SS: What about Under Discussion?

A&C: The present state of the land in Vieques is under discussion. Facing challenges in many ways far greater and complex than the demilitarization campaigns, the citizens of Vieques are currently entrenched in a mire of bureaucratic, administrative, legal, and political debates concerning the fate of their island. This film follows the son of a local fisherman involved in the Fisherman's Movement, a key movement in the 1970s that initiated the civil disobedience movement on the island. He has converted the discussion table, by turning it upside down, into a boat, and is driving it along the coastal areas of the island where the land status is still contested. Mobilizing the discussion table through its conversion into a fishing boat, the protagonist takes the debate into new, unexpected directions.

SS: Under Discussion was just included in the Venice Biennale. Was it your choice to show the piece? If so, why did you select it for that context?

A&C: Yes, we chose to show the work for a number of reasons, starting first with the site of the Biennale in the Italian Naval Arsenale. Shown in that context, the video opens up to crosscultural and transhistorical references, as the subject of militarism, conquest, and empire have played a central role throughout civilizations and histories. The video considers what happens to former military land. Showing it in the context of a largescale international art exhibition housed in a former navy property confronts the viewer with one possible outcome, a site for cultural production, while hopefully critically opening that space up to its own form of interrogation, perhaps leading the viewer to question, among other things, the role culture plays in such transitional spaces, what it permits and what it excludes. Another, more pragmatic interest of ours was to expose the situation in Vieques to a large international public. With no interest in instrumentalization, we hope this work expands the network of solidarity and support for the people of Vieques and the global demilitarization movement in general. One of the reasons for the success of the peace and justice campaign in Vieques was its ability to reach out to a global network of supporters who have both contributed to and learned from the initiatives in Vieques. So for example, you find people in a village in South Korea who call their town "The Vieques of Korea" and are using tactics similar to those that were used in Vieques in their own resistance to bombing exercises in Maehyang-ri. Or a conference organized in Glasgow, Scotland, entitled "Lessons from Vieques-a Conference Celebrating Peace, Resistance and a Commitment to a Military-free Scotland" (April 2005). There were also 9,000 protesters marching in Fretzdorf, Germany, on March 27th, 2005, for the struggle in Vieques. Our intention in showing Under Discussion in Venice was to establish yet another link in this larger global network of solidarity and support.

SS: As I've watched Under Discussion, I can't discern whether the table/boat is actually on the water or if it's a very clever digital manipulation. That ambiguity seems interesting- maybe a reflection of the instability and murkiness of the whole situation on Vieques-but at the risk of killing the mystery I'm going to ask anyway. Did the table actually work as a boat?

A&C: Yes.

SS: Do the objects-the table/boat and the altered moped-still exist? Do you have any interest in them as sculpture or design apart from their use within these videos?

A&C: Both the table/boat and the altered moped are still in Vieques. The last time we checked, the table/boat was still in the harbor in Esperanza, the small town on the south side of the island. It was being used as a dinghy by the fisherman to go out to their larger fishing boats in the harbor. Homar still has the moped and uses it to get around the island, but the last we heard the trumpet fell off, so it's back to being a regular muffler.

SS: As a technical note, are there any particular display parameters for your video works? Do you think about them as installations? Do they need to be screened as projections, at a particular scale?

A&&C: We prefer for these two particular videos to be projected. It underscores the monumentality and weight of the situation the protagonists find themselves in, even if their activities are repetitive or mundane-i.e. driving a moped or a boat-and it foregrounds the land as the arena in which these antagonisms are staged.

SS: The central figure in each video makes a perambulation around the island: either by land or by sea he ends up right back where he started. That seems a bit pessimistic: it suggests a condition of stasis that runs counter to the trumpet's call for action although perhaps is more in keeping with the protagonists' roles as witnesses/observers.

A&C: We see this cyclical movement a bit differently. The idea for the protagonists' particular trajectory was for it to function as a kind of mapping. In Returning a Sound, Homar travels through those tracts of land that in his lifetime and in the generation before him had never been accessible. In the expropriations of the 1940s, thousands of families living throughout the island were forced off of their land and made to either leave together or to settle in a small wedge of land in the island's center. The military occupation of the island divided the geography into three sections. In the west was the ammunition storage facility and in the east was the life-firing range. In between was the civilian population. So in Returning a Sound, Homar begins his journey in the civilian area in the central northern town of Isabel II and then moves in a clockwise direction around the entire island. With his modified bike, he starts in the town and then moves into the military lands. A similar logic holds true for Under Discussion. In this instance, Diego starts in the central southern town of Esperanza and moves eastward along the fishing routes that were the contested grounds of the Fisherman's Movement, which initially bore witness to the devastating effects of the bombing. Since both of their actions took place within a certain temporality, we understand that the protagonists do not really arrive exactly where they started. Time has passed-both the protagonist and his environment in which his action took place are somehow, even if only slightly, different. It is more of a spiral than a circular movement. This understanding of time and transformation, in a certain manner, reflects the ecological nature of the peace and justice movement in Vieques, in which change happens slowly, across generations, yet also respects and acknowledges the contribution of all actions, however great or small, in the eventual transformation of place.