. Yamashiro notes that she imagined the character of Seaweed Woman donning a 
beard of seaweed from the outset. Alongside the video's soundscape in which the 
Seaweed Woman struggles to breathe, the pictured seaweed can be read as 
suffocating the artist around the airway and as if the mass of sea vegetation that has 
been coughed out of her lungs. Note that mozuko, a seaweed farmed by Okinawans 
for processing in factories, is native to Okinawa. Mozuko is sold as food, but most 
relevantly here, as a cancer treatment. In a 2015 study, researchers at the University 
of Tasmania observed that fucoidan, found in brown seaweed such as mozuko, can 
not only destroy cancerous cells but also prevent chemotherapy and radiation 
toxicity.27 Reading the images with these connections in mind, and considering the 
seaweed woman equipped with a masculine gender performance (the donning of a 
beard), meaning is formed in the liminal state between binaries. Yamashiro forms 
meaning in-between the seaweed as a harm (as suffocating) and seaweed as an aid (as 
cancer treatment), in-between seaweed woman as feminine and seaweed woman as 
masculine. Okinawa and Okinawans occupy a position in-between such binaries: 
 
27 Farzaneh Atashrazm, et al. "Fucoidan and cancer: a multifunctional molecule with anti-tumor 
potential," Marine drugs, vol. 13,4 (2015): 2327-46, doi:10.3390/md13042327. 
18 
 
 
farmers who harvest seaweed with the potential to treat cancer expose themselves to 
waters now toxic from US military experiments; the islanders are Japanese citizens 
yet a separate ethnic group; land and waters are Okinawan yet occupied by an 
external force; a Japan conceptualized as feminized by the US enacts a masculinized 
violence on Okinawa.28 Yamashiro thus reveals the absurdity of binary distinctions 
via such gender play and reclaims an occupational power of meaning-formation and 
truth-production in this liminal space. 
 Yamashiro dwells on this absurdity in her hyperreal picturing of the island 
body as the mythical Seaweed Woman, occupying the fluid space of coastal waters. 
While a border is drawn to separate US occupied areas on Okinawa?s coast, water as 
a property cannot be divided, simultaneously occupying both sides, the in-between, 
moving from one side to the other with no way of distinguishing a part from the 
whole and always between two points of land. Furthermore, Seaweed Woman's 
breath, consistent and indicative of survival, yet strained and indicative of drowning, 
expands picturing to sonification of a liminal state, one between life and death. The 
water pushes and pulls Seaweed Woman between the overwhelming forces of the 
Japanese government and US occupation. As a creature tied to the water and as a 
stand-in for the Okinawan, Seaweed Woman dually threatens the binary system of 
borders and is subject to its devastating occultation, and even fatal, effects. In this 
 
28 Lee Chonghwa and Choi Jinseok, "Specters of East Asia: Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea," in Still 
Hear the Wound: toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 
East Asia Program, 2015); The image of a feminized Japan that has prostituted itself to the United 
States has been explored by male Japanese artists such as Hiroshi Nakamura, Kikuji Yamashita, and 
Takashi Murakami. 
19 
 
 
manner, Seaweed Woman, as an island body, defies empire in its occupation of the 
liminal.  
 The performance of an island body by Yamashiro, occupying and resisting 
from the space between life and death, demonstrates the latent power of the liminal 
position. Yamashiro?s performance runs parallel to that of Puerto Rican island bodies 
as described by Latina/Latino studies scholar Sandra Ruiz. While concerning island 
bodies situated far from Okinawa geographically, the positionality Ruiz describes is 
one that is particularly relevant to Okinawan island bodies due to their similar 
colonial and political histories as occupied islands of the US, providing a useful 
framework through which to consider the performative Seaweed Woman. Ruiz 
discusses the ?Rican? body, enduring a colonialism doubled under US rule in Puerto 
Rico, as situated in a liminal space: not living, not dying, but always on the precipice 
of death.29 Ruiz points to water?s symbolic liminal quality as ?a fixture of 
Ricanness?in between cultures, nations, and a colony and colonizer, water persists 
as a weapon, a situation warfare, and an all-encompassing deathtrap between 
worlds.?30 This ?fixture of Ricanness? is also one of the colonized island body, and it 
is this fixture, the liminal qualities of water and the ?all-encompassing deathtrap,? 
that Yamashiro employs to articulate the Okinawan position, placing the island body, 
her own, in the liminal space (water) that functions as the cause of death for Seaweed 
Woman.  
 
29 Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (New York: New York 
University Press, 2019). 
30 Ibid., 5. 
20 
 
 
Yamashiro exercises her resistance from this liminal space of being-toward-
death, freeing the island body by drowning its stand-in, Seaweed Woman, and then 
being re-born. Relying on the theories of Frantz Fanon and Martin Heidegger, Ruiz 
describes Puerto Rican endurance of ?being-toward-death?[as] not a daunting 
manifestation; it?s an insurgent alternative to a limited existence.?31 This insurgent 
alternative, or liminal space, offers the colonized island body a site from which to act 
in resistance. Yamashiro?s performance mirrors that of the 1954 political 
demonstration by Puerto Rican Nationalist Dolores ?Lolita? Lebr?n Sotamayor, as 
Ruiz describes. Shooting off multiple rounds from a .38 caliber pistol inside US 
House chambers shouting ??Viva Puerto Rico Libre!? Lebr?n intended to die in a 
suicide by proxy for her occupied country.32 In doing so, Lebr?n would have broken 
her long endurance of being-toward-death in a rebellious act against the impositions 
of US colonialism.33 Through this lens in which death is a release from the oppressed 
liminal state, and in which the liminal interval between life and death is the place 
from which such a powerful act of freedom may proceed, it is the last minute of 
Seaweed Woman in which Yamashiro forms her act of resistance. Seaweed Woman 
ceases her enduring repetitious and belabored breath not simply as a pause for 
dramatic effect but as a death. Her reemergence from the water that follows, as she 
breathes freely and turns her gaze to the heavens, is a rebirth. In imagining new 
 
31 Ibid., 24. 
32 Ibid., 35. Translation: ?Long live a free Puerto Rico.? 
33 Ruiz?s argument references a suicide note Lebr?n carried in her pocket, which ?critique[ed] the 
linear notions of life and death,? and her insistence repeatedly to reporters, and in the aforementioned 
note, that she ?didn?t come here to kill, [she] came to die.? Ibid, 36-37. 
21 
 
 
futures, or rebirths, for the Okinawan body, Yamashiro presents a triumphant act of 
resistance against imperial forces, an act emerging from this liminal space. 
 
 
22 
 
 
Hyperreal Island Bodies 
After years of protest, the decision to close the Vieques base was reached in 
2001, and the military completed its withdrawal in 2003. However, Vieques still 
occupies a liminal space: its political status, as part of Puerto Rico, an Estado Libre 
Asociado (Free Associated State, or commonwealth), is not that of a state or a 
sovereign nation. The land previously occupied by the military in Vieques is under 
discussion as the island decides how to best allocate the land. It is this latter liminal 
state that concerns Allora & Calzadilla in Under Discussion, a single channel 6 
minute and 14-second-long video shot on and around the coastal waters of Vieques 
(Fig. 11). Allora & Calzadilla?s camera follows a stand-in for the Viequense island 
body, played by Diego De La Cruz Gaitan, who steers an upside-down wooden table 
equipped with a boat motor through sparkling blue waters surrounding the island. 
Differing from Yamashiro?s use of underwater and in-water cinematography to 
picture the island body, Allora & Calzadilla?s camera remains above and on the water 
to picture the island body?s position in relation to its waters, coast, and formerly 
occupied land by connecting the performer?s gaze to the surveyed areas in close ups 
of the performer looking outward and wide, moving shots of the island from his 
perspective on the boat. By analyzing Allora & Calzadilla?s picturing of the island 
body?first, via the use of the table/boat as a physical realization of metaphor; 
second, through the juxtaposition of language and texts used to mark and regulate 
land-use and possession; and third, by effacing the boundary between the human 
island body and geographic island body?I argue that it is distinctly in the 
23 
 
 
hyperreality of liminality that the meaning ?island body,? as both human and 
geographic, takes form.  
The Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory defines hyperreality as ?an aesthetic 
mode of reproduction or replication that strives to produce an effect that is more real 
than the real thing being copied.?34 For Thomassen, it is ?in the hyper-reality of 
liminality [that] meaning-formation take[s] form.?35 My argument?s dependance on 
Thomassen?s framework thus extends to its reliance on hyperreality, particularly the 
framework set forth by French theorist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard contends that 
?Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, 
preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography.?36 (I submit 
that video is a form of photographic realism that goes even further to reproduce the 
real not only through image, but through movement and sound as well.) ?From 
medium to medium, the real is volatized, becoming an allegory of death,? he 
continues. ?But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction.?37 If the 
island body?s reality is an experience of the liminal, of being-towards-death, then its 
position is best articulated through that which turns reality into an ?allegory or death? 
reinforced by a ritual of cyclical destruction not so different from the endurance 
performed by the island body, as profiled by Ruiz. The island body in Seaweed 
Woman and the island body in Under Discussion are captured through the hyperreal 
 
34 Ian Buchanan, ?Hyperreality,? in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford, United 
Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018), 251. 
35 Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern, 1. (emphasis added). 
36 Jean Baudrillard, ?The Hyper-Realism of Simulation,? in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of 
Changing Ideas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), 1049. 
37 Ibid. 
24 
 
 
form of video, ?[effacing the] contradiction between the real and imaginary? to form 
meaning?one of resistance from the liminal position.38  
In an interview, Allora references what the artists discuss in Under 
Discussion. "A civil disobedience campaign was successful in forcing the military 
out, but the land has been designated as a federal wildlife refuge, a zone of natural 
processes in need of protection from humans after years of violent bombardment,? 
she explains. ?This designation entails its own violence, marginalizing island 
residents who demand that the land be fully decontaminated and turned over to 
municipal management so that its future can be democratically debated."39 Let us 
acknowledge that the success of this civil disobedience campaign owes much to 
Viequense and Puerto Rican artists who put both their money and their bodies on the 
line in protest, among them Rafi Trelles, Luis Alonso, Paloma Todd, Marta P?rez 
Garc?a, El?as Adasme, and Gustavo Castrodad, among others.40 Allora & Calzadilla 
direct Puerto Rican Diego De la Cruz Gaitan, at the time a student at the Escuela de 
Artes Pl?sticas and the son of a fisherman-activist, as the performing body in Under 
Discussion; this is a point of difference with Yamashiro, who with her own Okinawan 
body performs for the camera.41 While Calzadilla has longer-standing ties to Puerto 
Rico, both partners were not born there; and Philadelphia-born Allora had no cultural 
ties to the island prior to their marriage. The choice to film De la Cruz Gaitan echoes 
 
38 Ibid. 
39Elaine A. King, ?Art as Monster: A Conversation with Allora Calzadilla,? Sculpture Magazine, June 
2011, p.25. 
40 ?Press Release. I believe and Create in Vieques: Artists for Peace Enter the US Navy Restricted 
Zone in Vieques,? ?Vieques Libre!, August 28, 2000, http://www.peacehost.net/Vieques/latest.html. 
41 King, ?Art as Monster,? 25; and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ?1000 Words: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo 
Calzadilla,? ArtForum, March 1, 2005, https://www.artforum.com/print/200503/1000-words-jennifer-
allora-and-guillermo-calzadilla-8468. 
25 
 
 
Allora?s assertation that the duo ?are not activists.?42 By maintaining this distance 
from both direct activism and from the equation of the Puerto Rican island body with 
their own, they perhaps elude the political dangers of co-opting Puerto Rican 
experiences of oppression and resistance for commercial success and prestige. Indeed, 
the duo have exhibited globally and were selected as US representatives for the 2011 
Venice Biennale, which is, for some, the apex of artistic success.43 Nevertheless, a 
close examination of their work, and of their picturing of the island body (even if not 
their own), demonstrates a critical and anti-imperial engagement with hyperreal 
liminality. 
 In Under Discussion, De la Cruz Gaitan sits on the underside of the table as it 
floats on water, the four table legs protruding upwards like strange masts as a motor 
propels it through water. It is De la Cruz Gaitan who activates the rumbling motor, 
lifting the front edge of the table upwards like a speedboat. One shot depicts De la 
Cruz Gaitan's point of view, through the table legs, but most of the video is shot from 
a distance, alternating between shots of the land, the water, and De la Cruz Gaitan on 
the boat. Aerial shots survey the boat's wake through the water, bomb testing site 
craters, and leftover military structures. A close-up of De la Cruz Gaitan connects his 
gaze to the land and sea surveyed by the camera. 
For a moment in the film, he stands on top of the composite table-boat 
floating in the ocean, silhouetted by the bright sun (Fig. 12). The image articulates a 
power, an ownership, but his position is rendered absurd: he is atop a floating table. 
 
42 King, ?Art as Monster,? 24. 
43 No Puerto Rican-by-birth has ever represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. 
26 
 
 
As a metaphor, the table recalls the conference table, a site of discussion and 
negotiation and frequently used metaphorically in discourses of equity and inclusion 
(i.e., ?making room at the table? or ?voices at the table?). As a rhetorical device, the 
table acts as a line between the binary of who is and is not "at the table," who is and is 
not holding power. The character that De la Cruz Gaitan embodies is a stand-in for 
the Viequenses: De la Cruz Gaitan, at the time a student of Escuela de Artes Pl?sticas, 
San Juan, is the son of a Viequense fisherman and prominent leader of fisherman 
anti-base activists active in the 1970s.44 Occupying a liminal space through this 
hyperreal picturing of metaphor: he is not at or away from the table, he is under/over 
it. Under the table and on top of the boat: he is under discussion. Under the boat and 
on top of the table: water is under discussion. By attaching an absurd image of a 
table-boat, what this dual metaphor represents?the value of property over people and 
the systematic exclusion of Viequenses in the development of land/water use policies 
before and after the Navy's departure?can be understood as equally absurd. The 
island body?s occupation as both on and under speaks to the many ways in which he 
is dually involved and ignored in conversations on land/water use and sovereignty. It 
is this physical performance of metaphor, of the island body on/under the table, that 
becomes more real than the literal physical position of the Viequense island body. It 
pictures the island body?s liminal position between ?on? the land and ?under? 
occupation, a hyperreal picture that ?[effaces the] contradiction between real? (the 
 
44 Yates McKee, ?Wake, Vestige, Survival: Sustainability and the Politics of the Trace in Allora and 
Calzadilla?s Land Mark,? October, Vol. 133, Summer 2010, 20-48. 
27 
 
 
island body?s physical position) ?and the imaginary? (the island body?s metaphorical 
position).45  
Another significant shot in the video is of a bilingual sign marking a formerly 
occupied area of land now designated as a National Refuge (Fig. 13). It reads 
"BIENVENIDOS? (welcome), ?ABIERTO?. OPEN?. Por favor, ayudanos a 
proteger las plantas y los animales. Please help us protect the plants and animals." It 
proceeds with a list of prohibited and permitted uses of the space. The camera passes 
another sign that commands, ?No Traspase. Personal Autorizado Solamente. Peligro. 
Explosivos,? above two graphics?a skull and crossbones, and an exploding missile 
(Fig. 14). Below is the English translation: ?No Trespassing. Authorized Personnel 
Only. Danger. Explosives.? If the image of De La Cruz Gaitan on the table-boat 
constitutes a hyperreal visual rhetoric of juxtaposition to articulate the island body?s 
liminal position under discussions of occupation, then the juxtaposing images of these 
two bilingual signs constitute a hyperreal visual rhetoric out of the reproduction of 
rhetoric itself, articulating the island body?s liminal position under regulations of 
occupation. 
The signs? words, ?Welcome? and ?No Trespassing,? conflict not only in 
affect, but also in effect: the language prompts positive and negative response, 
respectively, and indicates land that is open and closed, safe and unsafe. The picturing 
of these two signs and their polar phrasings calls attention to how language creates 
and regulates liminal spaces through oppositional meanings and in the necessary 
space between words in a sentence or phrase. In the case of Vieques, the pictured 
 
45 Baudrillard, ?The Hyper-realism of Simulation,? 1049. 
28 
 
 
language simultaneously regulates the geographic island body and reproduces its 
liminality: once open to its inhabitants prior to the Navy occupation that closed much 
of the area, it is now both open and closed under strict regulation. Now a National 
Refuge, the land must be protected by the Viequenses, but in this regulated way, after 
decades of trying to protect it against sanctioned destruction. The juxtaposition 
between the two languages on each sign, English and Spanish, again articulates the 
liminal island body as neither US American nor Spanish (of its former colonizer) but 
instead existing between the two impacts of colonial powers without a surviving 
indigenous language to identify itself.46 Through such picturing of language, Allora & 
Calzadilla ask: who possesses the island body? Who regulates it? To whom is it open 
to? These questions are especially complicated when considering that these preserved 
areas and their beaches act as a major draw to US tourists and are no longer available 
to the Viequenses for agricultural, residential, or fishing uses. Furthermore, if such 
uses of land are regulated, then these regulations extend to the bodies who occupy the 
land. No definitive answers to these questions are reproduced in video by Allora & 
Calzadilla, because the answers are not exclusively "outsider" or "insider,? but rather 
something in between?thus, the necessary picturing of liminality. The discussion is 
not resolved, and Vieques remains in a liminal state.   
Allora & Calzadilla have concerned themselves with hyperreal picturing of 
liminality in many of their works, including two videos which center Viequense 
issues that, along with Under Discussion, are grouped in a series entitled Land Mark. 
Part of the series, the video Half Mast/Full Mast (2010) features performers taking on 
 
46 While some indigenous Ta?no language survives in Puerto Rico, it is considered extinct. 
29 
 
 
the form of a flag, their bodies stiffly extended from a flagpole in a feat of strength 
(Fig. 15). The hyperreal image created by a forced juxtaposition, human-flag?just 
like table-boat?speaks to the absurdity of a forced relationship between the US 
military and Puerto Rico and of the liminal state itself, placed (like the hyphen that 
each dual sign contains) between sovereignty and occupation. In the island bodies in 
Under Discussion?De La Cruz Gaitan?s character and the land surveyed?and in the 
picturing of island bodies as inanimate flags that mark land-possession in Half 
Mast/Full Mast, meaning is formed out of the hyperreality of liminality that each 
video describes. For Allora & Calzadilla, the line between island body as human and 
as geographic is effaced. When land is suspended in a liminal state between sovereign 
and not, as these works demonstrate, their liminality is also experienced by the human 
island body. 
?Today, reality itself is hyperrealistic,? Baudrillard argues. ?Now, the whole 
of everyday political, social, historical, economic reality is incorporated into the 
simulative dimension of hyperrealism; we already live out the ?aesthetic? 
hallucination of reality.?47 The political, social, historical, and economic realities 
faced by the island-body under US occupation may indeed seem like a hallucination 
of reality, realities that continually contest, challenge, and threaten the island body. Is 
there, then, not a better way to articulate such an existence than by activating its 
hyperreal qualities, blurring the reality of islands and bodies on video with the 
imaginary, or more accurately the nightmarish endurance of occupation? 
 
 
47 Baudrillard, ?The Hyper-realism of Simulation,? 1050. 
30 
 
 
(Re)possessing Island Bodies 
 
Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, works primarily in 
film and video. She has exhibited solo shows in San Juan, San Francisco, Los 
Angeles, London, and Miami, and in important group exhibitions such as Bienal del 
Caribe at Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (2003), 
Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum (2007), and the 
Trienal Poli/Gr?fica de San Juan (2011). Her work, Post-Military Cinema (2014), is 
an 11-minute-long digital color video filmed at a shuttered movie theater on a former 
military base in Puerto Rico. Beginning with the sights and sounds of a young forest 
outside of the theater, Santiago Mu?oz quietly films the degrading structure, the 
surrounding natural life, and the visual markings of ten years of sunlight, rain, and 
humidity on the undisturbed site. The video closes with a long hand-held take as 
Santiago Mu?oz leaves the site on foot. With a keen attention to the power of 
perspective, Santiago Mu?oz notes that ?the aerial view is the preferred 
representational mode of the US Navy,? one reflected in the hundreds of aerial 
photographs of Puerto Rico produced by the US during their occupation.48 ?The 
military view, and the reproduction of this view in its transparency, from the air, is a 
view of domination,? she continues. ?To see the future of the place, rather than the 
ruin of the military past, one must look from ground level, let the forest grow back, 
block the transparency, collapse, misunderstand, constantly change position.?49 
 
48 Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz, ?I am going to describe a ritual,? Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz: A Universe of 
Fragile Mirrors, ed. Cherry Pickman (Miami: P?rez Art Museum Miami, 2016), 39.  
49 Ibid., 39-40. 
31 
 
 
Offering visual transparency, this aerial view of domination can be traced back to the 
aerial perspective in mapping. An integral practice in the formation of empire, as 
when European marine forces competed to claim possession of Caribbean islands, the 
practice of mapping implicates the dominant aerial view in the act of taking 
possession by force.50 Santiago Mu?oz in Post-Military Cinema offers another way of 
looking at the land (i.e., on foot, on ground level) that reflects a repossession. 
 While Allora & Calzadilla picture the hyperreal liminality of post-military 
occupation through a reproduction of domination (i.e., the aerial view) to comment on 
the ongoing dispossession of Puerto Rican land, Santiago Mu?oz pictures the 
liminality of post-military occupation through images taken from the ground level to 
witness the slow process of repossession. In Under Discussion, the combination of 
aerial and on-water cinematography reproduces the perspective of both maps and 
seafaring imperial ships. Such a picturing suspends the dominating military-
occupation in perpetuity to illustrate how, despite the intervening departure of the 
U.S. military, the land is not yet fully returned to or repossessed by the Viequense. 
Santiago Mu?oz imagines another way of looking. She produces a view from within 
the island rather than (a reproduction of) an external view projected onto the island. 
Having established how the island body under US imperialism is pictured as liminal 
and hyperreal, I now will demonstrate how the liminal, hyperreal island body can be 
 
50 Author and cartographer Denis Wood makes the argument that maps have the ?ability to link the 
territory with what comes with it,? which made it crucially successful in the expansion of European 
Empire. Denis Wood and John Fels, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992); and 
Angela Sutton and Charlton W. Yingling argue that through maps, Europe visualized a commodified 
and exoticized Caribbean which in turn naturalized imperialism. Angela Sutton and Charlton W. 
Yingling, ?Projections of Desire and Design in Early Modern Caribbean Maps,? The Historical 
Journal 63, no. 4 (2020): 789?810. 
32 
 
 
pictured as repossessing. Through an examination of Post-Military Cinema?s sonic 
qualities; slow narrative time; subversion of the desiring gaze; and attention to nature 
as an agent of repossession, I present the work as witness to the island body?s charged 
and imminent resistance. 
Visible from Vieques across the Pasaje de Vieques (a body of water between 
Vieques and Puerto Rico) is Roosevelt Roads, a decommissioned naval station and 
the location for Post-Military Cinema. During WWII, Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered 
its creation, an act that dispossessed 4,000 residents of their land and annexed half of 
the municipality of Ceiba.51 It would become the largest US navy base in the world 
by land mass, spanning 8,500 acres in Ceiba, hundreds of acres from the abutting 
coastline of the Naguabo municipality, and the 26,000 acres acquired in Vieques (Fig. 
2).52 Whereas weapons testing took place in Vieques, Roosevelt Roads hosted nuclear 
submarines in its harbor, developed extensive base infrastructure, and constructed a 
quintessential US-style suburb for military families.53 To this day, approximately 17 
years after its closing following the Vieques protests, the remains of distinctly 
American base architecture?baseball field stands, a golf course, a K-12 school?are 
being slowly swallowed by indigenous tropical plant life (Fig. 16, 17). 
Santiago Mu?oz documents nature?s process of repossessing this previously 
occupied land in Post-Military Cinema. She turns her camera onto, or into the now 
closed El Coqui Theater. Her approach effectively turns the cinema inside-out, 
 
51 D?borah Berman Santana, ?Struggles for Ex-Base Lands in Puerto Rico,? Peace Review 22, no. 2 
(2010): p.159, https://doi.org/10.1080/10402651003751438. 
52 Ibid. 
53 While weapons testing did not take place in Ceiba, toxic destruction was still present. For example, 
Santana?s own uncle was one of several Roosevelt Roads employees who died from rare diseases after 
working with toxic materials. Ibid. 
33 
 
 
turning the exterior of the theater (i.e., the geographic island body) into the cinematic 
event. Santiago Mu?oz begins from within El Coqui Theater, her camera turned 
towards the theater doors as they open onto the exterior theater of a young forest 
growing around and into El Coqui (Fig. 18, 19). Ten years old, the forest is already 
dense and full of life.54 Within the first seconds of the film, coquis?small frogs 
indigenous to the island and emblems of Puerto Rico and its culture?produce a 
recognizable chorus (?khoh-KEE?) that emanates from the forest as afternoon light 
streams through the cracks of the cinema doors. As a preview to the hyperreal ?Coqui 
Theater,? (i.e., the forest as the cinema and the coquis as its score) the sound bleeds 
into the building, reminiscent of late-arriving audiences opening the doors to a film 
already underway, spilling sound into the lobby space.  
Here, Santiago Mu?oz again departs from an earlier strategy of Allora & 
Calzadilla. Their video Returning of a Sound (2004; from the Land Mark series) 
features the activist Homar as he drives a motorcycle with a trumpet attached to its 
muffler through previously occupied land in Vieques (Fig. 20).55  The vehicle 
produces an outrageous sound that the artists conceived as a sonic reclamation of the 
land much like bygone musical accompaniments to military processions. Visiting 
these areas of the former base takes one out of the way of daily life in Vieques, over 
10 miles away from the small town of Isabel Segunda, and via dirt roads ridden with 
potholes that are best handled by 4x4 vehicles (Fig. 21). The aural experience of 
penetrating as far into the base area as Homar, or as Santiago Mu?oz, is that of a quiet 
 
54 The base was closed in 2004, and Post-Military Cinema completed in 2014. 
55 King, Art as Monster, 24. 
34 
 
 
cacophony of natural sounds: birds, breeze, and if one steps into one of vacated 
buildings, bats clicking above. The explosion of bombs were once so loud that they 
would travel across the other side of Vieques, but now the quiet sounds of natural life 
can only be heard. Yet, in Returning of a Sound the triumphant sound of the trumpet-
muffler disrupts the quiet with a proclamation of repossession. Conversely, the coquis 
and other natural noises present in Post-Military Cinema?s soundtrack announce a 
space already enacting a form of return, reclamation, and repossession unto itself. 
Santiago Mu?oz quietly steps into a cinema already underway as the camera 
moves from her ?lobby? (the theater interior) to just outside the theater doors. Mu?oz 
proceeds to capture images of the young forest, leaves rustling in the breeze after a 
light rain, using the architecture of El Coqui Theater to frame images of the trees. The 
theater?s roof line cuts across her view and she lingers on a partially obstructed forest 
through propped open theater doors (Fig. 22). She takes in a detailed, close-up view 
of a swaying branch against a backdrop of bokeh produced by the few spots of lights 
through the forest, the product of its densely-packed canopy (Fig. 23). These 
internally framed compositions of the land and foregrounded details place Post-
Military Cinema in dialogue with some of the earliest well-known landscapes of 
Puerto Rico, notably those of Francisco Oller y Cestero. 
Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833-1917) is well known as Puerto Rico?s second 
earliest most successful painter after Jos? Campeche y Jord?n (1751-1809). Like 
Campeche, Oller mastered a European style, infusing it with his unique Puerto Rican 
perspective. A member of the well-known circle of impressionists, he married an 
imported painterly technique with his Caribbean eye in a number of plantation 
35 
 
 
landscapes.56 Rendered with characteristic loose brushwork, the impressionist effect 
on such scenes as Hacienda La Fortuna (1885) is generative of a proto-cinema 
antecedent to Post-Military Cinema (Fig. 24).57 Both Oller?s and Santiago Mu?oz?s 
narrative time unfolds slowly, unlike the fixed scenes of 19th century realism 
predating impressionism. Pictured in Hacienda La Fortuna are a few enslaved 
laborers dressed in white, oxen pulling a cart, and the yellow/green plain of cut sugar 
cane in the lower third of the composition. Further contributing to the sense of slow 
cinematic time is the sparse white mist floating above the field, the diffused clouds 
unfurling in the sky, and the soft plume of smoke arising from the sugar mill?s stack. 
In Post-Military Cinema, Santiago Mu?oz?s fixed, lingering camera sets a leisurely 
pace of events on screen. Outside of El Coqui Theater, she films a beekeeper lighting 
kindling for a smoker, a device used to blow smoke into the hive (Fig. 25). This 
smoke masks attack pheromones, released by bees when threatened, and hinders their 
ability to alert the hive of danger. Sounds of crackling fire precede the buzzing of the 
hive; the beekeeper puffs smoke into the colony that made its way through the cracks 
of the building. No doubt, Santiago Mu?oz plays on the idea of colony: where once 
 
56 ?Forced labor camps? more accurately reflects the sites pictured in such landscapes, but to maintain 
clarity in my reference to the genre of painting Oller produces I use ?plantation landscapes? here.  
57 As Edward J. Sullivan, citing Jennifer Raab, demonstrates, the works of US American painter, 
Frederic Church (1826-1900) function in the same manner. Church filled landscapes of the Caribbean 
and South American with so much detail that they also acted as an early form of cinema for its 
audiences. The large-scale paintings attracted masses of US Americans who purchased tickets to see 
them, and were encouraged to view through opera glasses, taking in the detailed flora one by one. 
Church?s details produce a hyperreal image and, in its consumable surplus, echo the concurrent US 
notion manifest destiny that fueled imperial expansion: the endless resources of the natural world are 
God?s gift to the white, US American man. It is worth noting that Church?s works, preceding the 
annexation of Puerto Rico by the US (and Oller?s plantation landscapes) would have prepared US 
audiences to view the island with a consuming, possessive gaze of desire. Edward J. Sullivan, 
?Francisco Oller and the Worlds of the Caribbean,? in From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco 
Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), 31. 
36 
 
 
outsider (human) colonists occupied this space, the most natural of (apian) inhabitants 
have unapologetically moved in. Achieving the same effect as Oller?s clouds, mist, 
and smoke, Mu?oz here holds her camera on the billowing smoke rising away 
through the trees, highlighting the streams of light making their way through the 
vegetation. With a focus on the movements of natural elements (clouds, smoke, and 
light), the temporal qualities of both Hacienda La Fortuna and Post-Military Cinema 
challenge the viewer to decelerate in accordance with the slow-time of nature. 
While the two temporally distant artists play with time in similar ways, their 
achieved effects vary greatly. Latin America art history specialist Edward J. Sullivan 
writes of Oller?s role in picturing ?landscapes of desire? that portray the land 
resources that drew the eye of imperial stakeholders and softened the view of labor 
conditions.58 One such landscape of desire is Oller?s Hacienda Aurora (1898-99), 
painted during the Spanish-American war and just before the US became Puerto 
Rico?s second colonizer (Fig. 26). Sullivan contends that that it evokes an 
?unmistakable air of melancholy? not nostalgia for the old order, but perhaps a 
certain uneasiness about what is to come with new political and social circumstances 
on the island.?59 Indeed, Oller?s wide view, sparsely populated with figures of 
enslaved workers, depicts the decline of the sugar industry in the years just before 
slavery was outlawed in Puerto Rico and romanticizes the period before transition by 
suspending it in slow time. In contrast, Santiago Mu?oz tightens her frame so that the 
image is as densely populated as the forest surrounding El Coqui. There is no 
 
58 Edward J. Sullivan, ?Landscapes of Desire: The Land as Resource in the Caribbean,? in Picturing 
the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra Del Fuego to the Arctic (Toronto: Art Gallery of 
Ontario, 2015), pp. 145-153. 
59 Ibid., 151. 
37 
 
 
sweeping emptiness in the frame to foster a sense of void and loss. In doing so, 
Santiago Mu?oz resists any such connection to melancholy or uneasiness about what 
is to come and, moreover, determinedly does not seek to soften the damages of the 
past through her picturing of decay. 
With the same assured indifference of the trees that surround the theater, 
Mu?oz depicts the beauty of both growth and decay. In a quasi-screenplay for Post-
Military Cinema, she writes: 
?The devastation of the land? and military retreat have created opportunities 
to observe [forest] growth? The tropical heat and humidity helps life grow 
faster, denser? there is no feeling of a new balance, of stillness, or of silence. 
It is a raging battle, a din, moving forward into the future through 
reproduction, rot, and death? There are large cotton trees growing closer to 
the ocean. They are exuberant and overgrown now; useless to that old 
economy and its society. This unreachable cotton is beautiful? All of this 
without exception is part of the image and the event. It is on the threshold of 
disintegration and expansion. It is impossible to tell where the event or the 
image ends. The threshold is always in motion.? 60 
Both Santiago Mu?oz?s script and video resist a treatment of transition that, like 
Oller?s, replicates a human understanding of time that is episodic. Post-Military 
Cinema?s slow narrative time does not paint a pastoral picture like that of Oller?s 
haciendas (?of a new balance, of stillness, or of silence?). Rather, she honors the 
 
60 Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz, ?A Natural History of One Frame of Film,? Beatriz Santiago Mu?oz: A 
Universe of Fragile Mirrors, ed. Cherry Pickman (Miami: P?rez Art Museum Miami, 2016), 139-140. 
38 
 
 
steady slowness of moments?a spider tenderly perched on its web, rusted debris on 
the forest floor?to cultivate a sensibility less aligned with historical chapters and 
more with ongoing cosmological evolution: ?a raging battle, a din, moving forward 
into the future through reproduction, rot, and death.?61 Whereas Oller uses slow 
cinematic time to celebrate the land?s resources and to mourn the possibility of a 
change in ownership, Mu?oz?s slow time pictures landscape that exists as something 
other than property, denying the imperial impulse to fix and to own and thriving 
instead beyond the landscape of desire. Here, the activity of existence is a reclamation 
and repossession of the land by the land. If Oller?s reproduction of the real portrays 
an idealized island body in the service of empire, Santiago Mu?oz subverts such 
realism through hyperrealism, animating the land to reveal its own pre-existing 
animation, to picture the island body?s moving threshold of repossession.  
Santiago Mu?oz?s camera lingers the longest on light, dappled by the dense 
forest and projected onto the exterior and interior walls, cement floor, and remaining 
blue seats of El Coqui Theater (Fig. 27). With its doors propped open, the theater 
itself becomes a screen onto which a soft light is projected, filtered by branches and 
leaves that rustle and sway to make the light and shadows dance for the interval (45-
minutes to an hour) which the light is angled in such a way as to reach the theater?s 
interior.62 Where military-base residents once occupied the cinema seats, daylight 
projects the shadows of a growing Puerto Rican forest?now, a cinema made by the 
land, for the land. In this cinema, there is no narrative arc, only movement and 
 
61 Ibid., 139. 
62 Ibid., 137. 
39 
 
 
change. The film departs from the hyperreal works of Parisian photographers Yves 
Marchand (b.1981) and Romain Meffre (b.1987), for example, which picture interiors 
of derelict and repurposed theaters of North America (Fig. 28). These images are lush 
with detail but nevertheless visually consumable because they are fixed in one static 
photograph employing a deep depth of field. Santiago Mu?oz resists reproducing a 
spectacle of ruin for the desiring gaze through tighter framing and shorter depth of 
field. While Marchand and Meffre offer the viewer the chance to visually possess the 
entirety of the space, fixing the image in time even if in the process of decay, 
Santiago Mu?oz denies the viewer such totality, and thus, of possession. She centers 
the repossessing event?the slow but raging takeover of the former building by the 
forest vegetation?in an image that she imagines created by the forest itself. In the 
dappled light projections onto the building, the forest (island body) casts an image of 
itself outside of the possessing, consuming, imperial, and human gaze.  
Much like the aforementioned landscape of desire, the consuming gaze is 
reproduced by a cinema of desire in works such as Romance Tropical (1934) (Fig. 
29). The first Puerto Rican feature-length film with sound, it was thought to be lost 
for 80 years but was miraculously found in the collections of the University of 
California Los Angeles Film & Television Archive in 2017. Desire is at the center of 
its Hollywood-style narrative?desire for hidden treasure typical of Caribbean pirate 
tales and no less, for whiteness in its portrayal of female romantic desirability. The 
desirability of these objects?riches and whiteness?is entrenched in the realistic 
depictions of events, however fantastical, to produce a believable, entertaining 
narrative that requires the viewers to adopt the desires of the protagonist for their 
40 
 
 
own.63 Again, Santiago Mu?oz resists such trappings of a cinema of desire. Her 
lingering close ups of forest vegetation, soundscape of coquis and bees, and play with 
abstracted light deny the viewer narrative escapism, present even in conventional 
documentary film, in the service of a hyperreal picturing that presents the 
repossession-by-forest as more real than the real.   
On location at El Coqui Theater, Santiago Mu?oz found a piece of film, 
presumably the foot-long piece of celluloid pictured in Post-Military Cinema strewn 
across the forest floor (Fig. 30).64 After scanning the set of eighty frames of 35mm 
film, the artist printed ten photographs from the material, comprising the work 
entitled 10 years (2014) (Fig. 31). Pictured are not only the remnants of the original 
images?a fighter pilot in an oxygen mask, Navy helicopters, a submarine, and a 
fighter jet?but layers of alterations produced by the environment?spotty bits of 
purplish lichen, splotches of green, and an immeasurable number of scratches that 
create bright white gashes and marks across each frame. Santiago Mu?oz speculates 
that the film would have originally been used as a leader for the feature films shown 
at El Coqui or test film for the projectionist. Now, however, these military-produced 
images have been transformed by ten years of light and natural elements, repossessed 
by the forest as their new auteur. The human is removed by the island: its rain, 
sediment, leaves, fungus, and lichen have slowly obscured the human?s image on 
celluloid, turning it into the geographic island body?s self-portrait. Santiago  Mu?oz?s 
landscape here becomes an agent of repossession. In Post-Military Cinema, the 
 
63 Film scholar Laura Mulvey argues that the cinema camera reproduces the desiring male gaze which 
is adopted by viewers regardless of gender. Mulvey, ?Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,? Screen 
16, no. 3 (January 1975): pp. 6-18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. 
64 Santiago Mu?oz, ?A Natural History.? 
41 
 
 
landscape is not a backdrop for action, but the cinematographer, protagonist, and 
audience at once, and through such active roles it demonstrates the potential energy of 
resistance and repossession stored in the liminal island body. Santiago Mu?oz 
pictures the dispossession of Puerto Rican land by US forces and the repossession of 
the island by the body of land itself in a narrative that, via transnational connections, 
threatens the ideologies behind the occupational force.  
 
  
42 
 
 
Epilogue: Binaries and Borders 
 
Santiago Mu?oz pictures the liminality of the (geographic) island body in an 
act of repossession. Yamashiro?s and Allora & Calzadilla?s picturing of liminality is 
just as engaged in resistance through their powerful articulations of an enduring 
island body. Liminality, in each case, serves as an effective tool to resist imperial and 
essentializing categorizations, and the binary-focused Western gaze that so often 
views the ?other? as a subject to dominate. Such categorizations influenced by this 
Western vision include the occupied-occupier dichotomy, the development of the 
notion of race as a hierarchical system through which to subjugate the ?other;? and 
the establishment of land ownership and regulation in areas where land had not 
previously been conceived of as property. It is in this liminal space and through the 
picturing of liminality that the island body can resist imperially imposed 
categorizations of ?occupied,? ?other,? and ?owned.? 
This picturing of liminality can be extended to a larger context indirectly 
addressed by these works: the Cold War?the hostile tension between the US-led 
Western Bloc and Soviet-led Eastern Bloc in which capitalism and communism 
emerged as oppositional forces. The Cold War was the powerful driver for US global 
domination post-World War II. Immerwahr?s chosen descriptors??Greater United 
States,? a ?hidden empire??remind us of what has resulted from this desire for 
global domination: a nation whose military (and economic and political) presence has 
expanded US borders while simultaneously rendering them invisible.  Seaweed 
Woman, Under Discussion, and Post-Military Cinema connect two islands out of 
many in this ?Greater United States? as liminal spaces created by US occupation. The 
43 
 
 
picturing of liminality enables the artist to articulate the in-betweenness of islands 
under US occupation and bridges the waters that separate their geographic locations 
through the documentation of comparable experiences. 
In turn, this model can be applied to critique the Cold War ideologies that 
gave birth to these occupations in the first place. Three decades after the Fall of the 
Wall, Cold War ideologies still color US relations with and military positions in 
Japan, Puerto Rico, and many other countries and territories. The US Forces Japan's 
highly propagandist "mission video" refers to Japan as the region "where the contest 
between free and repressive visions of the future will be decided" as images of a 
Japanese shopping center and flashes of stock market symbols play over the words 
"free" and images of communist North Korean military processions play over the 
word "repressive."65 In February 2022, Russia?s President Vladimir Putin proved that 
he has every intention of building back the nation to its former Soviet-era footing 
with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In Global Art and the Cold War, John J. Curley 
explains how the binary between Cold War political forces was upheld in art 
historical discourse. While this discourse characterized abstract expressionism and 
social realism as emblems of East and West ideologies, it also created a byproduct: an 
un-articulated liminal space in which many artists traveled and from which they 
critiqued the very ideologies attached to them by critics and art historians.66 Indeed, 
the enforcement of a binary conception of style, while valuable to the Cold War 
powers in their dissemination of ideological propaganda, was threatened by the 
 
65 The Mission of US Forces Japan, US Forces, Japan, 2019, https://www.usfj.mil/. 
66 John J. Curley, Global Art and the Cold War (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2019). 
44 
 
 
liminal by-product. This residual and subversive liminality, as pictured by 
Yamashiro, Allora & Calzadilla, and Santiago Mu?oz, threatens US imperial 
ideology by exposing the absurdity of the binary and the US position therein. The 
liminal Okinawans and Viequenses are only threatening if they reveal themselves. 
The picturing of the liminal island body in these works participates in the 
transnational resistance of imperialism through the meaning-formations they produce. 
What does such a powerful liminality mean for the future of American art? 
The liminal island body under US imperialism not only speaks to the conditions 
imposed by the US, but also offers a rounding-out of a limited, one-sided history 
produced within the US. Should the canon of American art be limited to artists born 
or working in the US? Or might it be significantly enriched by art that is about the US 
and from positionalities created by the US? One can envision a ?liminalization? of the 
discipline?s borders in the same way that liminal island bodies challenge the borders 
of the nation (beyond the continental US). The liminalization of American art 
promises a non-teleological approach to art history?one that would not abandon 
oppressions the field has historically enabled and profited from. It would instead 
integrate the field?s conditions and (Western, binary) ideologies as an impetus for the 
repossession of the genre. Best articulated by scholar Sherrie L. Baver, ?peace is 
more than the end of bombing,? and as she argues, it is achieved through organized 
collective resistance.67 Similarly, an expansive history of American art necessitates 
 
67 Sherrie L. Baver, ??Peace Is More Than the End of Bombing? The Second Stage of the Vieques 
Struggle,? Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 1 (January 2006): pp. 102-115, 
https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x05283520. 
45 
 
 
more than just an end of violence, it requires a collective and transnational process of 
continued repossession by those whom it has dispossessed. 
 
 
 
 
46 
 
 
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