Rubin presents “El Museo Nacional de lo que queda” in partnership with Beta-Local, a non-profit dedicated to facilitating time and space for artistic practices in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
Professor Jon Rubin debuted the newest version of his The National Museum project, first launched in Pittsburgh in 2023, now in Puerto Rico, titled “El Museo Nacional de lo que queda (National Museum of What Remains).”
Together with non-profit Beta-Local, this version focuses on the act of paying attention to historical traces: “In Puerto Rico there is often a sense of living in a constant present which, one could argue, denies the possibility of understanding our pasts. Within this condition of disarticulated narrative, we do not propose a totalizing history, nor a nostalgic position toward what has been lost. Instead, we begin from emancipatory readings of traces, cracks, and fissures, in short, in the face of apparent absence, we propose a constellation of presences.”
The project in Puerto Rico began with ethnopaleobotanist Jaime Pagán Jiménez, focusing on the Marunguey, one of the oldest plants in the Caribbean. The Marunguey serves as a witness to the region’s unfolding and a guardian of the forests, providing a lens through which to inhabit and think about the archipelago across different historical scales.
The project will run through this summer and features a series of programs, including a publication, a radio station, and a nursery. For more information, visit national-museum.org.