SS: These works followed another project in Vieques, an interrogative design, intervention, and photography project called Land Mark, which you made prior to the military pullout from the island.

A&C: The photography project-which we have shown in various exhibition contexts-is an extension of a series of actions that took place in Vieques in 2001-2002. We worked in collaboration with activist groups involved with protest actions in the disputed US Navy bomb testing range. Initially our project consisted of designing custom-made soles that were added onto the shoes of people involved with the land reclamation campaign. The shoes were used in civil disobedience actions in which people seeking to reclaim the land entered the range and, as a result of walking in that landscape, marked their presence in the form of a stamp on the terrain. The images on the bottom of the shoes, chosen by each individual user, depicted territories (geographical, bodily, linguistic, etc.) that functioned as counter-representations of the site's function at that time as well as what it is still to become.

SS: You've done other works that touch on sustainability but not on Vieques in particular, some of which we considered including in Beyond Green. However they ended up being too delicate or logistically complex to travel with the show. There was something apt about the perversity of trying to include works that would have consumed large amounts of money, time, and resources. Although we decided not to pursue those options in the end, the process highlighted the difficulties of trying to address sustainability within the logistics as well as the content of an exhibition. Could you describe two of those pieces that we considered-Puerto Rican Light (2003) and Ten Minute Transmission (2003)?

A&For Puerto Rican Light we collected the sunlight from Puerto Rico using portable photovoltaic cells. The light was stored in a battery bank and used to provide the energy for the fluorescent light sculpture by Dan Flavin, Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) (1965). Enough sunlight was collected from Puerto Rico to power the Dan Flavin sculpture for the course of an exhibition.

Ten Minute Transmission consists of an antenna made from hundreds of metal wire hangers, forming a replica of the International Space Station (ISS). This precarious/ fragile construction is suspended from the ceiling and is meant to be used to contact the ISS. During the ten minutes when the space station is in transmittable orbit above the exhibition location, the sculpture/antenna attempts to make two-way contact with the astronauts. This is done through the use of a ham radio and a computer program that automatically dials the ISS every 90 minutes, the amount of time it takes the space station to orbit the earth. In the time between attempting contact, the antenna functions as an international radio station capturing other ham, fm, and am radio signals coming through the air (locally and internationally) that are made audible to the passing public.

However, our interest in this work is not reducible to sheerly technical or functional criteria. It is comprised of an unnatural composite of elements-political, technological, and sculptural-that would normally never be brought together. We wanted to evoke Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919, designed to have a gigantic radio tower) but also to draw attention to the exclusionary conception of "the international" that surrounded another engineering project with universal pretensions, the ISS, a paramilitary complex floating outside the earth. Despite its name, the ISS is controlled by a handful of powerful nations in the global north; this poses a big political question about who gets to be represented in the extraterrestrial realm. On its own, this dialectic would make an interesting historical and political point, but it would not be monstrous. Coat hangers are a debased, cast-off material, part of an economy of the scavenger. They are detritus with an infinite capacity to be reused for purposes other than those prescribed by their original design. They are ciphers of the potential monstrosity that haunts the utopian plans of "mankind."

SS: How do you see these works fitting into the questions about sustainable design raised by Beyond Green?

A&C: Our works included in this exhibition in particular look at the question of environmental justice-what and who counts as an endangered species-and how this discourse reconceptualizes the relationships between nonhuman and human nature and, as a result, fosters new forms of environmentalism. The land-rights struggle in Vieques extends the parameters of the term sustainability to include the very survival of the indigenous civilian population of the island, and, as a result, complicates and broadens mainstream notions of environmentalism and sustainability to include questions of social justice that affect how people live in their environments. The recent transition of the contaminated naval grounds into a wildlife refuge administered by the US Department of the Interior and the rapid development of mostly North American tourist initiatives further complicate this debate. The former mask grave health problems caused by the release of toxic chemicals from the hundreds of thousands of bombs dropped over the past 60 years on this small island and the latter continues a long history of colonization and systematic exclusion of the local population from the natural and productive resources of the island.