TAMARA CEDRÉ
Tamara Cedré, The remains of furniture near the shoreline of Yabucoa, from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Mayra, the sole caregiver of her bedridden mother and brother, stands on her destroyed rooftop in San Juan. She is still waiting for it to be fixed by her insurance company, from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Family photographs in a resident’s home in Caparra Terrace, PR, from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Amado, artist and independentista, tells me on the fourth of July, “No hay nada que grite colonizadx mejor que celebrar la independencia del país que nos tiene esclavizadxs. Pero claro, todo animal que nace en cautiverio también cree que su parcela enrejada es el mundo entero y que la comida que recibe es un obsequio.” “There is nothing that screams colonized better than to celebrate the independence of the country that has you enslaved. But of course, every animal that is born in captivity also thinks that their caged plot is the whole entire world and that the food they receive is a gift.” from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Sarai, a recent transplant to Orlando, shows me the ruins of the home she left behind on her cell phone, from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Leyda has become a security guard at the site of the abandoned school her grandchildren once attended. 283 schools have closed down in Puerto Rico, from the series Revelar, 2018
Tamara Cedré, Escuela de la Comunidad Dr. Isaac Gonzalez Martinez, from the series Revelar, 2018
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the shores of Yabucoa Harbor. It was the strongest storm to make landfall in Puerto Rico in 85 years. In the midst of media coverage, the residents of the island have become subjects of catastrophe. But, before the hurricane, Puerto Rico had been ravaged by economic downturn— a legacy of the colonial histories that still shape its future.
Throughout my life, my grandparents and parents traversed between the island and the “mainland” like most Boricuas who left to come to the States. My own identity oscillates between the locus of a place I can only visit and an imaginary drawn from my family’s memory. As more Puerto Ricans become displaced, this scattering shapes our collective consciousness.
Over the course of four years, during my summer visits back home, I have tried to bear witness to the stories of people who live on these margins everyday, photographing the changing landscape and attempting to show a more nuanced observation of an incredibly complex place.
Tamara Cedré was born in Brooklyn, New York and was raised in Central Florida. Tamara completed her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art where her studio research tested photography as a personal, political tool of documentation. Her recent work mines historical and personal archives that articulate diasporic identity shaped by the colonial status of her family’s homeland of Puerto Rico. In an act of reclamation, she constructs an archive of found, contested, and reimagined photographs to serve as a site for understanding issues surrounding the political status and identity of Boricuas. An excerpt from her series Revelar, Recontar, Reclamar was recently curated into the publication ‘Recent Findings’ for the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography.
