Veronica Bello
Standing on Porous Rock | 2022
Miami is built on limestone, a rock so porous that water moves through it freely, from below as much as from above. At 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, which even conservative scientists now project will arrive by 2100, the city faces a particular kind of reckoning: not just rising seas at its edges, but water pushing up from within. Standing on Porous Rock is an ongoing research and material project that sits with that tension, between the landscape's geological reality and the myth that was built on top of it. The myth that nature could not only be tamed, but made irrelevant.
Developers arrived, canals were dug, swamps were drained, and a city emerged unlike any other: an edge-of-the-world, air-conditioned dreamland of sunshine and beaches. What interests Bello is the disparity between that marketed image and the precarious ground beneath it: the drying of the Everglades in direct correlation with coastal real estate development, the prioritizing of parking lots over cultural and natural heritage, the preference for swimming pools over oceans, lakes, and rivers. The found objects in the work, beach chaises, parasols, towels, are the props of that dream. Familiar vacation objects, legible anywhere. But in the work they are modified, destabilized, no longer able to offer the oblivion that leisure promises.
The use of photography and digitally printed fabrics ponders the currency of images. We rarely pause, mid-swim, to consider where the raw materials for the pool tiles beneath our feet were extracted from. Bello's fascination with limestone in Floridian pools comes from exactly that relationship, the quiet correlation between extraction and pleasure that appears in every corner of Miami. Limestone is the bedrock of the city and also the material of its undoing, and yet we continue to pull it from the ground and place it in our own backyards as a kind of idealized nature. Standing on Porous Rock asks what it means to build a paradise on something already dissolving.