7 Days in Igualdad

2004. Añasco, Puerto Rico

 

For 7 Days in Igualdad, Negrón reignited an abandoned chimney from a sugar cane hacienda in Añasco, Puerto Rico an effort to bring visibility to a dying community. Once marked by a flourishing sugar industry, the region saw its factories close some thirty years ago, followed by increasing impoverishment. Negrón worked with local collaborators to light the chimney twenty-four hours a day for a week. The resulting smoke signified -not a return to production- but a concerted social action and the reconsolidation of kinship, symbolically captained by the reignited chimney's incription "igualdad" (meaning equality).