About the project
Our vision is to promote a way of creating that is sustainable from a neighborhood space that makes visible and proposes solutions to the problems of race, violence, social class, gender, and climate change. We share our land as a way to de-privatize knowledge through workshops, meetings and art residencies. Patio Taller is the land of our grandparents, in San Antón, Carolina, an industrialized area since the 90s. As a means to continue their sovereignty practice since the 40s, namely the exchange of fruit crops, healing practice by medicinal plants and raising of farm animals, the space has also been used, since 2011, for artistic, culinary and environmental workshops for the youth of our community. These workshops have given us the opportunity to deepen neighborly relations in a community segregated by industrialization. Using the principles of nonviolent communication, emancipatory education and establishing horizontal relations we have created a place for the neighborhood congregation that allows intergenerational participation based on the ideas, needs, and resources of our community. Patio Taller is the meeting space for the women who organize the Imaginación Post-María projects which look for just recovery strategies in collaboration with La Maraña. Patio Taller has an art residence called El Residencial. This residence is a platform for research, interconnection, criticism, and openness, with the aim of creating links that nurture collective practices. El Residencial provides a basic structure for the organization of a residence that promotes autonomy and exchange between artist, coexistence for a practice influenced by the collective space (sharing processes and skills) and cooking, an integral resource for daily sharing that nourishes the collective body.
About the artist
Sisters Lydela and Michel are Las Nietas de Nonó whose joint practice encompasses performance and visual art combined with activism and education. They live in San Antón, an industrialized working class neighborhood of Carolina, Puerto Rico. Their autobiographical art is framed within the socioeconomic and geographical context of the exclusion and eviction of black communities in Puerto Rico. They created Patio Taller a community art space for gatherings, performance, residencies, workshops, and sustainable agriculture.