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Edin Velez: Delirio Tropical

A pioneer in video art since the 1970s, Edin Vélez has garnered many honors, including the 1990 American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission. Throughout his career, he's made a point, he says, "of creating work that established me as a Latino artist within a world culture not limited to issues of ethnicity." Indeed, his single-channel videos and video installations have been shown at numerous venues in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Despite the critical acclaim, Vélez keeps his distance from the mainstream. "I have always constructed my work from the outside—everything I do is as an outsider," he states. He views living on the periphery as "artistically advantageous," a situation "where you can place yourself without being obvious." He adds, with some irony, "my defining struggle is not to be defined." This outsider stance is why he loves New York, a city of immigrants where everyone and no one is a stranger. In 1970, Vélez moved to the Big Apple from Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised. For him, New York is "an agglomeration of peripheries"—a place where he felt at home immediately.

In his 1982 work, As Is, Vélez reconfigures New York as a vast landscape, a flamboyant theater at once gritty and mythical. The piece ends with images of people riding down an escalator, conveying a poignant sense of the city's humanity. In A Reasonable Facsimile (2004), the city emerges as a site of misunderstandings and missed connections. Not coincidentally, Vélez's fascination with New York ties into a work he loves: James Joyce's Ulysses, which deals with the quintessential outsider, Leopold Bloom, a Jew, in another great city, Dublin. In the span of one day (Bloomsday), the reader accompanies a middle-aged flâneur on his wanderings through the metropolis for which he has an intimate feel. In his recently completed work, A Certain Foolish Consistency, Vélez pays homage to the Joycean universe. Intrigued by how time folds in on itself, he attempts to illuminate the way we experience it, not as a neat narrative but as a multilayered process.

In his Creative Capital project, Delirio Tropical (Tropical Delirium), Vélez has set out to fashion "a multi-layered structure of image making," influenced by "the fractured, multi-stylistic approach of Joyce's Ulysses" and his response in A Certain Foolish Consistency. An experimental narrative, Delirio's formalist structure will also be influenced, Vélez says, by his work of the early 1980s—pieces like As Is and Meta Mayan II (1981), an interpretive examination of Mayan culture in Central America—which he describes as anticipating "the current, digital-based forms by almost 15 years." He also acknowledges the inspiration provided by Iranian filmmakers, especially Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who, he says, "redefine many filmic tropes in amazing new ways."

In Delirio Tropical, Vélez is opting for multiple rather than split screens. For him, simple split screens create "two or more 'boxes' within the larger box, which is the screen," whereas what he's looking for is "less defined boundaries between images." Delirio will interweave three narrative strands: a retelling of the infamous Cerro Maravilla incident of 1978, in which two pro-independence Puerto Rican activists were set up by the police and subsequently killed; a young woman's broken romance in 1984; and the back story to both the romantic and political strands. Currently working with a writer to refine the script, Vélez anticipates completing the project in early 2007.

Vélez has high hopes for Delirio Tropical: With it, he says, "I will finally create a piece that incorporates elements of my Puerto Rican culture with modernist storytelling, within a very complex formal structure."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | History | Politics | New York | 2005