Several recent projects by

Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla) have brought a poetic sensibility to bear on the complex intersections of power, activism, and environmentalism within the landscape of Vieques, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Vieques has been-and remains-disputed terrain. After decades of effort by local and international activists, the US military stopped conducting its notorious bombing exercises on Vieques in 2003. The land is now managed by the US Department of the Interior, a shift that raises a new set of challenges for Viequenses who wish to preserve space for themselves in the face of plans for tourist developments and intensive environmental preservation.

Allora & Calzadilla are represented in Beyond Green by two recent projects that address sustainability in Vieques. Each of these videos follows a young man traveling around the island on a modified vehicle: an everyday object that the artists have transformed for evocative new uses. In each case, Allora & Calzadilla intercut close-ups of the rider and vehicle with wide or aerial shots that situate these unusual journeys within the contested landscape of Vieques, in which verdant open spaces, homes, military installations, and protest graffiti comingle.

In Returning a Sound (2004-05), Homar, an activist, rides around Vieques on a moped that Allora & Calzadilla reengineered by attaching a trumpet to the exhaust system. During the ride, every thrust of the throttle or shift in speed alters the instrument's pitch. Allora & Calzadilla have edited out other ambient noise, leaving only the alternately sputtering vibrato and clear, pure sound of the trumpet as a jazzlike soundtrack, a call to action, or perhaps an anthem, as the artists discuss in the interview that follows.

Under Discussion (2005) features a special boat, a simple wooden table that Allora & Calzadilla flipped upside-down and enhanced with a motor. The video's protagonist, Diego, circumnavigates the island on this craft, a witness to Vieques's uncertain situation as well as an actor in determining its future as he moves the discussion into surreal waters. The table has become a vehicle-a means to get somewhere-and also a stand-in for other tables around which those seeking to resolve Vieques's future have gathered. As Yates McKee has noted, however, such tables are imperfect vehicles. "In liberal thought, ‘sitting down at the table' suggests an ideal space of conflict-resolution through rational dialogue [...] Yet this ideal fails to account for the inequalities that underwrite the space of the table to begin with, such as the hierarchical division between scientific expertise and local ecological knowledge, which rarely register at all in planning processes. Under Discussion is an experimental device for publicizing such counter-knowledge."