Land Mark (Foot Prints),

2001–02

Known for integrating poetics and politics, the collaborative team of Allora and Calzadilla explores such issues as ecology, nationalism, militarism, and self-determination. Land Mark (Foot Prints) documents a performance that was also a civil disobedience campaign. During 2001 and 2002, Allora, Calzadilla, and a group of activists trespassed onto a United States Navy bombing range set up on a beach in Vieques, Puerto Rico, during World War II. Each person wore shoes with soles embossed with words in Spanish and English and images—a map, a dove, the Apollo spaceship. Their footprints spoke silently but assertively, addressing what they viewed as an unacceptable injustice: the environmental and communal toll exacted by years of bombings on the island. The range was closed in 2003.