La Jornada: The MCA of Chicago recreates the power of the rebellious language of Caribbean rhythms

Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago until September 20, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, the exhibition, which will travel to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in the spring of 2027, is committed to expanding the boundaries of art history. With solid academic research and the work of 40 artists, the exhibition incorporates historically marginalized genres and recognizes that contemporary creativity was also forged in the peripheries, where the performativity of working class masculinities – their search for humanity in the face of exclusion – was intertwined with black, feminist and cultural traditions. queer in order to transform the aesthetics and social fabric of the Caribbean and its diaspora.

The voice of the people

The genealogy of reggaeton begins in Jamaica: since the 50s, the sound systems – handcrafted mobile discos installed in streets, yards and vacant lots – shaped the popular culture from which dancehall would be born. They were towering towers of speaker boxes, generators, amplifiers and turntables, hand-assembled from plywood in true style. do it yourself (do it yourself), and oriented towards the audience to literally get them into the sound, letting the bass hit the bodies like a physical pulse.

Described as the “voice of the people,” these infrastructures were much more than music equipment: they supported a performance collective that allowed marginalized subjects to claim radical visibility.

In the 80s, this tradition arrived in Panama, a musical bridge to the rest of the Caribbean. The descendants of the Antillean workers who built the Canal adapted Jamaican rhythms into Spanish – appropriating the instrumental B-sides of acetate records – and created reggae in Spanish. From neighborhoods like Río Abajo and Parque Lefevre, they turned the Diablos Rojos buses into rolling sound systems. Under the dictatorship of Manuel Antonio Noriega and the trauma of the 1989 invasion, music was a mirror of Panamanian society and gave its marginalized youth the “permission to speak” about the reality of its streets.

“Fiuuuuuuuuuuu…”, the whistle that opens Sharpening the knives, of Residente, iLe and Bad Bunny, calls for a performance collective that made the summer of 2019 – in a July like this one seven years ago – a milestone of political and corporal sovereignty. What was born in the 90s in the hamlets as a genre criminalized by the “tough hand against crime” of Pedro Rosselló, closed a circle of historical justice when the combative perreo –led by a corilla queer and feminist groups – became the language of civil disobedience that removed her son, Ricardo Rosselló, from power, after a chat loaded with homophobic, misogynistic insults and mockery towards the victims of the hurricane was leaked. María. On the steps of the San Juan Cathedral and in front of La Fortaleza, the touch of bodies and the bass of reggaeton activated an ancestral memory of resistance: proof that in the Caribbean dance is not entertainment, but a strategy of decolonial joy in the face of mourning. This force, validated by the MCA Chicago, challenges the coldness of the institutional “white cube” and reminds us that, when words are not enough in the face of corruption and abandonment of the State, it is the body that recovers its freedom through movement.

From the street to the museum

This leap from the asphalt of protest to the museum halls that ranges from painting to specific installations, prefabricated objects and collages digital reveals that the strength of reggaeton and dancehall is not only in the rhythm, but in its ability to articulate a visual and spiritual cosmogony that contemporary artists knew how to decipher. In the catalogue, that connection becomes tangible in figures who understand music as a ritual of sovereignty: the mystical works of Mallica head Reynolds, leader of the revival movement, and the visionary landscapes of Everald Brown place the origin of these rhythms in a sacred dimension, where art is an extension of spiritual practice. That same depth is shared by Lee Scratch Perry: His legendary Black Ark studio – covered in cutouts, graffiti and found objects – not only spawned the sound of dub, but visually anticipated an aesthetic of dub. sampleo which Perry would continue to explore as a painter.

From the ancestral, this anatomy of the performance It moves towards the critical investigation of the contemporary body, where several artists made the movement of the buttocks the center of their visual grammar. Carolina Caycedo, in her collage Great dog (2004), portrays a dance competition where women claim erotic and political protagonism, turning choreography into an emancipation strategy that disputes gender’s place. ethos male. The photography of On top of that, in the series Untitled (Ricky Renuncia)2019, is direct testimony of combative perreo: close-ups of bodies that, on the steps of San Juan Cathedral, transformed physical friction into an act of civil disobedience.

He sound system emerges as the technological and community heart of this sonic revolution, the space where sound builds identity in the diaspora. The photo Count Shelly Sound System, Dalston, 1973, by Dennis Morris, immortalizes the legendary Four Aces Club in London and shows how these systems compensated for the exclusion of the black community, turning reggae into a transnational language of belonging. That same intensity is translated to canvas by Denzil Forrester, who after years of drawing in London dub clubs manages to capture the physical vibration of the bass and the collective energy of the bodies. And although Jean-Michel Basquiat never painted dancehall, his paintings share the same grammar with the genre: they are not read, they are listened to; His words and signs overlap like the rhythms of mother and that improvisation becomes a visual syntax that validates these genres as subjects of high intellectual density.

This institutional commitment forces an exercise of “unlearning” the dominant discourses: understanding current creativity requires listening to the marginal and letting the genealogy of an Afro-Caribbean performative tradition – which turned the body into its main vehicle of memory and community – finally claim its place in the history of art.