At the heart of Daniel Lind-Ramos’s practice are large-scale assemblages of found objects, often objects gifted to him by friends and neighbours, or those he comes across after a hurricane, when they are thrown, helter-skelter, into environments where they do not necessarily belong.
The sculptures Lind-Ramos presents at the Biennale Arte 2026 conjure the history of maroonage and escape. Talegas de la memoria (2023-2024) takes as its point of departure the plastic kayak, an object that, for Lind-Ramos, symbolises the ongoing stakes of water-bound travel for black life, past and present, in Puerto Rico. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a large number of people escaping slavery fled by boat there, taking refuge in the area’s dense mangroves. Meanwhile, the found objects in Guardaverde (2024-2025) and Centinelas de la luna nueva (2023) combine to 126 create sentinel-like entities, paying homage to those stewards who have watched over the land.
Together, the three works narrate commingling historical threads: of the land protecting people from the regime of the plantation, and of people protecting the land from the ecological terror that is inseparable from that very same regime. In Lind-Ramos’s figures, we see the twinned needs for preservation of the environment and preservation of black life in assemblages that speak life over and against death.
—Zoë Hopkins
