Everyone returns to the land where they were born To the unmistakable spell of its sun And who’d want to be eating shit and ice When they could be dancing something better Rita Indiana, “La hora de volvé”
In the ongoing search for a way to record the immaterial, we imagine that such a form must come from another dimension — a pulse, a lifeline preceding language itself. Plural, dispersed, and sharpened, the signals we send toward the mirrorless surface of the outside shape another life — within, in the pulverized body of another intelligence.
If we had to head north into the cold while new settlers arrived on our beaches, patios, and gardens — perched on surfboards, lying in hammocks, wearing Ray-Bans — then it is the spirits of the ancestors, incongruent and fierce but never docile or resigned, who hold the precise questions and answers to reverse the process. Whom are we listening to, and who listens to us? How and when should we listen? What sounds or silences are we reproducing, amplifying, accompanying, and expanding?
The Outer Limits opens a door to a form of interdimensional and intertemporal solidarity — with ancestors and more-than-human entities, with outsiders and aliens, the deaf and the subterranean. It seeks to expand our understanding and to embody interdependence as a radical politics, attuned to the historical and systemic oppressions that have silenced the world. Each invited artist takes this as a point of departure, working from distinct conceptual, disciplinary, and geographic positions, through processes where history, memory, gossip, and pleasure intertwine in unexpected ways. We imagine the insular and continental Caribbean, the Darién rainforest, and the Pacific coast as a single, shifting territory — a living map traced by the movements of expelled bodies and by a shared, greater life: not the small one, but the vast one, written in capital letters and forever opaque to the extractive gaze.
La Vulcanizadora recalls the astronaut training once held in the Darién rainforest — uninhabitable and inaccessible to them, yet now crossed in flip-flops by migrants bound for the United States. Ser del Cosmos and María Isabel Rueda replace the golden record sent into outer space aboard the Voyager probes in 1977 with a counter-narrative connecting unheard sounds from the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Simón Vega offers a wry commentary on the tourist colonization of Latin America; inspired by the spacesuits designed by NASA and the Soviet Space Program during the Space Race, he reimagines them in floral fabrics and found materials as survival gear for space castaways landing in tropical lands without air conditioning and unsettled by the relentless noise of nature. Tony Cruz Pabón also works with local materials in Si por mí llueve, the only sculpture not housed in Beta-Local’s gallery — for it is a portal in itself: a device for eavesdropping on rumors and catching satellites, in complicity with Maritza Sánchez, an artist who channels messages through radio and listens to the memory of Old San Juan, drawing ever closer to her own mediumship as she builds bridges between past, present, and future. Finally, Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s works are grounded in improvisation as a practice inseparable from the present, linking the colonial processes carried out by the United States in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century to the artist’s homage to Makandal, the Haitian maroon leader.
Dominican musician Wilfrido Vargas composed “El extraterrestre” in 1995, driven, as he said, by “the need to explore the cosmos and my philosophical reflection on life and cosmic behavior.” That same year, sixty thousand people marched in San Juan to oppose the U.S. Navy’s plan to install a ROTHR radar in Vieques and its receiver in Lajas. A fortune-teller told the local press: “What harmony can there be between a tiny island offering a paradise for tourists and the latest in modern technology to spy on the Cali Cartel in Colombia?”
The exhibition conceives the aural as the primal dimension of communication between humans and other presences; listening as a tool for cultivating intuition; and mediumship as a path toward collective liberation. Though deeply anchored in the present, mediumship also reaches into the past, drawing on the echoes of ancestors, stories, and landscapes that never fully disappear but continue to resonate through time. In engaging with these echoes, mediums fuse the body with object-instruments and spaces that together translate a shared consciousness and enable communication among silenced entities.
The Cold War is hotter and noisier than ever, and meanwhile our alliances are forged in dance. We want to invoke, stir, groove, and hustle with the spirits who accompany and protect us, conceiving this space as one where the present and other times converge through sensory wisdom.
We do not know what comes next — only that the steps ahead cannot be found or dictated by us. What we do know is that we must listen to other voices and allow those voices to listen to each other. Our collective well-being depends not only on the connections we forge in the present but also on the invisible energies that have shaped us: the traditions, the ancestors, the forgotten struggles, and the untold stories that continue to resonate. In this world, there are many worlds.
We’re heading toward the year 2000, and humans still aren’t thinking straight They’re fighting over nuclear power — their behavior is insane We’re heading toward the year 2000, and the industry’s getting ready They’re already making it easy for me to fly in a spaceship […] Here, there are no wars; we’re no longer on Earth Here, we’re not poor; we’re only dancers Wilfrido Vargas, “El extraterrestre”
Information
Address
Beta–Local Avenida Manuel Fernández Juncos 1412 San Juan, Puerto Rico
Beta–Local
Beta-Local is a non-profit organization founded in Puerto Rico in 2009. Its mission is to create and sustain space and moments for the development of contemporary artistic practices in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Since its inception, it has operated as an artist-led initiative, cultivating long-term relationships grounded in exchange, collaboration, and experimentation. Through its programs and projects, Beta-Local has woven a cultural network that reflects on and activates artistic practice from local contexts, fostering new forms of production, circulation, and critical reflection — both within and beyond traditional art circuits. Its work embodies a collective vision of artistic practice as a driving force for social and cultural transformation, interlacing experimental pedagogies, research, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
La Casa de Meira
La Casa de Meira is a center for art and experimentation in the Colombian Caribbean, based in Barranquilla. It is dedicated to the exchange of knowledge and to horizontal dialogue between local artists and the house’s residents. The space encourages encounters across disciplines, cultures, and generations through a varied program that includes exhibitions, film clubs, workshops, literary, musical, and sound gatherings, performances, culinary experiences, fashion and costume presentations, and publications.
Among its main exhibitions are Si no puedo bailar, no quiero ser parte de tu revolución, featuring Romany Dear and Grace Tortuga; Capturas, with Breidy Manes; El Indiscreto Encanto by Jessica Mitrani; Parcialmente Nublado (collective exhibition by Caribbean artists); Río Lengua, by María Leguízamo; and Cosecha post-mortem, by Bryan Duarte.
OtherNetwork
OtherNetwork is a decentralised cultural institution that connects independent art spaces. At its core are hundreds of projects that are rooted in their local context, responding to the needs of artists directly. We see the term ‘independent’ as fluid and context-specific, and continuously seek to unpack what this means to cultural practitioners in different global localities.
Visit othernetwork.io
Follow for updates
Credits
An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, curated by La Casa de Meira and hosted by Beta Local, with artworks by Ser del Cosmos, Maritza Sánchez Hernández, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Simón Vega, La Vulcanizadora, and Tony Cruz Pabón.
Artists
Ser del Cosmos, Maritza Sánchez, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Simón Vega, La Vulcanizadora and Tony Cruz Pabón
Beta–Local
Curators
Michael Linares, Pablo Guardiola
Directors
Michael Linares, Pablo Guardiola
La Casa de Meira
Curators
Ana Ruiz Valencia, María Isabel Rueda
Directors
María Isabel Rueda, Julián Chams, Juan Betancourt
ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Project Management
Nina Frohm
Travelling Exhibition Department
Sabiha Keyif, Nina Frohm, Valerie Hammerbacher, Sabina Klemm, Clea Laade, Alexander Lisewski, Clemens Wildt
OtherNetwork
Board of Directors
Quentin Creuzet, Domitille Debret, Colin Keays, Federico Martelli
Creative Direction
Cookies (Federico Martelli, Alice Grégoire, Clément Périssé)
Research Team
Samantha Modisenyane, Abraham Tettey, Camila Alegría, Matheus dos Reis, Camilo Quiroga
Website Conception & Visual Identity
F451 (Quentin Creuzet, Domitille Debret)
Editor
Colin Keays
Project Management
ifa Visual Arts Department (Nina Frohm)
OtherNetwork is a collaborative project connecting independent art spaces globally, initiated by Cookies in partnership with ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.