This project confronts Florida's central role in sugar production, an industry rooted in exploitation and environmental destruction. Fragmented video projections play over piles of Domino sugar embedded in neon, symbolic of Florida’s artificial paradise: a polished façade masking systemic harm. Owned by a family of Cuban sugar barons, Domino Sugar exemplifies the continuation of colonial legacies, replicating exploitative practices that once devastated the Caribbean within Florida’s landscapes. The fractured visuals evoke a sense of disorientation, or “vertigo,” reflecting the destabilizing effects of sugar production on both ecosystems and human lives.
The hurricane serves as both metaphor and force: cyclical, relentless, and devastating. Its chaos mirrors the upheaval caused by the sugar industry, by upending lives and reshaping landscapes in its wake. A broken lawn chair, once a symbol of leisure, sits amidst this wreckage. Neon’s synthetic glow heightens the tension between indulgence and consequence, exposing the human and ecological toll beneath sugar’s sweetness. The projections also reflect the fractured histories of the Caribbean, inextricably tied to the global sugar industry. These images point to the legacies of colonialism, forced labor, and displacement and these cycles of extraction. Drawing on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, the project interrogates the colonial experimentation and exploitation that transformed the Caribbean into a site of depletion. Florida’s sugar industry perpetuates these histories, embedding labor abuse and environmental degradation within the fabric of modern industrial agriculture.
The title, The Corrosive Sublimate/Of Vertigo & Hurricane, references both a historical disinfectant used in sugar processing and the destabilizing force of the hurricane—a symbol of destruction that erodes both the environment and human lives. Through its layered components, the project confronts the intertwined histories of exploitation, ecological harm, and colonialism, inviting viewers to question the fragile illusions of paradise and the profound costs hidden beneath its surface.
