Allora & Calzadilla rebuild in Puerto Rico

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s work Unspecified Promise (2017), half of a digger once owned by Calzadilla’s father spliced with a 55-ton boulder of Massachusetts black granite, was unveiled at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami on Monday. The piece is a personal response by the Puerto Rico-based artists to US policies towards their island, where government contracts and economic support have dried up, and to US policies in Cuba. Calzadilla’s father, who owns a construction company in Puerto Rico that was badly hit by the island’s economic recession, is now in the process of transferring the business and its property to the pair for them to use for artistic purposes. “They hope it will thrive again,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator.