Biography
Elena Vanasse Torres is a graduate student at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University and a cultural worker in her community of Jayuya, central Puerto Rico. Elena works with coloniality and race in Latin America and explores the possibility that agrarian praxis may (re)map the material and imaginative geographies of past colonial encounters. She is particularly attuned to how multispecies assemblages might unsettle the inclusions and exclusions of nation-states, limits of citizenship, and demands of neoliberalism. Elena has also been involved in agroecology since a young age and caretakes a four-acre parcel of ancestral land in central Puerto Rico with her partner.
Research
Centro para la Ecología y Apicultura Urbana, (C.E.A.U., pronounced sê-oo) is an itinerant-site-specific, multi-modal, and experimental art and ecology project rooted in and attending to urban belonging/displacement in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s urban fold. With the guiding metaphor of localized bees and beekeeping praxis, C.E.A.U. seeks to foster a safe space for dialogue and collective action with an eye towards place-making, belonging, sensory experience, cooperative systems of autonomy, and “transitional” or pluriversal design.[1] In addition to providing a platform for dialogue vis-à-vis urban ecology and place-making, C.E.A.U proposes a collaborative makers’ space and agroecological garden, CASA PALACIO, on Calle Palacio of the Villa Palmera neighborhood, Santurce, PR. CASA PALACIO offers an opportunity to explore collective design and urban homesteading for sustenance and subversion.
[1] Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 138-164.
