NADA New York 2025

Verso de liquen & Estoy aquí by Javier Orfón are concrete poems inspired by his memories and experiences as a speleologist. They continue to expand the research-based work that originated in the Guajataca forest northwest of Puerto Rico for Bientevéo. This installation was included in the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “No Existe un mundo poshuracán.”
In this way, Orfón records his observations about these contexts’ nature, anthropology, and archaeology, highlighting Taino petroglyphs, overlaying photo transfers of etched drawings and phrases on leaves from the cupey tree on wood slabs of Pterocarpus indicus and teak (Tectona grandis).
Orfon’s choice of materials highlights and decolonizes Europeans’ associations with the natural resources found in their colonial holdings in the Atlantic and Pacific.
The cupey tree is a type of tropical Ficus from the Caribbean. The first Europeans to arrive in the Caribbean used the cupey leaves to write. Pterocarpus indicus and teak are woods that have been in demand for cabinet-making and high-class furniture, making their existence in the wild precarious. Subpopulations have significantly declined in the wild because of overexploitation, and sometimes illegal exploitation, of the timber, as well as from increasing general habitat loss.