In a rather eclectic studio visit with artist and cultural worker, Shey Rivera Ríos, we talked about PCL, Studio Loba, performance and all things art. Read more to learn about their past and upcoming work at the Lab!
What does performance mean to you?
Performance is very essential to my practice and one of my core mediums. There’s something really powerful about exploring the body and wisdom that don’t come from the mind, but from ancestral knowledge or the things we carry with us- whether it’s trauma or liberation. I think performance allows us to be in presence with people and create different sets of ways that we communicate with one another. There’s something healing when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to explore ritual and grief. Performance is a framework for us to create intimacy with consent and also to create different forms of storytelling that don’t rely on traditional Western forms. That said, I love the work of Marina Abrahamović and other artists who are courageous and bold in different ways, but the performance that I do is meant for healing and tapping into cultural lineage. So, I see performance as a very powerful way of bringing community together, outside of its traditional way of presenting through museums or institutions.
How are you activating/planning to activate your PCL site- Former Columbus Square?
We commenced the work for the Lab a year ago (2024) with a land blessing event that brought culture bearers and residents from the neighborhood together to make offerings of blessings, stories, songs and drums. This gathering started our activations on the site that formerly used to hold a Christopher Columbus statue. A few weeks later, I held an event titled, ‘Culture Jam,’ with a very important organization, Sister Fire, who does work around reproductive and economic justice. We used theater techniques and storytelling to think about various questions such as: How is our community facing economic injustice? And how can we share the stories to think about solutions collectively?
More recently, we had another event, ‘Museo de las Ancestras’, in partnership with Arte Latino New England (ALNE). ALNE is an arts-based organization that houses costumes and props, and creates theater and community events. We selected a list of powerful women from history who are relevant to the communities that live in Elmwood and whom we want to commemorate. We created monologues, designed performances to become incarnations of these Ancestras, and welcomed the community with food and activities. We held our public open rehearsal as an indoor event at Hope Artist Village, in the studios held by ALNE, The Village Theater, and Caribbean Heritage Center. We have also filmed each monologue to be presented in a digital portal. We now prepare to present Museo de las Ancestras at the former Columbus Square on Saturday September 27, as our cultural intervention upon this contested site.
Lastly, we will close the year (2025) with an event where all the three artists at the site- Valerie Tutson, Lu Heintz and I, will come together (Sun Oct 13), the day before Indigenous Peoples Day, to have community, celebration, performances, and a screening. We will continue the work to create ways for the people of Providence to think differently about the histories held in this site, interrupt celebrations of settler-colonial stories of conquest, and center community storytelling as commemoration because that is what leads to cultural healing and connection.
What are our stories of today and what do we want to pass on? What are the learnings that we can harness while centering beauty? We need joy and energy at this time more than ever before, and art brings cultural repair. So what better way than to celebrate community gatherings in this time and space.
What is your relationship to the site?
My assigned site, the former Columbus Square, is on 24 Reservoir Ave, in the neighborhood of Elmwood, which is in the South Side of Providence, Rhode Island. I have lived in a lot of places in Providence including the South Side, and that area in particular is very diverse with people from Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cambodia, Laos, South America, Mashapaug, Narragansett, and more. I lived in this part of the city when the Christopher Columbus’ statue was taken down in 2020 during the pandemic. There was joy and celebration because it was a moment of recognition of colonial harm faced by a lot of our communities. But it was also very contentious. Some people drove by, booing and throwing things because the Italian community feels very connected to the story of Christopher Columbus. I chose this site when I applied for the lab because I wanted to grapple with the complicated tensions of the site and its story. I’m a Taino descendant, a person from Puerto Rico– I’m Boricua. Taino were the ones to discover Columbus and we often get left out of discussions about the narratives of discovery of this land.
So for me this was a space of potential, and after the statue got taken down there were a lot of conversations around what to do with the statue. I remember thinking about the space that was left empty, and how that needed community repair and conversation. When PCL was launched, it was the perfect opportunity to talk about that empty space and its narrative. In Providence specifically, this is a place of so many intersections: the history transatlantic slave trade, various people and communities seeking asylum, and the people who have been here on this land for a long time. This makes it crucial to rethink how we utilize and steward this land. The Mashapaug tribe, for example, continues to honor the Mashapaug Pond and convene there. Taino descendants have convened there as well. So this site is a special one for me.
The project that I'm trying to do in this space is to welcome people into thinking about cultural repair, not from an intellectual point of view, but from the heart, and activate the space by weaving stories together. We were handed a story, but we also have agency to think about what are the stories that we want to preserve and continue to move into the future.
Tell us about the activity book that you’re creating for PCL.
It felt really important to create something of a learning tool that families, young people and educators could use to talk about commemoration, and engage younger people. Performance is the ephemeral part of my work. The gatherings are important to build embodiment and gather community. But I’ve also been creating an activity book with Watson Creative Consulting, a team that specializes in children’s media, alongwith designer Ruchika Nambiar. The activity book will be short, around 10 pages. I developed these characters, Sol and Luna, two Taino children who are sentinels and time travelers. They guide the reader with the intention of gathering stories of how the people of Providence commemorate culture. The activities invite children to think about a number of ways we commemorate in our day-to-day, from food and banner making, to symbols, and a cabinet of stories. This activity book will be printed and distributed in schools, nonprofits, and youth programs for free. This is the second time that I am leading the creation of a youth-focused coloring/activity book. The first time was with support from the Department of Health to create a bilingual coloring book called, Mi Gente Siempre Responde, as part of COVID-19 health advocacy in 2021. It was very well received with 1,000 copies distributed to families. I’m looking forward to seeing the joy and impact of the Commemoration as a Storytelling activity book now.
So this isn’t the first time that you’re making a book! Tell us about your past projects.
The first book that I ever wrote and published is, Los Buitres. It’s a poetry book in Spanish that was inspired by vultures, nature, land, alchemy and transformation. My second book was a short novella titled, ‘Naty and my Chaotic Stench,’ which is a magic realist short story of a young person who has this smell that doesn’t go away, and they have to go to different spiritual healers to get rid of it. It’s a coming of age story. And lastly, Tierra Futura: Submerged archives of Boricua futurity was my RISD Master’s research thesis in the Global Arts and Cultures program. It’s an analysis of the jíbaro, or the farm worker, and its connection with national identity. The book talks about assimilation and occupation, and invites artists to think about what decolonial storytelling is and how to craft stories of futurity, outside of the U.S. occupation. It is a container for everything from grief to land and storytelling. I’ll make it available soon, because I’m excited to share.
Your work has a lot of recurring symbolism, like the banana flower. What is its significance?
To me, the banana or plantain flower is an ancestor. The plantain tree, plátano, is a very important plant in Boriken, as well as in various Caribbean cultures. It gives us sustenance. It is an immigrant plant, not native to the Caribbean, yet it has become so important to the culture. My most recent artwork features the banana plant, and I think about their connection to land and the immense knowledge that they hold. The plátano flowers, to me, are ancestral portals of futurity. I connect them with Afro and Indigenous futurisms, and I imagine realities where, to touch them means to gain wisdom and power. I also think about the in-between space of the experience of living as part of a diaspora- the betweenness of where I live (the U.S.) and where I was born (Boriken), of cultures, language, race, and gender. Many of us have this double relationship to land where we’ve had to leave our homes of origin but are still connected to them. The plátano flower symbol helps me create a sense of home through nurturing and embodiment, food and sustenance, and it’s playful to think about that in a futurist way. I love science fiction, and in that spirit I ask, what would it look like if we had the plátano ancestors in the future and they help us move through our present moments?
You also work with GIFs. Tell us about them in light of your creative practice.
During the 2020 pandemic, I was reflecting a lot on Puerto Rican liberation through digital media. I started drafting animated GIFs on Instagram and developing them into full gifs and animations. This includes a range of hand drawn collages, digital photographs, collaged animations and gold-painted annotations. “TuRumba” is a series of 8-10 animated works as a commentary on Puerto Rican struggle and liberation. A work titled, Jíbaro features farm workers and UFOs. I think there’s something about growing up in a rural place where you can find magic and sci-fi in ways you don’t expect. I come from a family of jíbaros or Boricua farm workers, and the mythologies around the secrets of the land always attracted me. I play with religious iconography and mysteries that have existed as family and land lore. I also work with symbols of feminine power and the feminine unknown. I also doodle and annotate images of Puerto Rican icons to pay them a tribute, like Lolita LeBron, a nationalist liberator- right now, she is a powerful symbol in our generation, especially as the women’s liberation and land sovereignty movements have risen. I like bright colors and fierce beauty. That’s something that I’m often leaning into, especially in relation to my work with PCL and in thinking about the ways in which we commemorate using beauty to interrupt public space. There is beauty in passing our community stories into the future.
What is Studio Loba?
Studio Loba is a production house and consulting firm created from my community practice. It’s the vessel I use to hold community projects, with a focus on artist cohorts, community activations, workshops for artists, and consulting for city planning and community-led design. It officially launched in 2022, as an artist-run company. My PCL work is also held by this lovely vessel of collaboration called Studio Loba.
Learn more about Shey here and follow the PCL Instagram to see more from our Studio Visit series!