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On a Friday night earlier this month, I joined hundreds of spectators on City Hall Plaza to series some people set a ship on fire.
Okay, so technically it wasn’t a ship. It was a quarter-scale replica, delicately rendered with dried marsh reeds woven around a steel frame. This was no casual act of arson, either — it was a whole pyrotechnic show. And it was all done in the name of art.
If I’m struggling to explain myself, that’s because this was like no art I’ve ever seen. It was the culminating event for the first Boston Public Art Triennial, a citywide exhibition that opened in May and will close at the end of October. Triennial organizers and local museums commissioned 20 site-specific works, many of which made bold visual statements or asked provocative questions. But Adela Goldbard’s proposal for a replica of a 17th-century sailing ship to be burned in effigy in front of Boston City Hall posed the biggest risk. When I reported on the Triennial back in the spring, the organization had yet to finalize the details of the plan. Privately, I doubted they would be able to get permission from all the necessary city bureaucracies to pull it off.
Goldbard shared my doubts. “I honestly never thought this would happen,” she told me that Friday evening, as the crew readied the ship for its explosive finale. Goldbard said it was Triennial organizers who suggested using City Hall Plaza. “I thought it was the perfect location, because this work has a lot to do with power.”
Goldbard titled the piece “Invadieron por mar, respondemos con fuego. Un presagio,” which translates to “They invaded by sea, we responded with fire. An omen.” The Triennial described the planned event as a “fictional first encounter” between European colonists and Indigenous people. The ship was constructed out of an invasive species of phragmite, a type of wetland reed, to symbolize the invading Europeans. Goldbard, who is from Mexico and works at the Rhode Island School of Design, was inspired by the effigy-burning rituals of Central and South America, where it is customary to dramatically destroy papier-mâché dummies on New Year’s Eve. “ It’s usually a communal event that takes a representation of harm and evil and then burns it in order to get rid of that evil symbolically,” Goldbard said.
At City Hall, spectators crowded around the barriers encircling the ship (quite a good distance away), buzzing with anticipation. No one knew quite what to expect. One City Hall employee told me she had stuck around after work because “I’ve never seen anything like this on City Hall Plaza, ever.” Another woman I spoke to said she had seen a television news report about the ship burning. “My curiosity got the best of me!” she said, laughing.
A Brazilian drumming ensemble readied itself on the steps of City Hall. The ship, adrift in the center of the plaza and encircled by stage lights, was bathed in a soft purple glow. Goldbard sat under a tent by the barriers, poised to cue the pyrotechnician. She and the band would attempt to stay synchronized using timers. “I’m most nervous about losing my cues,” Goldbard said.
At long last, one of the Triennial’s curators, Tess Lukey, got up on a platform to address the crowd. Her voice echoed over the PA system, ricocheting off the plaza’s brick surfaces. “This is the kind of art that doesn’t decorate a public square,” she declared. “It disrupts, engages and asks us to reflect on how we live together.” The crowd waited patiently as a series of speakers offered remarks. At long last, Goldbard took the podium. She extended a special thank you to Artsumex, a Mexican pyrotechnic collective that helped construct the boat. The group couldn’t be at the event, Goldbard explained, “because they were not given visas.” The crowd booed.
Finally, it was time. Goldbard readied herself at her station. Then: nothing. A minute passed, and then another. There was a flurry of activity; someone ran across the plaza and handed something to the band. The crowd shifted and murmured. After more than five minutes, the drums finally began to rattle, ominously. Smoke wafted from the ship.
The first explosion, like a cannon, rattled the air. The crowd flinched; one person whooped in surprise. There was another explosion, a pause, another explosion. The air smelled like a lit match. A snare drum launched into a military march, and pyrotechnic flares whizzed around the edges of the ship, outlining it in orange light. White flares flew up the ship’s three masts. More explosions, louder, spewed thick purple smoke. A stranger in the crowd turned to me and said, with a note of disbelief, “This is pretty f—ing wild.”
The explosions continued and the drums rumbled. Pink sparkles shot upward, blooming against the backdrop of City Hall’s looming brow. A series of bright white missiles launched into the sky like comets. For a moment, the ship was completely engulfed in a cloud of eerie red smoke. A full-on fireworks display commenced; we craned our necks toward the sky.
When the first fireball roared from the body of the ship, I felt the heat on my face from 60 feet away. The effigy burned, its delicate shell melting away to reveal its metal skeleton as the band transitioned into a shimmying rhythm. When the performance ended, the crowd cheered and whistled. The drummers launched into an encore and spectators thronged at their feet, dancing, while a handful of firefighters appraised the smoldering ruin.
Whenever I encounter political art, I find myself asking the same questions. Will its message be lost on people? Or, on the other hand, will attempts to contextualize the work water down its complexity, reduce its emotional impact, risk didacticism? And always, I wonder about art’s power to change minds. Is anything with a message just preaching to the choir?
Something I hadn’t considered was art’s ability to provide collective catharsis. I suspect Goldbard understood this from the start. The spectacle lingered in my mind for days afterward. The implication of the work — the joyful exorcism of colonialism’s dark specter — was easy enough to grasp. Yet, somehow, the display was subtle, mysterious, dreamlike. It was at once foreboding and playful, violent and celebratory, defiant and communal. It began with a sense of menace and ushered the audience into a feeling of release. The explosions, so close and so loud, exhilarated us, bonded us, and left us with a sense that something new was still possible in this world.
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