Social engagement and/against creativity: Art making, collective agency and the politics of urgency in the hispanic Caribbean

This chapter analyses issues of social resilience and collaborative creativity in times of environmental hazard. By comparing several long-term initiatives arising in Puerto Rico and the Canary Islands, it explores the possibility of an archipelagic and relational politics of urgency spanning across Atlantic insular territories. At the same time, the chapter discusses the possibilities and limitations of socially engaged art for producing alternative art histories of the Hispanic Caribbean. By conceiving contemporary art as a field where central aspects of socio-political reproduction and labour are negotiated, I argue that a focus on collective creativity provides a suitable ground for analysing organisational and infrastructural cultural processes.