The concept of establishing a museum in a remote region of India—one that is not only geographically isolated but also prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and cyclones—presents a complex set of challenges. Yet, it also offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with the traditional knowledge systems of local communities. Located in Ajrakhpur, just outside the city of Bhuj in Kutch, Gujarat, in western India, the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC), founded in 2016, exemplifies this duality (fig. 1). Conceived as a multipurpose cultural institution, LLDC is dedicated to the preservation, revival, and continuity of the diverse craft traditions of Kutch.¹ Situated on a nine-acre campus, it houses three galleries as well as craft studios and educational spaces that collectively serve as a platform for cultural transmission and innovation.

Tracing the development of LLDC, this essay focuses on how indigenous systems of knowledge informed its planning, construction, collections, infrastructure, and modes of audience engagement. Using LLDC as a case study, it explores how the model of a global museum can be thoughtfully translated to a local context—one that is shaped by environmental precarity, cultural richness, and community resilience.

Building Trust: The Elders as Gatekeepers of Knowledge

The seed of the Living and Learning Design Centre was planted more than five decades ago in a chance encounter between the late Chanda Shroff (1933–2016) and women from the Ahir and Meghwaad Gurjar communities.² In 1969, Shroff traveled overland from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to Dhaneti in Kutch to assist with famine-relief efforts.³ For the fifth consecutive year, Kutch—the second largest district in India—was experiencing severe drought that had resulted in an acute need for humanitarian assistance as many residents faced starvation. Despite these hardships, women arriving to collect food aid remained impeccably dressed and were hesitant to accept charity. They had nothing to exchange for the food parcels they received as they had sold most of their belongings—including valuable embroidered heirlooms passed down through generations—just to survive. 

Their pride and skills caught the attention of Shroff. Recognizing the need for a long-term solution, she asked if they would create embroidered designs on plain saris that she would then sell in Bombay, returning the proceeds of any sales directly to them. The women agreed to participate under the condition that the patterns and motifs would be outlined by Parmaben Balasara, an aarekhni artist and their designated designer.⁴ This was Shroff’s initiation into how traditional crafts, such as embroideries, were not just borne from women who sat in their homes and created them, but rather from a regulated system that relied on the wisdom and knowledge of elders from their community. Without the support of Parmaben, Shroff could not have engaged these communities (fig. 2), and it was through her steadfast support that the initial seeds were planted for LLDC, building trust with the communities through their first organization, Shrujan.⁵

Engaging Communities: The Need for a Mobile Museum

In the late 1990s, Chanda Shroff launched a precursor to the Living and Learning Design Centre through an innovative mobile museum housed in a repurposed bus, initially named the Design Center On Wheels. This initiative was instrumental in introducing the concept of a museum to the rural craft communities of Kutch, many of whom had limited exposure to formal cultural institutions. Rather than imposing an external model, the mobile museum served as a dialogic platform—demonstrating how a museum could emerge from within the community’s own knowledge systems.

The Design Center On Wheels featured a rotating display of specially commissioned panels and garments, showcasing traditional patterns and techniques in contemporary formats, all painstakingly hand-stitched by women from the various communities of Kutch (figs. 3–6) 

Encouraging the use of traditional stitches in a modern color palette and moving beyond clothing and textiles were crucial steps in teaching the women how, through the eye of a needle, to reinvigorate and expand their cultural histories using their own knowledge and experience. Between 1997 – 2003 they created over 1000 embroidered panels and over 600 garments, in a range of designs and colorways, establishing a rich visual archive of stitches and motifs. From 2003 to 2012 the Design Center On Wheels travelled across Kutch, exhibiting a rotating selection of these panels. This mobile museum not only documented craft heritage, but it also inspired renewed interest among younger generations, who began to see their cultural practices as valuable and evolving (figs. 5, 6). 

By visiting more than 100 villages and engaging more than 20,000 community members, the mobile museum played a critical role in the instruction, retention, and revitalization of an intangible cultural heritage. It laid the groundwork for LLDC’s later development by fostering a sense of ownership and participation among artisans and by demonstrating that museums could be truly inclusive and rooted in lived experience.

In 2006, Chanda Shroff was honored with the international Rolex Award for Enterprise for preserving, protecting, and safeguarding the unique embroidery heritage of Kutch and for empowering rural craftswomen. Her pioneering efforts were recognized as “one of the most successful models of social entrepreneurship in her country.”⁶

Building the Living and Learning Design Centre

With the support of the prestigious Rolex award, Chanda Shroff advanced her vision by establishing the Living and Learning Design Centre in Ajrakhpur—a village founded by the Khatri community after the devastating 2001 earthquake in Kutch. The Khatris, renowned for their intricate ajrakh block printing, had previously lived in the village of Dhamadka.⁷ However, the earthquake altered that village’s natural water sources, changing their mineral composition, which negatively affected the quality of the dyes produced there. Seeking better conditions, many Khatris relocated to Ajrakhpur, a site near Bhuj with a more suitable water supply for their craft.

Recognizing the potential of this new site, the Khatris encouraged Shroff to consider acquiring land in the same area, which subsequently led to the procurement of the plot. The location was selected not only for its proximity to the artisans but also for its potential to host a multifunctional campus. Through a process of community dialogue and environmental assessment, the land was eventually prepared for construction. Importantly, the acquisition of this property involved ongoing community collaboration and consultation, outlining the vision and plans for the site, ensuring that the initiative was embraced as a collective effort rather than an external imposition.

The acquisition of the land marked a pivotal transition for LLDC—from mobile outreach to a permanent institutional presence. It signaled a long-term commitment to the region and laid the foundation for a built environment that reflects the values of resilience, inclusivity, and cultural continuity. By embedding the institution within the living context of one of Kutch’s most iconic craft traditions—ajrakh—LLDC reinforced its mission to support and sustain artisan life through meaningful, place-based cultural infrastructure.

The architectural design of LLDC had to emphasize structural resilience, incorporating earthquake-resistant technologies alongside vernacular building practices. In doing so, it addressed environmental risks while maintaining the region’s architectural heritage. The design team, working with local engineers and artisans, aimed to ensure the building could withstand future seismic activity.

Locally sourced materials were combined with reinforced structural systems to create a hybrid approach that enhanced durability while preserving cultural continuity. The campus layout—including galleries, studios, and open courtyards—was designed to support rainwater harvesting and to optimize natural ventilation and lighting, thus reducing reliance on mechanical systems and promoting environmental sustainability. For thermal stability, the design team used bricks made from lime and fly ash. Lime mortar was prepared on-site by grinding lime with sand and cement, and this gauged mortar was used for the masonry work. Natural lime plaster, applied using traditional methods, was used in the interiors of two galleries.⁸

Although Kutch experiences a predominantly hot and arid climate, winter nights can be very cold. To regulate temperature extremes, the building plan incorporates passive cooling strategies. Fenestrations of varying sizes on the west and south sides allow winter sunlight while minimizing summer heat and enhancing ventilation. Shaded passageways offer cooler zones, and rainwater harvesting tanks collect approximately 500,000 liters annually, supplemented by onsite wastewater management.

By embedding resilience into its architecture, LLDC exemplifies how cultural institutions can be both context-sensitive and future-ready. The building itself serves as a pedagogical tool, demonstrating how indigenous knowledge and modern engineering can converge to create spaces that are safe, sustainable, and symbolically rich.

Documenting the Collections 

Alongside the building of the Living and Learning Design Centre, work was begun on documenting the collections in readiness for the gallery displays. Of particular importance were the specially commissioned embroidered panels initiated through the Design Center On Wheels. Each piece was systematically photographed and catalogued, including details such as the maker’s name, community affiliation, and pattern type, preserving the unique identities and cultural significance of each motif, such as the scorpion at the midway point on either side of the central medallion in figure 5. Oral interviews were conducted in Kutchi—a dialect that has no written script—and were later translated into Gujarati and then English. These interview transcripts were also digitized to ensure comprehensive recordkeeping. This time-consuming process could only be overseen through locally recruited teams composed of members of the communities themselves. In doing so, LLDC has been able to capture and contextualize some of the region’s most intricate embroidery as markers of its ecosystems and holistic way of living, heralding a break from previous museological practices. Importantly, many of the team at LLDC are multilingual and have the advantage of being able to speak Kutchi. By sitting with the community members, sharing food, and listening to intergenerational stories of how their crafts have changed over time, they have slowly collected facts, piecing them together over days, months, and years. To date, the communities that are being documented (an ongoing process with varying degrees of completion) are the Ahir (within which are the subgroups of Pranthadiya, Machhoya, Boricha), Meghwaad Gurjar, Sodha and Jadeja, Rabaari (including the subgroups Debariya, Kaachhi, Vagadiya, and Bhopa), Meghwaad Maaru, Jat (Garasiya, Danetah, Fakirani, and Haajani), Rau Node, Mutwa, and Halepotra. 

By actively recruiting staff from within these communities, LLDC has been able to ensure and conserve a granular level of knowledge that has been authentically verified at each stage. This practice remains ongoing, safeguarding cultural heritage through grassroots representation and local expertise. Additionally, the collection continues to expand through the acquisition and donations of personal traditional garments and artifacts from the communities as well as those made for commercial sale and the repatriation of antique garments and crafts from Kutch, previously held in Western public and private collections.

Storing the Collections

The collections at the Living and Learning Design Centre are housed in purpose-built, specialized facilities, with the natural materials of the building and construction serving as active agents, conducive to regulating the temperature and light levels. To ensure the collections are protected from pest infestations, natural preventive methods that use local indigenous insect-repelling herbs are employed. Since traditional Western materials like Melinex are unsuitable for the climate, finely woven unbleached cotton and herb-filled pouches are placed within the storage units, and to minimize contamination, visitors and staff must enter barefoot: No outside footwear is allowed inside the archive.⁹

Programming at the Living and Learning Design Centre

The Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery at LLDC serve as dynamic spaces for the transmission, experimentation, and celebration of Kutch’s rich craft traditions. Designed not merely as a production unit but also as pedagogical and collaborative environments, these spaces facilitate a range of activities bridging traditional knowledge and contemporary practice.

Workshops are regularly conducted in the Hands-On gallery, bringing together master artisans, apprentices, students, and visiting designers. These sessions focus on skills transmission, enabling younger generations to learn intricate techniques such as ajrakh block printing, embroidery, felting, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The studio also functions as a site for experimentation, as a place in which artisans are encouraged to innovate with materials, motifs, and forms while remaining rooted in traditional aesthetics.

Community engagement is central to the Craft Studio’s ethos. Local residents and artisans are invited to observe and participate in open-studio days, fostering a sense of shared ownership and cultural pride. Collaborative projects with design institutions and nongovernmental organizations create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and economic empowerment. Through its multifaceted programming, the Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery exemplify LLDC’s mission to sustain living traditions by embedding them in spaces of learning, creativity, and community interaction.

Currently, there are approximately 30 active crafts in Kutch, encompassing textiles, vegetal materials, metals, and pottery. Each craft is maintained and utilized, with traditional techniques adapted to suit the available natural resources. LLDC includes these practices as a central aspect of its programming.

Throughout the year, various programs take place, featuring live and performing arts such as dance, drama, music, and film screenings as well as academic conferences and award ceremonies that recognize the work of local artisans. The Winter Festival is an annual major event bringing together traditional craft communities from across India.

Sustaining the Longevity of Craft: Community and Cultural Resilience

The Living and Learning Design Centre offers a compelling model for rethinking museum practice in rural and environmentally sensitive contexts. The pioneering work of the late Chanda Shroff continues under the leadership of her daughter, Ami Shroff. By integrating indigenous knowledge systems into its architectural design, curatorial strategies, and community engagement, LLDC challenges conventional museological frameworks that often prioritize static preservation over dynamic cultural continuity. Its establishment reflects a deliberate effort to create a space that is not only resilient to seismic and climatic disruptions but also responsive to the sociocultural fabric of the region.

The Centre’s infrastructure—characterized by its use of local materials, vernacular construction techniques, and participatory planning—demonstrates a contextually grounded approach to sustainability and resilience. Furthermore, LLDC’s hybrid functionality as a museum, educational hub, and craft studio positions it as a site of both cultural preservation and economic empowerment. It facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer and supports the livelihoods of artisans engaged in traditional crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and block printing (to name but a few), each one a complex and historically rich practice unique to the region.

In translating a global institutional model into a locally embedded framework, LLDC contributes to a broader discourse on culturally responsive heritage infrastructure. It underscores the importance of ecological sensitivity, community participation, and cultural specificity in the development of museums that serve not only as repositories of history but also as living systems of learning and innovation. As such, LLDC offers valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to design inclusive and resilient cultural institutions in the Global South.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her indigenous group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

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Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

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In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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The somewhat offhand archive called Track Changes nests in the permanent, and therefore more premeditated, display of the art collection of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila. The items in this collection are organized according to a loose art-historical diachrony and within broadly conceived tropes of light, province, unease, and passage. Layered around this nucleus of privileged objects are select contemporary artworks and archival materials. The latter comprise Track Changes, which aims to introduce the public to the archives of the Vargas Museum and the University of the Philippines. The clusters of things are rendered equivalent to and contemporaneous with the encounter of the art through a paracuratorial supplement that exists adjacently to the collection; this arrangement enhances a porous scenography that pursues the interdisciplinarity research inscribed in the word “Filipiniana,” which may mean anything, and so everything, or at the very least, something Philippine. And because Track Changes reminds the public that the museum is the custodian of more than just art as validated by an elite and an expert class, it alerts them to the redistribution of the values of the motley “stuff” of which the museum is steward.

In certain ways, the initiation is an insertion into the stable canon of the collection, thus alluding to a “distraction,” to drag or to pull in different directions in Latin and late Middle English, but not altogether a disruption. It is a practical diversion, so to speak, a delay of expectation consisting of vitrines resting on the spindly legs of wooden tables that may easily be moved or stored. The room housing the collection is surrounded by glass, the panes of which are framed by aluminum, and dappled by various illuminations at different times of the day from the outside. Not a typical white cube, it situates the viewer amid art and nature in a kind of wraparound transparency that instills the feeling of being in a museum and, at the same time, experiencing a kind of continuum with external happenstance, be it rain or a riot. Track Changes is both implicit and complicit, receding and advancing within the institution but not seeking a center; in fact, it is at the sides, flush to the glass wall and so invites oblique reading in the way of an annotation or an aside. While sufficiently present, it is neither ubiquitous nor conspicuous: rather, it is intermingled and intermittent though delicately indented.

The initiation into this endeavor is titled The Native Strain: Guillermo Tolentino and Aurelio Alvero. It focuses on the relationship between Jorge B. Vargas (1890–1980), collector and donor of the collection; artist-professor Guillermo Tolentino (1890–1976); and curator-critic Aurelio Alvero (1913–1958). These three figures are related at certain nodes. Vargas collected the stalwart academic sculptor Tolentino, and Alvero helped Vargas set up his collection. Furthermore, the archives of Tolentino are in the University of the Philippines, which administers the Vargas collection and where Vargas was a student in its first law class and later a regent. Relating Tolentino and Alvero to Vargas is particularly intriguing as it gives us a glimpse into the aesthetic and political implications of making art, making nationalisms, and making museums in the interwar, war, and postwar years in the Philippines.

Jorge Vargas aspired to a postwar national culture through an art collection, as stated in the founding papers of the collection. The latter yield references to cultural heritage being vital for a “young Republic” and the logic of art being a kind of “accumulation” that serves as a gauge of a “level of culture.” According to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection, the pieces are viewed as “representative of a national art.” The first catalogue, published in 1943, spells out the aims of the collection: “‘encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in the presentation of their works’ . . . helping ‘Filipinos to know and treasure our cultural heritage’. . . and . . . contributing ‘to the proper presentation of Philippine art.’”¹ Vargas commissioned modernist painter Victorio Edades (1895–1985), who studied architecture and mural-making at the University of Washington in Seattle and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska, to write the first catalogue of his collection; and Alvero completed a catalogue of his own collection titled Art in Tagala (1942/1944).² These efforts may well be the earliest anthologies of art criticism and curatorial writing in the Philippines to the degree that they attempted close readings of works in a collection.

Alvero and Tolentino were nativists who exalted the pre-Hispanic Philippine lifeworld; at the same time, they were decisively (other)worldly, advocates of abstraction and builders of monuments. The term “nativist” is deployed here as a provocation and pertains to the range of articulations that may be considered not-yet or never-to-become colonial (and therefore potentially national or nationalist) or, perhaps, the basis of the exemplary folklore that is the nation, or its afterlife via a new folkloristics in the contemporary. Tolentino was a sculptor of the classical tradition, of the heroic and allegorical kind, and a spiritist who convened séances. He also proffered claims on the Philippine primeval such as its writing system or script, spinning some esoteric codes and wildly transhistorical comparisons.

Jorge Vargas was born into a family that had significant interests in sugar in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. He was a political figure in the Philippines, its first executive secretary, who served the governments of the United States and Japan from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in American bureaucracy with various portfolios including defense and agriculture, Vargas was invested in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of a gamut of things that, from art to ashtrays, included stamps, coins, photographs, books, and documents, inter alia. He was accused of conniving with the Japanese and later convicted, only to be absolved by the postwar government. He donated his collection to the University of the Philippines, which opened the museum in his name in 1987.

Kept in the vitrines of Track Changes are important texts that tend to inflect the trope of the Philippine bildung. Tolentino’s excursus references a deep past, an ancient ethnic and racial community lying beyond the strictly colonial and imperialist civilization. For instance, in Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog (The Language and Script of Tagalog, 1937), he unfolds an almost encyclopedic account of the Philippines through the different systems of knowledge, describing flora, fauna, and people in lofty and idiosyncratic Tagalog, an ethnolinguistic marker of communities around the capital of Manila.³ Tolentino illustrated some of the pages, including the one imagining how the Tower of Babel might have looked from an interplanetary perspective and in the context of the birth of Tagalog as one of the world’s languages.

Alvero, who opened his collection to the public in 1942, was born to intellectuals. His father was the painter and interior decorator Emilio Alvero (1886–1955), and his mother was Rosa Sevilla (1879–1954), founder of the Instituto de Mujeres (1900), the first Filipino-run lay Catholic school for women. He was an accomplished orator and took up law and education simultaneously. He was a poet and taught English, history, and the Tagalog language. He was tried as a Japanese collaborator and imprisoned from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1952. He cofounded the Young Philippines, a fringe nationalist party of the 1930s advocating that “The Political Salvation of the World Lies in Dictatorship Rather than Democracy.” Alvero founded a “quasi-fascist, blue-shirted” organization that was modeled on groups in Germany, Italy, and Spain.⁴ He went by the name of Magtanggul Asa, which in the local language means “Defending Hope,” and wrote prodigiously on Philippine culture. A case deserving closer study is the monograph titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala written in 1954 in Manila, in which he theorizes the rubric of the “non-objective” based on the First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines, which opened in 1953 at the modernist nerve center in postwar Manila, the Philippine Art Gallery. Here, he would realign the idiom of western abstraction twice: first through the term “non-objective” and second through “Tagala,” a reference to the dominant ethnic society in the country that is appropriated presumably as an alternative to the colonial appellation of the archipelago, which is the Philippines, the genealogy of Filipiniana. With Alvero and Tolentino looming in the mindset of Vargas, the absolute and the occult alternate with the self-conscious and the internationalist to conjure the fantasy of the modern. 

Alongside documents related to Vargas, Alvero, and Tolentino, the vitrines also contain visual material from the Japanese occupying forces that portray the Americans as murderous, while promising social stability and prosperity through the banking system, health service, and a market economy under their auspices. Curiously, in their illustrations, which are veritable wartime propaganda, the template is American comics and editorial cartoons, thus indicating a persistence of American popular visuality across colonial cultures.

To discuss Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero as an ensemble is to anticipate a theoretical and historiographic framework of the Philippine modern that considers the aesthetic, artifactual, and discursive implications of the archival material inscribed in or ornamenting the collection. What might be offered here concomitantly is a method that contemplates the postcolonial modern through a paracuratorial visibility. In this regard, the modern is not singularly intuited as a mode of progress or criticality; like the vitrines in Track Changes, this modern is, as alluded to earlier, offhand. For the ethos of Vargas insisted on a certain pleasure in appreciating the distracting collectible, perhaps an elaboration of the desire to belong to an abstract collective.

The term “kawilihan” is key. Kawilihan was the name of Vargas’s residential complex and the site of the collection before its transfer to the university. It roughly translates as fascination, distraction, or absorption. It shapes the time and pursuit of leisure, even of reverie. The complex was imagined as Pleasantville and was part of the development of the suburbs of Manila. It had a garden where Vargas raised vegetables, chickens, and pigs, and ample spaces where he hosted costume parties. Besides being a concept-work, kawilihan was also real estate, the land that bought and preserved the art.

The care and thoughtfulness that sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its distinct institutional framework had Vargas not settled on an intellectual scheme that braided culture and nation, not to mention art and garden. It was a scheme seen within the context of fondness for materials in a collection thriving on heterogeneity and later subjected to analysis in a university museum. Across these interactions, the collection would feed into a life of ferment, speculation, and scholarship. These three impulses of fascination, culture, and university animate the collecting instinct of Vargas and the collection. The phrase “university museum” holds two of modernity’s most consummate bureaucracies: the university and the museum, from which stem the prospects of enlightenment and radical epistemology through knowing and sensing. The alternation between homegrown joy and critical institution is instructive.

The joy derives from kawilihan. It is at once residence, collection, museum. Its root “wili” is also attentiveness, interest, penchant, liking, pleasure, enjoyment. In the early lexicon, it straddles between afección (in Juan de Noceda and Pedro San Lucar), a profound, deep-seated affection on the one hand, and afición (in Pedro San Buenaventura), a habit, inclination, talent, or an enthusiasm on the other. These words gravitate toward “love”; in one Filipino translation of “wili,” it is considered “mataos na pagmamahal,” or a lofty devotion to a beloved.⁵ If kawilihan as a structure of feeling hangs over a particular sensitivity to a precious belonging, then it is a cognate of the ethos of care and inevitably of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the custody of, or of curiosity, the inquisitiveness about things. Because the state of kawilihan or the condition of wili is absorption, love becomes a discursive articulation of the word: the collector, or lover, loses the self, which is absorbed in the collection.

In the Pedro Serrano Laktaw dictionary, the absorbed subject is an “aficionado, apegado, encariñado,” that is, generally attached, and a connoisseur. Such cultivated attachment and connoisseurship are mediated by an object of desire. The example of the lexicographer is intriguingly allegorical and potentially moral: “Hindi mawiwili ang aso, / kundi binibigyan nang buto.”⁶ The dog will not be engaged if not given a bone. Wili, therefore, hinges the subject to the object for it to be distracted.

Criticality informs the second aspect, specifically how the conceptualization of culture and the state, or how the state represents the polity through culture, or the ethical necessity of representativeness for a common image of an ethical community that professes the symbolic birthright of a tradition.⁷ To be more concrete in the Philippine historical context, the trope of the American Commonwealth and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to a collective and expansionist imaginary rooted in colonial history. And the sui generis Vargas was right at the center of these projects and at the same time the collector of the evolving Filipiniana of the Philippines. No other figure in Philippine history rivals his acumen and dexterity in terms of the country’s political and aesthetic education. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote a detailed account of the Vargas collaboration case, opines that the “collaboration question was . . . the brainchild of the Americans who, acting under the pressure of the prevailing war psychosis, dictated to the hapless Filipinos what they should and should not do or think in relation to the incidents and accidents of the war.”⁸

What Track Changes does is to create a relationality between the historiography, which is also the museology, of colonial and modern art and the curatorial supplement that is not programmatic or thematic, but rather contingent and tropic. It insinuates itself from within the institution and beside, or within reach of, the displayed collection to hopefully choreograph, or subtly incite, the frisson of “situated knowledge” across the varia or corpora in the room. In other words, the paracuratorial in this instance coordinates, hints at, a cognitive mapping of things in a tentative totality without lapsing into ideological iconography or art-historical repetition. The “para-” turns out to also be “proto-” in that it reveals symptoms of the museological unconscious of Vargas as well as the apparatus that enabled the collection to cohere and then ramify across temporalities through curatorial activation. The native, the national, and the non-objective suffuse this utterance of the modern—all caught up in contradictions but also pointing to a third moment beyond the dualisms that underlie all stylizations of coloniality and its attendant class-, gender-, race-continuous discriminations. Track Changes proves to be a viable intersectional site that cannot be quickly co-opted by narrow specialization and the positivisms it attracts.

The native, the national, and the non-objective initiate a relay between expressions of the subjectivity that is the Philippine, construed as a figurine and not an identity. The latter dilates across the said three registers in which various imaginaries coalesce to generate particular phases, and plasticities, of modernity: the supposed authenticity of the indigenous (the native), the idealized cultural character of postcolonial autonomy (the national), and the eccentric entitlement to a transcultural and international abstraction (the non-objective) in which all empirical and rational references are banished as if to perform the purity of the native and the melancholic hubris of the national. In a certain way, the Philippine is all of these, condensing in the acquisitive personas of Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero, who communed with the archaic, the multitude, and the dead—all taken by liberal sympathies, cabinets of curiosity of their own. In this sequence of categories, the notion of the modern becomes exceptionally complex, interpellated by the difficult desires of belonging, and not belonging, to the aesthetic polity of the colonial western by sketching out a cognate genealogy of the Kantian sensus communis: the bodies of willful subjects, which include the collector, the collection, and the culture. This can only be the very groundwork of the museum, its curatorial substrate, when it renders the art ambiguously present in its space, “derived from distractive experience” and turned into an “abstraction of bits of the world.”⁹ Modern art critic Richard Shiff brings distraction, abstraction, and the (non)objective together rhythmically: as the art is grasped so does it “draw away” and “draw apart” from how it is sensed as actually existing and how its becoming real is not only poignantly, but also punctually prefigured.¹⁰

To end with another distraction: In 2022, the Philippine government asked the Vargas Museum to temporarily keep and curate the collection of about five hundred pieces from the collection of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, at a time when the couple’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had become president. The items in the collection comprise paintings on canvas, glass, and wood. They are crafted from the tradition of lacquer, egg tempera and copper, and the ornament of gold leaf, among other mediums. These objects are paintings from the late Gothic and Rococo periods in Italy, reverse glass paintings from former Yugoslavia of folk-fantastic style and called “naif” in Southeast Europe, and lacquer vanity cases and religious icons from Russia. The Marcos government was hailed as developmentalist and cosmopolitan but was deposed by a popular uprising in the wake of autocracy and allegedly massive thieving.

While not cohabiting with the display of the collection and Track Changes, the Marcos collection finds its place alongside the Vargas Collection guided by a kindred paracuratorial sensibility. The task of a university museum is to invite a mindful and urgent study of these objects as well as the tricky lives of Vargas and Ferdinand Marcos, both of whom were enmeshed in the history of colonialism, the formation of nation-states, the accumulation of wealth, and the status itself of objects in collections. With their contentious imbrication as the ecology, essential questions may be revisited: What is an object? How does it become property or patrimony? Why is it in the world, why are we around it, and what do we as subjects do about it?

When the initiatory and coincidental Track Changes asks these same questions, digressively and not aggressively or even transgressively, it drags and pulls the museum in different directions, paracuratorially. As the title “Track Changes” suggests, it traces the indicia of amendments to the text, the writing itself of difference—or the difference finally of curatorial writing.

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“In cosmic beauty, there is no place for degrees or locations in time and space: Cosmic beauty is infinite. Words like pretty, ugly, tragic, funny, and useful—the abiding limits in the brief race toward death—on the other hand, are part and parcel of sensual reactions.”¹

With these words, Costa Rican artist Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) describes the crucial difference between an art that leads to the infinite—abstract art, in his case—and a transient art that reflects immediate emotion—a characteristic particularly evident, in his view, in figurative art.² Manuel de la Cruz understood art as a tool to integrate humankind into the universality of the cosmos in order to yield cosmic beauty. The quote above is taken from his lecture “El arte como integración cósmica” (“Art as Cosmic Integration”), which he gave in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1957. In this talk, the artist laid out his theories on the cosmic value of geometric abstraction. Over the course of the 1950s, he not only lectured and wrote on these ideas, he also developed a body of work that reflected his thinking, a line of production that he would extend into the early 1970s.

Also in the 1950s, another artist from Costa Rica embarked on a body of work tied to the transcendent. But unlike Manuel de la Cruz, Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982) did not attempt to integrate universal truth into her art.³ Instead, she professed to accept that it was impossible to access one’s ultimate reality. In the paintings, drawings, and stained-glass works that she produced in the 1950s through the end of her life, landscape and the human figure predominate; her lines and brushstrokes convey a specific way of perceiving the natural environment, humankind, and the spirituality in which both are steeped (fig. 2).For Luisa, the perceptible forms in her surroundings were the elements in which it was possible to experience and even see the transcendent.

In this essay, I will address these artists’ visions of the spiritual and the transcendent and how their work reveals predominant twentieth-century stances on the role of art in the representation and transformation of the spiritual.⁴Manuel de la Cruz exemplifies an artist who understood art and his own work as evidence of the vibrations of an irrefutable universal truth. Art, for him, was a device that when understood in terms of cosmic beauty, transports the human being to an absolute human state. Luisa, on the other hand, held that one cannot know ultimate truth in this lifetime. That said, she expressed no doubt that the natural environment and humankind are imbued in spirituality, an immanent charge so potent that it can change our very perception of things. Her work is not a device for integration, but instead the materialization of a spiritual world enmeshed in daily life.

Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz were part of the generation of pioneering Costa Rican artists who, in the 1930s, introduced the avant-garde to their country.⁵ In the late 1940s, Manuel de la Cruz ventured into abstraction, and in the early 1950s, he moved to Venezuela.⁶ It was in the context of a Venezuelan art scene influenced by Neo-Plasticism, a movement spearheaded by Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944), that Manuel de la Cruz developed his theories.⁷ Early in her painting career, Luisa focused on landscapes and portraits. Starting in the late 1940s, her work grew more hermetic as she looked to the natural landscape of the Costa Rican highlands. At that juncture, her palette darkened, and her images became suggestive of an adverse and unstable environment, one that inspired a degree of abstraction in her depictions of nature. The artist addressed a range of religious and mythical themes, and she almost obsessively fashioned scenes in which nature takes precedence over humankind. Though she pursued her artistic career in Costa Rica, a collection of drawings preserved by the Sáenz-Shelby family suggests that the natural settings and cities she visited in the United States and Europe also influenced her production. Indeed, these places resonate in many of the sketches closely tied to the work she began in the 1950s.

In 1956, Manuel de la Cruz published the essay “El arte abstracto: Realidad de nuestro tiempo” (“Abstract Art: The Reality of Our Times”) in the Costa Rican magazine Brecha. In this text, he states that abstract art is the “reaffirmation of eternal aesthetic truths.”⁸ Abstraction, in other words, was, in his mind, a universal art that transcends geographic boundaries. In his lecture in Maracaibo in 1957, the artist suggested that the components that make up the universe are number, rhythm, order, and balance. He described an eternal cosmos in which any independent form is ultimately tied to a universal whole, where life consists of endless integration and reintegration of energy, and the human spirit and the universe are vibrantly connected.⁹ From this perspective, he argued, art can be seen as “a way to unleash certain reactions we call aesthetic. . . . It is aimed at a certain aspect of the human in an inevitable pursuit of attuned cosmic vibrations [where] the human moment is seen as a bridge to its universal integration.”¹⁰ These “cosmic vibrations” are what is emitted by the harmonic rhythm manifested in the geometric shapes, lines, and colors used in painting, which itself facilitates cosmic integration (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz presented three routes—the spontaneous, the intuitive, and the intellectual—by which art can lead to cosmic integration. Based on these, he outlined categories for an art history in which abstract art from the first half of the twentieth century corresponds to the intellectual route. That said, all three routes are revealed throughout history, and the art at play in each of them is tied to the cosmic eternity that envelops humankind.¹¹Manuel de la Cruz looked to the “inner necessity” declared by Vasily Kandinsky (French, born Russia. 1866–1944) in 1911 in Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) to understand major historical events in the world of the arts and culture. In “El Cuadro Tridimensional” (“The Three-Dimensional Painting”), which he published in 1958, Manuel de la Cruz asserts: “Both during his era and beyond it, Fra Angelico is interesting—and will always be interesting . . . not because he painted angels, but because of how he painted them. He imbued them in that mystical oneness common to all men, even when that zeal is directed to Buddha or Quetzalcoatl. He is interesting, then, because of how he expressed his ‘inner necessity.’”¹²

Manuel de la Cruz expressed that he saw the transition from “primitive” thought to rational thought, and that the final route—the intellectual—was, for him, the one that lays out a path to truth, to “its cosmic reason, its vital, eternal and universal rhythms.”¹³ He argued that it is possible to imbue the work of art with the conditions that enable cosmic integration, and further, that these conditions are present to a large degree in the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky (figs. 4, 5). As he asserted in his 1957 lecture, “Both of them understood that the only way to reach the infinite rhythm is through abstraction, the elimination of any trace of reference, sensuality, or allegory, the total omission of the romantic.”¹⁴

In the context of this lecture and his essays, Manuel de la Cruz’s geometric abstract painting underscores his commitment to the notion of universality. In his Abstracción geométrica nº 8 (Geometric Abstraction No. 8; fig. 6), for example, flat color planes interact with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, as well as with simple geometric shapes. In works like Equilibrio cósmico (Cosmic Balance), slightly curved lines generate a tension between color and form.¹⁵

Unlike Manuel de la Cruz González, Luisa González de Sáenz did not leave a body of writing describing her vision of art. What we have instead are brief interviews, critical reviews of her work over the course of decades, and the testimony of friends and family. In other words, Luisa appears to have been less inclined to describe her process. She seems to have been most interested in how art could become a daily means of expression. When her art was exhibited to the public, what was on display was her perception of the environment, the spiritual, and humanity.¹⁶ In figure 7, for instance, we see a landscape, in all its vastness and spirituality, overpowering the solitary individual and the path they have trodden. The night sky transforms into a flying creature that seems to have emerged from the night itself.

Luisa’s creative work is overwhelmingly figurative. Figuration was for her, as she stated in 1957, “the best form of expression [for me]. Truth is the ultimate pursuit of art and all forms of expression. [Figurative art] is my truth.”¹⁷ She drew on highland landscapes—trees, mist, gusts of wind, and temperature—for that personal expression.¹⁸ The artist believed that the inability of humankind to perceive nature differently was an impediment born of a spirit largely closed to sensory experience.¹⁹ In her mind, society shuts down the possibilities of the gaze available only to an open spirit. Her art, then, gradually came to engage not only what is observed by that spiritual vision, but also what is transformed, via the spiritual, in the human being and nature. As she states in a recording from Carlos Freer’s 1999 documentary Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz (An Evening of Herself: Portrait of Doña Luisa González de Sáenz): “I am not sure if there is such a thing as spiritual change, though that is something we all go through, right? We often evolve, and our spirit is transformed, without even realizing it, right? I gradually became very interested in the human soul, and I saw it as much in nature as in persons themselves.”²⁰

According to Costa Rican writer Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), Luisa had the ability “to materialize the spiritual, to render it visible, to make it our own; [and] to spiritualize matter, to render it impalpable—and that is no less our own.”²¹ She would transfigure observable nature by means of a style characterized by strong brushstrokes or lines that yield an atmosphere so integral, adverse, and shifting that it veers into abstraction as the elements represented blur into one another. This is evident in an illustration she made to accompany the short story “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático” (“María de la Soledad: Episode in the Life of Doctor Lunatic”), which was written by her brother Mario González Feo (fig. 8). In this drawing, she has referenced two sentences uttered by the main character in the story: “How I wish I could feel the vital force of that transfigured evening. Because the whole evening was transfigured!”²² Also relevant is the passage that precedes these sentences: “There are things and persons that are transfigured at a given moment by dint of the extraordinary force we call mystery. They are still themselves, but it is as if an inner light, an inward flame . . . lit them up and gave them an interior transparency—that is transfiguration.”²³ The image shows a figure in a desolate landscape; her body is part of the natural space in general, but mostly it forms the rays of a “light” in the sky. We can distinguish between the terrain on which the figure stands and the sky, and we can sense the tension between that source of light and the figure. At the same time, the quality of the line gives these elements—figure, sky, light—a sense of mobility and adversity.

The idea that spiritual observation and expression are individual runs through the artist’s life and work: the soul is inevitably and innately alone, even when in the company of others.²⁴ Most of the human figures that cross Luisa’s landscapes do so alone; when there is more than one figure, they do not seem to notice one another. Her work, on the other hand, is steeped not only in spiritual transformation and solitary pilgrimage, but also in acceptance of the impossibility of seeing the true face of transcendence or of life after death.

Luisa was fond of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (Persian, 1048–1131), and she made several drawings inspired by it. The Rubaiyat values taking immediate pleasure in life, since human knowledge is categorically incapable of answering the fundamental questions faced by humanity, such as the reason for life and death. Luisa’s drawing of quatrain 68, for example, reflects these ideas (fig. 9): “We are no other than a moving row / Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go / Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held / In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”²⁵ Here, once again, the artist has used light to transfigure space. With the force of her line, she makes us feel that we are witness to an inevitable transformation or transience, one that will affect both humankind and nature. In another sketch (fig. 10), she has transcribed a passage from quatrain 32, which discusses those places of knowledge inaccessible to humankind: “There was the Door to which I found no Key; / There was the Veil through which I could not see.”²⁶

The representation here is more somber than in the other works discussed. A path in a desolate nighttime setting leads to a door, behind which lies the transcendental to which humans have no access. The faces and bodies of the three lantern-lit figures walking toward that door are covered. These figures do not have the key to that space of knowledge—to be sure, no one does.

It is entirely possible that Luisa’s art was influenced by literary and philosophical sources other than the Rubaiyat, though we cannot know for certain which ones. As previously mentioned, the artist did not make this information public. By attempting to reconstruct in part how the artist seems to have understood her work, we can say that she was conscious of a spiritual world that the human soul was capable of perceiving both in the soul itself and in the natural environment in which the soul unfolds. This interaction leads to a constant but solitary transformation of the soul and of nature in an individual spiritual experience that continues throughout existence. That sensibility is patent in Luisa’s work—as is the interaction between and mutual transformation of the individual and the environment. At the same time, she seems to have understood the limit of that experience; as is evident in her work, any other aspect of the transcendent, especially anything related to life after death, is shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

Manuel de la Cruz, on the other hand, made the points of reference for his artistic agenda known. These influences range from a Hegelian notion of history and trust in science to the aesthetic and spiritual theories of modern abstract artists who were, in turn, influenced by the Theosophical Society, which had its own stance on scientific advancement.²⁷ Similar ideas are at play in Manuel de la Cruz’s writings and Mondrian’s essays. For the Dutch artist, “Art—although an end in itself, like religion—is the means through which we can know the universal and contemplate it in plastic form.”²⁸ Manuel de la Cruz, like Kandinsky, asserted that he was living at a watershed moment in history, a time when truths were revealed; art could help, he argued, to manifest that revelation.²⁹ With Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian himself foresaw a new culture “of the mature individual; once matured, the individual will be open to the universal and will tend more and more to unite with it.”³⁰

Through influences such as these, Manuel de la Cruz developed his own vision of a macro-history. He was interested in deciphering the mystery of time and the relative truth regarding the role of humankind in the cosmos—concerns he shared with esotericism.³¹ And these concerns also informed his conception of Neo-Plasticism. In his writings, he follows a narrative akin to that of a number of esoteric traditions in which “all things originate in one and all things in turn flow and return to one.”³² It is within this conceptual framework that Manuel de la Cruz forged his vision of art history. In his view, this history advanced toward cosmic truth and the repudiation of a certain sensual and superficial individualism whose final champion was Romanticism.³³

In closing, we might read Luisa’s art in the context of the historical progress posited by Manuel de la Cruz. Some strains of Romantic thinking resonate in her work, at least in terms of an aesthetic that expresses the spirituality innate to nature. Think of William Blake (English, 1757–1827) and Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), for instance.³⁴ The Romantics, like Luisa González de Sáenz, understood that the spiritual can be captured in its environment through the subjective, that is, through a personal vision. True knowledge—or the knowledge to which the individual can gain access—exists only in the subjective,³⁵ an idea that aligns with Luisa’s perception of the possibility of seeing the world through the opening of the soul.

How to understand humankind in our environment and the universal principles that govern us were concerns shared by Manuel de la Cruz and Luisa. Their distinctive artistic and, perhaps, personal experiences led them to contrasting sets—or fabrics—of beliefs, practices, and systems as well as strategies. Manuel de la Cruz’s work engages the control and understanding of truths that can be materialized in an object, and Luisa’s the veiled nature of the spiritual that is, nonetheless, experienced and, therefore, potentially materialized in the object.

I am grateful to Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López, and Leonardo Santamaría Montero for their comments on early drafts of this text. I would like to thank Sofía Vindas Solano and the Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural for the information they provided on Luisa González de Sáenz and for access to primary sources relevant to her life and work. Lastly, I thank the Museo de Arte Costarricense and the Museos del Banco Central for allowing me to reproduce works from their collections.

Spanish

“La belleza cósmica no admite gradaciones o localizaciones geográficas o cronológicas, es infinita, mientras que las reacciones sensuales llevan aparejados los términos de bonito, feo, trágico, humorístico, útil, límites constantes en su fugaz carrera hacia la muerte”.³⁶

Con estas palabras, el artista costarricense Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) determinaba la diferencia crucial entre un arte que conducía al infinito, ejemplificado en su caso por la abstracción, y un arte transitorio que respondía a emociones inmediatas, características que son más evidentes en el arte figurativo.³⁷ El artista conceptualizó el arte como una herramienta que generaba la integración del ser humano en la universalidad del cosmos, lo que daría como resultado la belleza cósmica. Esta cita forma parte de la conferencia impartida por Manuel de la Cruz en Maracaibo, Venezuela, en 1957, titulada “El arte como integración cósmica”, en la cual propuso sus teorías sobre el valor cósmico del arte abstracto geométrico. A lo largo de la década de 1950, el artista también dictará otras conferencias y escribirá ensayos al respecto, además de iniciar una producción de obras que reflejan sus preceptos teóricos y que culminaría a inicios de los años setenta.

En la misma década de 1950, otra artista costarricense iniciará una producción también vinculada a lo trascendente, pero, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz, no había en su trabajo una intención de integración en esa verdad universal, sino una aceptación de la imposibilidad de acceder a la realidad última del ser. Me refiero a Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982), cuyas pinturas, dibujos y vitrales se enfocaron, a partir de los años cincuenta y hasta el final de sus días, en un estilo donde el paisaje y la figura humana predominan, y las formas de expresión en la línea y la pincelada plasmaban una manera de percibir el entorno natural, el ser humano, y los aspectos espirituales imbuidos en ambos (fig. 2).³⁸ Luisa trató las formas perceptibles proporcionadas por su entorno como los elementos en los que era posible sentir y ver lo trascendente.

En este ensayo me concentro en las propuestas sobre lo espiritual y lo trascendente propias de estos artistas, y en cómo sus obras revelan posturas predominantes en el siglo XX sobre el papel del arte en la representación y transformación de lo espiritual.³⁹ En el caso de Manuel de la Cruz, veremos un entendimiento del arte y de su propia producción en cuanto componentes que evidencian las vibraciones adecuadas de una verdad universal irrefutable. El arte se convierte, además, en un artefacto que al ser comprendido bajo conceptos como la belleza cósmica, acerca al ser humano a su estado absoluto. En contraste, la obra de Luisa no acepta que el ser humano pueda conocer, en esta vida, una verdad última y, sin embargo, la artista tiene claro que el entorno natural y las personas están permeados de una carga espiritual, una cualidad inmanente tal, que lo vuelve capaz de modificar la percepción de las cosas. Su obra no es un artefacto para la integración, sino la materialización de un mundo espiritual imbuido de la cotidianeidad que nos rodea.

Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sénz pertenecieron a la generación costarricense de artistas de los años treinta, fundamental para la introducción de las vanguardias artísticas al país.⁴⁰ Hacia finales de la década de 1940, Manuel de la Cruz inició su incursión en el arte abstracto.⁴¹ A inicios de los años cincuenta arribó a Venezuela y ahí, influido por el ambiente artístico del país y por el neoplasticismo, movimiento ampliamente divulgado por Piet Mondrian (neerlandés, 1872–1944), desarrolló sus teorías artísticas.⁴² Luisa comenzó su carrera artística con pinturas de paisajes y el arte del retrato. Desde finales de los años cuarenta empezó a generar obras más herméticas, sirviéndose principalmente del paisaje natural de las zonas de altura. Su paleta de colores se volvió oscura y su estética sugería un escenario pictórico adverso y en movimiento, cuyo resultado plástico indica una cierta abstracción de los elementos naturales. La artista trató disímiles temas religiosos y míticos, y forjó, de manera casi obsesiva, escenas donde la naturaleza imperaba sobre los seres humanos. Si bien desarrolló su carrera artística en Costa Rica, podemos constatar, gracias a la colección de dibujos preservada por la familia Sáenz-Shelby, que los entornos naturales y ciudades que visitó en sus viajes a Estados Unidos y a Europa influyeron en ella, llevándola a realizar una gran cantidad de bocetos de esa temática que guardan una estrecha relación con la producción iniciada en la década de 1950.

En 1956, Manuel de la Cruz publica en la revista costarricense Brecha el ensayo “El arte abstracto: realidad de nuestro tiempo”. El artista entiende el arte abstracto como la “reafirmación de las eternas verdades estéticas”,⁴³ un arte universal que trasciende geografías. En la ya mencionada conferencia de 1957 en Maracaibo, el artista propone que el universo está comprendido en el número, el ritmo, el orden y el equilibrio; un cosmos eterno donde toda forma independiente al final está sujeta a una totalidad universal. La vida consiste en infinitas integraciones y reintegraciones de energía, y el espíritu humano se concibe como una conexión vibrante con este todo universal.⁴⁴ El arte es, en este contexto, “una manera de provocar determinadas reacciones que llamamos estéticas . . . [que] se dirigen a determinada porción de lo humano en inevitable búsqueda de vibraciones cósmicas afines, tomando el momento humano como puente hacia su integración universal”.⁴⁵ Estas ‘vibraciones cósmicas’ son lo emitido por el ritmo armónico que se expresa en las formas geométricas, líneas y colores empleados en la pintura, lo que posibilita el proceso de integración cósmica (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz también establece tres vías artísticas para la integración: la espontánea, la intuitiva y la intelectual; y con ellas compone clasificaciones para una historia del arte, siendo el arte abstracto de la primera mitad del siglo XX la principal vía intelectual. Las vías se muestran a lo largo de la historia, y el arte contenido en ellas son referentes de la eternidad cósmica en la que estamos comprendidos.⁴⁶ Manuel de la Cruz emplea la “necesidad interior”, proclamada por Vasily Kandinsky (Francés, nacido en Rusia, 1866–1944) en 1911 en Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (De lo espiritual en el arte, y la pintura en particular), para entender grandes acontecimientos históricos en el mundo de las artes y de la cultura. En su ensayo “El Cuadro Tridimensional”, publicado en 1958, Manuel de la Cruz nos dice que: “Fra Angelico interesa e interesará siempre, en su época o fuera de ella . . . no porque pintó ángeles, sino el cómo los pintó imbuyéndoles esa unión mística que es común a todos los hombres aún [sic] cuando ese fervor se canalice hacia Buda o Quezlcoatl [sic], vale decir, cómo manifestó su “necesidad interior.”⁴⁷

Manuel de la Cruz ve entonces la transición de un pensamiento primitivo a un pensamiento racional, y es en la última vía donde se puede plantear un camino hacia la verdad, “su razón cósmica, sus ritmos vitales, eternos y universales”.⁴⁸ El artista propone que a la obra de arte se le pueden suministrar las condiciones necesarias para alcanzar la integración cósmica. Esas condiciones están en gran medida representadas por Mondrian y Kandinsky (Figs. 4–5), ya que “ambos comprendieron que sólo por la abstracción, la eliminación de la referencia, de lo sensual y alegórico, el olvido en fin de todo lo romántico, es que podía llegarse al ritmo infinito”.⁴⁹

Cuando observamos la pintura abstracto-geométrica de Manuel de la Cruz en el contexto de estos ensayos, advertimos el compromiso con la noción de universalidad. En su cuadro Abstracción Geométrica Nº 8 (fig. 6), por ejemplo, encontramos plastas planas de color que interactúan con líneas horizontales, verticales y diagonales, además de sencillas formas geométricas. El artista también se sirvió de leves curvaturas de la línea que generaban tensión entre los colores y las formas seleccionadas, tal y como puede verse en Equilibrio cósmico.⁵⁰

Luisa González de Sáenz, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz González, no dejó escritos sistemáticos sobre su modo de visualizar el arte. Lo que conocemos de ella son breves entrevistas que le realizaron, comentarios a sus obras de críticos de arte a lo largo de los años, así como los testimonios de familiares y amigos de la artista. En otras palabras, Luisa sería reservada respecto de los procesos existentes detrás de su obra. El interés se dirigía en cambio a cómo el arte se convertía en un medio diario de expresión: cuando este era expuesto al público, lo que se mostraba era su percepción sobre el entorno, lo espiritual y la humanidad.⁵¹ En la Figura 7 vemos, por ejemplo, el potencial que le dio la artista al paisaje, su inmensidad y su espiritualidad, con respecto al solitario individuo, de quien Luisa nos deja conocer el camino que ha recorrido. El cielo nocturno se transforma en lo que podemos dilucidar, es una criatura voladora en movimiento, como si estuviese atravesando o surgiendo de la noche misma.

Luisa encontró una base para la creación en el arte figurativo, al cual consideraba su “mejor forma de expresión, y como en arte y en toda manifestación se debe buscar la verdad, ésta es mi verdad”.⁵² El paisaje de altura, entre otros, le suministró esos componentes para una expresión personal, tales como la forma de los árboles, la niebla, la fuerza del viento y la temperatura.La artista sentía que la imposibilidad de percibir la naturaleza de forma distinta por parte de las personas era un impedimento causado por la falta de apertura del espíritu a otro tipo de sensaciones.⁵³ La sociedad no se permitía explorar las posibilidades de la mirada que únicamente un espíritu abierto podía proveer. En este sentido, la obra de Luisa se involucró gradualmente no sólo en lo que se observa a partir de esta mirada espiritual, sino también en lo que se transforma espiritualmente en el ser humano y en la naturaleza. Como la artista comenta en una grabación que aparece en el documental de Carlos Freer, Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz, realizado en 1999: “No sé si hay un cambio espiritual, que generalmente todos tenemos, ¿verdad? Hay ciertas evoluciones que sin darse uno mucho cuenta va[n] transformando el espíritu, ¿verdad? Me fui interesando tanto, y ver en la naturaleza tanto [como] en las mismas personas, el alma humana.”⁵⁴

Luisa poseía la capacidad, de acuerdo con el escritor costarricense Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), de “materializar lo espiritual, hasta hacerlo visible y nuestro; espiritualizar lo material hasta hacerlo impalpable, que es también hacerlo nuestro.”⁵⁵ La artista ofrecía una especie de transfiguración de la naturaleza observada, a través de un estilo en el que tanto la pincelada como la línea de dibujo eran fuertes y generaban una atmósfera integrada, adversa y en movimiento, al punto de generar cierta abstracción y falta de claridad entre los elementos representados. Esto se puede advertir en una ilustración que realiza para el cuento “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático”, escrito por su hermano Mario González Feo (fig.8). El dibujo refiere a dos líneas del personaje principal: “ojalá pudiera sentir ahora la fuerza vital de aquella tarde transfigurada. ¡Porque toda la tarde estaba transfigurada!”.⁵⁶ El texto que precede estas oraciones resulta a su vez valioso: “hay cosas y personas que en un momento dado, por la fuerza extraordinaria de lo que llamamos misterio, se transfiguran. Siguen siendo ellas pero una como luz interior, una llama interna . . . les da iluminación, transparencia interior: eso es, transfiguración”.⁵⁷ La imagen muestra una figura situada en un paisaje desolado y su cuerpo se está integrando con el espacio natural, específicamente con los rayos de la “luz” que está en el cielo. Podemos distinguir entre el terreno sobre el que está la figura y el cielo, y también la tensión entre esta fuente lumínica y la figura. Al mismo tiempo, el trazo posibilita la sensación de movilidad y adversidad en cada uno de los elementos mencionados.

La observación y la expresión de lo espiritualmente percibido son actos individuales. Esto daba pie a un pensamiento recurrente en la obra y en la vida de la artista: la inevitable e inherente soledad del alma, que no es posible eliminar aun estando en compañía de otros.⁵⁸ Nos encontramos con paisajes donde la gran mayoría de las figuras humanas transitan en soledad, y si es que hay varios personajes, estos no se percatan los unos de los otros.Por otro lado, aunado a las transformaciones espirituales y el peregrinaje solitario, la aceptación de la imposibilidad de conocer la verdadera cara de la trascendencia, de una vida después de la muerte, permeó su obra.

Luisa profesaba, por ejemplo, un gran cariño por los Rubaiyat, cuartetos atribuidos a Omar Khayyam (persa, 1048–1131), y realizó dibujos referentes a algunos de sus pasajes. En los Rubaiyat es valioso el goce inmediato de la vida, ya que no hay conocimiento humano capaz de darnos las respuestas a las preguntas fundamentales de la humanidad: los motivos detrás de la vida y la muerte. Un dibujo de Luisa, donde se ilustra el cuarteto LXVIII de los Rubaiyat,refleja estas ideas (fig. 9): “No somos más que una hilera en movimiento / De sombras mágicas que van y vienen / En torno a la linterna iluminada por el sol / Y sostenida a medianoche por el Maestro del Espectáculo”.⁵⁹ La artista vuelve a emplear la luz como elemento que transfigura el espacio. Debido a la fuerza del trazo, la artista posibilita la sensación de que nos hallamos ante la inevitable transformación, o transitoriedad, tanto de los individuos como de la naturaleza. Contamos también con un boceto en el que está anotado un fragmento del cuarteto XXXII (fig. 10) sobre aquellos sitios del conocimiento a los cuales el ser humano no puede ingresar: “¡De esa puerta la llave no encontré yo jamás; ese velo ocultaba lo que existe detrás…!”.⁶⁰ A diferencia de otros ejemplos que hemos expuesto, el tema se representa en un estilo más sobrio. Ante un espacio nocturno y desolado se encuentra un camino que se dirige a una puerta, la cual resguarda aquello trascendente a lo que el ser humano no puede acceder. Los tres personajes caminan hacia la puerta, iluminados sólo por sus lámparas, con sus rostros y cuerpos cubiertos. Ni dichos personajes ni nadie posee la llave que permite ingresar a dicho espacio del saber.

El uso de los Rubaiyat nos permite suponer que varios elementos de la obra de Luisa se vieron influidos por referencias literarias o filosóficas, aunque no sea fácil establecer cuáles fueron. Y es que, como ha sido señalado antes, no hizo pública esta información. Al reconstruir parte de la forma en que Luisa entendió su obra, podríamos decir que la artista estaba consciente de un mundo espiritual que el alma humana era capaz de percibir, tanto en ella misma como en el entorno natural en el que se desenvolvía. Esta interacción provoca la transformación constante del alma y de la naturaleza, y dicho proceso espiritual constituía una experiencia individual que se vivía, a lo largo de la existencia, en soledad. Luisa expresó su sentir por vía de una obra donde se pudiese visualizar precisamente esta interacción y transformación entre el individuo y su entorno. Al mismo tiempo, estaba consciente de que ese era el límite de su experiencia y que cualquier otro aspecto sobre lo trascendente, en especial lo concerniente a la vida después de la muerte, quedaba resguardado en el misterio.

Manuel de la Cruz, en cambio, se interesó en que supiéramos cuáles eran las referencias de su programa artístico: desde una especie de espíritu hegeliano sobre la historia y una fidelidad a la ciencia hasta las teorías estéticas y espirituales de artistas abstractos modernos que, dicho sea de paso, estaban influenciados por la Sociedad Teosófica, la cual proporcionaba su propia postura sobre los avances científicos.⁶¹ Cuando comparamos los escritos de Manuel de la Cruz con los ensayos de Mondrian, por ejemplo, encontramos propuestas similares entre sí. Para el artista neerlandés, “el arte –aunque sea un fin en sí mismo, como la religión– es el medio a través del cual podemos conocer lo universal y contemplarlo de forma plástica”.⁶² Manuel de la Cruz replicó, además, un sentir similar al de Kandinsky: decía estar viviendo en un momento decisivo de la historia, en el cual las verdades se estaban revelando y su arte podía ayudar a manifestar dicha revelación.⁶³ El mismo Mondrian con el neoplasticismo profetizaba el desarrollo paralelo de una nueva cultura, que sería “aquella del individuo maduro; una vez maduro, el individuo estará abierto a lo universal y tenderá más y más a unirse con ello”.⁶⁴

Con este tipo de referentes Manuel de la Cruz generó su propia versión de una macrohistoria, manifiesta en esa preocupación común con el esoterismo por descifrar el misterio del tiempo y la verdad relativa al papel del ser humano en el cosmos.⁶⁵ Su concepción del arte neoplástico no está exenta de esto, ya que como leemos en sus escritos, se sigue una narrativa similar a la de varias tradiciones esotéricas, donde “todas las cosas se originan en uno y todas las cosas a su vez fluyen y vuelven a uno”.⁶⁶ Es en este contexto que Manuel de la Cruz forjó una visión peculiar del progreso en la historia del arte, en la que, a través de las épocas, hay una cercanía a la verdad cósmica y un rechazo ante cierto individualismo, sensual y superficial, cuyo último gran campeón fue el Romanticismo.⁶⁷

Podríamos finalizar con una lectura de la obra de Luisa en el contexto de este supuesto progreso sugerido por Manuel de la Cruz. Su producción artística guarda un cierto eco con algunas líneas de pensamiento del Romanticismo, por lo menos en lo que refiere a una cierta estética donde se expresaba lo espiritual inherente a la naturaleza, como lo sería en el caso de William Blake (inglés, 1757–1827) o de Caspar David Friedrich (alemán, 1774–1840).⁶⁸ Los románticos, al igual que Luisa González de Sáenz, entendieron que la forma de preservar lo espiritual en su entorno se produce a través de lo subjetivo, esto es, una visión personal de lo espiritual. Es en lo subjetivo, de hecho, que el verdadero conocimiento existe, y al que en verdad el individuo puede acudir.⁶⁹ Esta idea se alinea con la percepción que tuvo Luisa sobre la posibilidad de ver el mundo a partir de la apertura del alma.

Tanto Manuel como Luisa tuvieron inquietudes sobre cómo comprender al ser humano en su entorno y sobre los principios universales que nos gobiernan. Los problemas artísticos y, en todo caso, personales que surgieron, los llevaron a un entramado de creencias, prácticas y sistemas, y a soluciones plásticas contrastantes. Las obras artísticas de ambos responden, para el primero, al control y entendimiento de las verdades que se pueden materializar en un objeto y, para la segunda, a la veladura inherente a aquello espiritual que, sin embargo, es experimentado y, por lo tanto, también se puede materializar en el objeto.

Agradezco a Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López y Leonardo Santamaría Montero, por sus comentarios y críticas al revisar los primeros bocetos de este texto. Quiero también agradecer a Sofía Vindas Solano y al Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural por su apoyo en proporcionarme información y acceso a diversas fuentes relativas a Luisa González de Sáenz. Finalmente, va mi agradecimiento al Museo de Arte Costarricense y a los Museos del Banco Central por el permiso de reproducción de sus obras.

The post The Cosmos and the Spiritual: A Fabric of Beliefs in the Work of Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz / El cosmos y lo espiritual: un entramado de creencias en las obras de Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sáenz appeared first on post.

“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

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On Conspiratorial Materialisms

Firearms, Molotov cocktails, flags, and banners are some of the objects in an arsenal of protests and revolts. Alongside clenched fists and enraged bodies, these objects form an imaginary of human gestures associated with the uprising. Art historian and curator Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated the exhibition Uprisings (2016–17) to this theme, assembling artworks collectively serving as an atlas of insurgent gestures.¹Among them was Woman with Flag (1928; fig. 1), a photograph by Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896–1942) of a confident Mexican woman. The exhibition also featured works depicting demonstrations, clashes with police, and expressions of rebellion, mourning, or redemption. The project revealed how a specific imagery of revolt appears in artworks from different regions of the world. At the same time, it identified gestures that though originating in particular historical moments have survived, reappeared and been repeated over time, mobilizing, shaping, and influencing other communities engaged in their own uprisings.

In doing so, it prompts us to consider the extent to which we are able to reimagine revolt beyond the patterns of gestural repetition. How can we seek out other gestures, objects, shared dynamics and forms of insurgence? Are there alternative imaginaries that do not conform to conventional uprisings or that engage with non-Western frameworks, characterized by different knowledge systems, notions of the body, materialities, and gestures? In the pursuit of counter-colonizing revolt imagery, it becomes imperative to reclaim narratives, histories, and artistic expressions from the Global South. To construct alternative archives of insurgent gestures, it is essential to explore modes of political action beyond those in which humans are the only conceivable political agents. This essay focuses on an archival examination of the interplay between material culture, religiosity, and insurgency within the history of the Black diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Through an array of objects and practices embedded in Afro-derived religions and Afro-diasporic material culture, I intend to shed light on expressions of other imageries of insurgency.

Weapons of combat such as spells, magical powders, talismans, statues, and medicinal or poisonous plants, to name but a few, cannot be comprehended solely through a secular, materialistic perspective, as their power to protect, cure, or cause harm arises from cosmological forces. They are, at their core, imbued with enchantment, understood as the sustenance, containment, and activation of life forces, which in turn are related to knowledge, other beings, and higher powers. Crafted through diverse technological means, these weapons hint at heterogeneous materiality, while their existence and persistence acknowledge a potential for new analytical frameworks. In this text, I delve into the relationship between military arsenals and religion, namely through the usage of religious artifacts as conflict tools of anti-colonial rebellion.

I will refer to these objects as “conspiratorial materialisms”², since they represent enchanted forms of socio-material construction while orchestrating bodies, forces, and historical processes to challenge the established orders and knowledge. The term “conspiracy” encapsulates a reactive nature, embodying both a sense of threat and a will to overthrow. Fighting on two fronts, this understanding of the word disrupts the rationalist and disenchanted materiality of the Enlightenment while dismantling colonial subordinations.

To explore this conspiratorial materialism, I will intertwine historical sources from colonial times with contemporary artistic research and artworks in which they figure. I will consider the artistic practices and work of Ana Mendieta (American, born in Cuba, 1948–1985), Ayrson Heráclito (Brazilian, born 1968), Dalton Paula (Brazilian, born 1982), Abdias do Nascimento (Brazilian, 1914–2011), and Tiago Sant’Ana (Brazilian, born 1990). Here, the archive acts as a crucial political methodology, making room for memorial practices of historically marginalized social groups that were persecuted and suffered the violence of colonialism. By reflecting on the material dimension of these objects against the grain, recovering their histories, and recontextualizing them in a contemporary, counter-colonial framework, I believe we can shed a new light on the political and transformational potency of the colonial archive.

Insurgent Fetish

A defiant and rebellious memory resides within an anonymous manuscript written between 1793 and 1806, where a witness of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) vividly narrates the French execution of an insurgent. For him, it was not the act of killing that proved most shocking. Following the brutal spectacle, he recalls how the executioners callously searched their victim and his pockets, unveiling a further layer of the revolution: “In one of his pockets [we found] pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest was a large packet of tinder and phosphate of lime. On his chest, he had a little sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.”³

This amulet led to an understanding of the ontological and epistemological complex of the Black rebels, one in which political writings coexisted with the notion of “fetish.”⁴It survives, albeit in a different geography, in William Blake’s illustration of a Black insurgent in Suriname carrying such a sack beside a firearm (fig. 2). This “fetish” presence conjures up a materialist analysis. As part of the insurgents’ arsenal, it suggests a marked military presence of Afro-derived religious practices during the Haitian revolution.  What seemed like a mere, meaningless joining of objects whatsoever, a trifle, for those trained under the political, secular, and racist gaze of Western thought, this “fetish” brings us however to the order of the “unthinkable.”

For the Haitian American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the unthinkable encompasses “that which cannot be conceived within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all the answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.”⁵The unthinkable points to the ontological and epistemological problem of how to interpret and understand these conspiratorial materialities and their translation into a Western theoretical framework. In other words, how to question the presence of these materialities and make them thinkable. And how, then, not to theoretically pervert their existence and usage. Such perversion not only challenges the colonizer’s limited understanding of historical events but also fosters alternative perspectives on nature and the technologies wielded by collective rebellion.

This fetish shows a way to politically instrumentalize religious materiality and yet it likewise reflects the persistent presence of spirituality within the forces of this insurgency. It illustrates the broad spectrum of material technologies through which Black Africans and their descendants equipped themselves to mitigate, subvert, and combat colonial oppression. Indeed, they insisted on the political dimensions of their cosmologies. In their studies on nineteenth-century slave rebellions in Brazil, historians João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes address the significant and complex religious presence among enslaved Africans and how this body of knowledge was reflected in counter-power agencies against the colonial state. For Reis and Gomes, the conjunction of African Islam, popular Catholicism, sorcery, and witchcraft, as some of the religious practices of African origin were called, “served as intellectual, moral and practical guides for rebellious slaves, as well as an arsenal for attack and defense.”⁶Today, this warlike apparatus forms an archive of practices that claims other ways of understanding materialism and its possibilities, ways that encompass the composition and capabilities of materials, and their utilization within sociopolitical contexts.

Religiosity brings not only an alternative mode of power administration but also a poetic-political horizon to the ongoing pursuit of epistemic justice. Despite the historical erasure and silencing of Black culture and people by white elites and their political and cultural institutions, some artists have been carrying out the memory work that reaffirms Black ancestral technologies within the Americas and the Caribbean. Despite the imprisonment of African and African-descent doctors, the criminalization of their medicine, and the seizure of their objects, these artists postulate alternative ways of healing. Despite racism, exoticization, folklorization, and the inferiorization of Afro-diasporic cosmology, their research offers new horizons for artistic practice.

Evoking the work of American poet Audre Lorde, Tiago Sant’Ana claims, for instance, that “the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house” (fig. 3).⁷In so doing, Sant’Ana reminisces about the colonial past and the enslaved people’s labor on Brazilian sugarcane plantations. Further, Lorde’s warning calls for a double gesture—that of inventory and invention. The past, impossible to repeat, can only be actualized as another. When updated into the present, it is necessarily reinvented or even remade. Its actualizations, therefore, are fabrication calls: “Armor fused with axé art and bathed in ebô for the fight against the evils of silencing.”⁸In this sense, conspiratorial materialism offers a way of identifying tools produced outside the colonial power frameworks, but rather along its margins, forcing their way against it.

Revolutionary Vanguard

In this war archive, alongside the fetish, I could also find the case of Joaquim Mina, a well-known African healer and “sorcerer” from western São Paulo arrested in 1856. According to records of the criminal charge against him, he had been sought out by four enslaved people from the Pau d’Alho farm in the State of São Paulo to help murder their slave owner. To achieve it, he asked for materials to fabricate a murderous weapon: “A carved stick, a palm and a half long, woven with white and black threads, with an inlaid glass pedal.” During its fabrication ceremony, “Joaquim’s assistant asked one of the Creoles for a coal . . . and then ‘spat’ . . . on the stick to bless it.” This weapon, similar to a nkisi, according to the historian who recovered the case, was a religious object of the Central African Bakongo People. Shaped as a human body, with two legs and a head, itwas supposed to be buried with its head out “in one of the paths where the slave owner used to pass because at that time the figure would turn into a poisonous snake and bite the victim” (fig. 4).⁹

The act of burying this object of power is given renewed impulse in Ana Mendieta’s Fetish Series, especially in Untitled (Fetish Series, Iowa), in which the artist carved into her own buried silhouette sharp-pointed sticks, just like a nkisi  (fig. 4). These objects of ordering power, called “nail fetishes” by European colonizers, served a protective and attacking function, like “automatic weapons.”Harmut Böhme, Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity, trans. Anna Galt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 197. In Bakongo culture, these piercing objects are considered both inexhaustible receptacles of vitality and bodies containing their own strength and agency. Re-signified within the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, they continue to be manufactured and used in the socio-religious dynamics of some Afro-Atlantic communities.

Religiosity, as we have seen, was energized by the materiality produced along forces which strengthened the ongoing desire for liberation. In this political-religious relationship, figures of religious leaders often referred to as “sorcerers” (priests, pais e mães de santo, healers, vodunsis, and zeladores de santo, among others)  were particularly prominent. According to historian Walter Rucker, in the Caribbean and North American contexts, these “sorcerers” were central to the insurgent conjunctures, composing “a revolutionary vanguard”¹⁰that brought “witchcraft” to the center of political mobilization, agency, and the produced fear among local elites through the tactical use of magical powders or potions either ingested or rubbed on clothing. These substances, such as aduru, an Akan medicine from the West African coast, granted invulnerability, special powers, and rebellious impetus.

In Brazil, the use of medicines, garrafadas, and other compoundings was also prominent in colonial tensions. Healers and religious leaders treated illnesses by using their gifts and knowledge to make remedies, herbal baths, and poisons or feitiços (spells) through which they promoted a silent struggle against their masters. One of these drinks became known as amansa senhor (tame lord) as it was used by the enslaved to subdue or even kill their masters. Produced with guinea-hen weed, known in Brazil as guiné or amansa senhor (Petiveria alliacea), it was manipulated using secrets and mysteries to render its victim apathetic and thus incapable of inflicting violence.¹¹

The sculpture Paratudo by Brazilian artist Dalton Paulawas inspired by a research project engaging with this “silent weaponry” to which the amansa senhor and the feitiços belong (fig. 5). Made up of bottles of Paratudo, a Brazilian liqueur, the piece also incorporates guiné, which Paula added to the original beverage. He then tied the bottles together using a fishnet and suspended them from a thicker rope. The piece, conceived for the solo exhibition Amansa-senhor (2015) at Sé in São Paulo, elaborates an analysis of the tactical uses of Indigenous and Afro-descendant spiritual and medicinal knowledge to subvert or arm oneself against colonial oppressions. At the same time, it incorporates organic and perishable elements activated through forces driven by a cosmological and spiritual power.

The reintroduction of ancestral knowledge, especially of plants, has been highlighted in the work of artists like Ayrson Heráclito. In his Sacudimentos series, for example, Heráclito performed two spiritual cleansing rituals in two large architectural monuments linked to the Atlantic slave trade: the Maison des Esclaves (Gorée, Senegal) and the Casa da Torre (Bahia, Brazil). The performance, recorded on video, involved a group of men holding bunches of heated sacred leaves, which they beat and then rubbed on the buildings’ walls (fig. 6). Sacudimento, or spiritual cleansing, is used in African religions to chase eguns, or spirits of the dead, from domestic spaces. Through this political-spiritual gesture, the artist disturbed history by exorcising the ghosts of colonization. In his artistic practice, Heráclito works with a “mystical activism,”¹²serving as an “exorcist artist”¹³by incorporating the political into Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices. Through its implications, interventions, and disruptions of power and violence, this activist practice operates within colonial structures beyond disenchanted agencies, identifying alternative methods of challenging how colonialism operates.

Rebellious Amulets

For the exhibition Acts of Revolt: Other Imaginaries on Independence (2022–23), commissioned by the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, Tiago Sant’Ana created the installation Museu da Revolta Bahiense (Museum of the Bahian Revolt). Putting the museum at the center of the installation the artists pointed out its problematic role in the historical construction of Brazil, largely silencing historical events mobilized by Africans and Afro-descendants while showing how to dispute it. In Museu da Revolta Bahiense, he assembled a group of objects evoking insurgencies led by Afro-descendants in Bahia in the nineteenth century. Through this collection of items whose stories straddle fiction and truth, the installation strained the limits, problems, and the archive’s possibilities in constructing a unified Brazilian national history. As a speculative record, it fabled both the objects in time and the time of the objects.

Among these objects, we could find  escritos de guardar o corpo (writings to guard the body), a small leather-bound book with inscriptions in Arabic described as an “amulet with prayers and words of hope to protect the body and soul of the people who were fighting against slavery and religious intolerance, and with ideas of establishing an Islamic republic in Bahia” (figs. 7, 8). Such amulet-books, also called patuás, were present, along with other manuscripts, in the Malês Rebellion of 1835, one of the most important Brazilian revolts, undertaken in Bahia by enslaved people of Nagô and Houssá origin.

According to historian João José Reis, these patuás, like the “fetish” belonging to the Haitian insurgent, were leather pouches that, in various iterations depending on their use and purpose, could contain different elements and “insignificant things,” such as “cotton wrapped in a bit of dust,” “bits of garbage,” “cowries,” or even “a small piece of paper written in Arabic letters.” ¹⁴One such “little book” was donated to the Brazilian Historic and Geographical Institute (IHGB)¹⁵by a member of the Bahian elite at the time of the revolt. In the letter accompanying this gift, the donor described it as a curious object taken from the neck of one of the “Africans killed in the insurrection,” who had “attributed it with the miraculous effect of scaring away bullets and preserving him from death.”¹⁶Beyond the seemingly “insignificant” materiality of patuás, the iconographic elements incorporated in these talismans persistently assert the agential power of symbols and words, indicating a technological aspect.

Part of a variety of tactics still used by multiple Afro-diasporic communities, the graphism in the Malê amulet, like the Bantu pontos riscados in Umbanda and Candomblé, or the Jeje vèvè in Vodou, are also used to summon and invoke entities. The recurrence of this graphic, often made of white pemba,¹⁷as is visible in a 1947 work by Haitian artist Wilson Bigaud (fig. 9), indicates its itinerancy through the Afro-American diaspora across the Americas and the Caribbean but also its iconographic importance in establishing a connection with the spiritual world.

In Bastideana no. 3: Ponto Riscado de Exu Cruzado com Xangô (fig. 10), Abdias do Nascimento portrayed two of Candomblé´s entities: Exu’s “ponto riscado” and Xangô’s ax, which is depicted in red in the background of the canvas. Exu, as the lord of pathways and encruzilhadas (crossroads), initiates movement and serves as the orixá of communication and language, while Xangô represents justice and fire. Knowing the impossibility of representing these beings, the ponto riscado makes them present. As a way of calling gods, beings, and encantados, these symbols allow those to come, when respectfully called upon, and operate within our human realm.

An Archive of Conspiratorial Materialism

Insurgent fetishes, tamer plants, rebellious amulets, and other symbols of power collectively form this conspiratorial materialism archive. The material composition of these objects is deeply intertwined with their respective cosmological systems, rooted in the religions of African ancestry. This connection to the inherent power emanating from them transcends a purely rational understanding of materiality.

Within the framework of conspiratorial materialism, there is pronounced emphasis on these objects’ power and agency as they are strategically used against colonial hegemony, and as tools of symbolic and political contention. By engaging with these objects through the various artistic practices presented here, I aim to go beyond the mere nexus between religiosity in the Americas and contemporary artistic endeavors to carve out a political-poetic horizon—one that prompts us to overcome the secular and disenchanted foundations of Western aesthetics.

Spanish

Sobre el materialismo conspirativo

Armas de fuego, cócteles molotov, banderas y pancartas son algunos de los objetos que forman parte del arsenal utilizado en protestas y revueltas. Junto a los puños en alto y a los cuerpos enfurecidos, estos objetos conforman un imaginario de gestos humanos asociados a la sublevación. El historiador de arte y comisario Georges Didi-Huberman dedicó la exposición Sublevaciones (2016-17) a este tema, para la cual reunió obras de arte que colectivamente funcionaban como un atlas de gestos de insurgencia¹⁸. Entre esas obras se encontraba Woman with Flag (1928, fig. 1), una fotografía de Tina Modotti (Italia, 1896-1942) en la que se ve a una confiada mujer mexicana . Otras obras representaban manifestaciones, enfrentamientos con la policía y gestos de rebeldía, duelo o redención. El proyecto evidenció la existencia de un imaginario específico de la rebelión presente en obras de arte de distintas regiones del mundo. Al mismo tiempo, identificó los gestos que  a pesar de haber surgido en un momento histórico concreto, han sobrevivido, han reaparecido y se han repetido a lo largo del tiempo, movilizando, configurando e influyendo en otras comunidades inmersas en sus propias sublevaciones. 

De esta forma, Didi-Huberman invitaba a reflexionar hasta qué punto somos capaces de reimaginar una rebelión por fuera de los meros patrones de repetición gestual. ¿Cómo localizar otros gestos, objetos, dinámicas compartidas y formas de insurgencia? ¿Existen imaginarios alternativos que no se ajusten a los levantamientos convencionales o que se inscriban en contextos no occidentales, caracterizados por sistemas de conocimiento, ideas sobre el cuerpo, materialidades y gestos diferentes? Para lograr un imaginario de rebelión contra-colonial es clave reivindicar las narrativas, historias y expresiones artísticas del Sur Global. Al construir archivos alternativos de gestos de insurgencia, es importante explorar distintos mecanismos de acción política que excedan aquellos en los que los seres humanos son los únicos agentes políticos concebibles. Este ensayo presenta un análisis de archivo centrado en la correlación entre cultura material, religiosidad e insurgencia en la historia de la diáspora negra en el continente americano y el Caribe. A través de una serie de objetos y prácticas integradas a las religiones de origen africano y a la cultura material de la diáspora africana, me propongo arrojar luz sobre las expresiones de otros imaginarios de insurgencia.

Ciertas armas de combate como los hechizos, los polvos mágicos, los talismanes, las estatuillas y las plantas medicinales o venenosas, por nombrar sólo algunas, no se pueden interpretar únicamente desde una perspectiva secular y materialista, porque su poder para proteger, curar o causar daño proviene de fuerzas cosmológicas. En esencia, están imbuidas de encantamientos, entendidos como soportes, contenedores y activadores de las fuerzas vitales que, a su vez, están relacionadas al conocimiento, a otros seres y poderes superiores. Elaboradas con diversos recursos tecnológicos, estas armas revelan una materialidad heterogénea, y su existencia y permanencia habilita el potencial de nuevos marcos analíticos. En el presento texto, profundizo en la relación entre el arsenal militar y la religión, concretamente a través del uso de artefactos religiosos como herramientas de conflicto en la lucha anti-colonial.

En adelante, voy a referirme a estos objetos como “materialismos conspirativos”¹⁹, ya que representan mecanismos de construcción socio-material con encantamientos, al tiempo que instrumentalizan los cuerpos, las fuerzas y los procesos históricos para desafiar los órdenes y conocimientos establecidos. El término “conspiración” describe un carácter reactivo, y encarna tanto la sensación de amenaza como la voluntad de derrocamiento. Luchando en dos frentes, esta manera de pensar el término desbarata la materialidad racionalista y desencantada de la Ilustración, y al mismo tiempo desmantela las subordinaciones coloniales.

Para indagar en este materialismo conspiratorio, enlazaré fuentes históricas del período colonial con investigaciones artísticas contemporáneas y obras de arte en las que está presente. Para ello trabajaré las obras y prácticas artísticas de Ana Mendieta (estadounidense, nacida en Cuba, 1948-1985), Ayrson Heráclito (Brasil, 1968), Dalton Paula (Brasil, 1982), Abdias do Nascimento (Brasil, 1914-2011) y Tiago Sant’Ana (Brasil, 1990). En este caso, el archivo funciona como una metodología política fundamental ya que da lugar a prácticas de recuperación de la memoria de grupos sociales históricamente marginados, que fueron perseguidos y sufrieron la violencia del colonialismo. Creo que si reflexionamos sobre la dimensión material de estos objetos que van a contrapelo, recuperamos sus historias y los recontextualizamos en un marco contemporáneo y contracolonial, podremos arrojar una nueva luz sobre el potencial político y transformador del archivo colonial.

Fetiches insurgentes

En un manuscrito anónimo escrito entre 1793 y 1806, podemos encontrar un recuerdo provocador y rebelde, en el que un testigo de la Revolución Haitiana (1791-1804) narra de forma muy detallada la ejecución de un rebelde por parte de los franceses. Todavía, para el narrador, lo más impactante no fue el acto del asesinato. Tras el brutal espectáculo, recuerda la manera en que los verdugos revisaron insensiblemente a la víctima y sus bolsillos, desvelando otra capa más de la revolución: “En uno de sus bolsillos [encontramos] panfletos impresos en Francia, plagados de lugares comunes sobre los Derechos del Hombre y la Sagrada Revolución; en el chaleco había un paquete grande de pólvora y fosfato de cal. En el pecho llevaba un pequeño saco repleto de pelos, hierbas y trocitos de hueso, lo que ellos llaman un fetiche”²⁰.

Este amuleto permitió comprender la complejidad ontológica y epistemológica de los rebeldes negros, para quienes los textos políticos convivían junto a la idea de “fetiche”²¹.  También sobrevive, aunque en una geografía distinta, en la ilustración de William Blake en la que se puede ver a un insurgente negro en Surinam, quien lleva un saco de este tipo junto a un arma de fuego (fig. 2). Esta presencia “fetichista” invoca un análisis materialista. Al formar parte del arsenal de los insurgentes, señala la marcada presencia militar de las prácticas religiosas de origen africano durante la Revolución Haitiana. Sin embargo, aunque parecía una mera acumulación de objetos sin sentido, una nimiedad, para quienes se habían formado en la visión política, laica y racista del pensamiento occidental, este “fetiche” nos coloca en el orden de lo “impensable”.

Para el antropólogo estadounidense de origen haitiano Michel-Rolph Trouillot, lo impensable abarca “²². Lo impensable plantea el problema ontológico y epistemológico de cómo interpretar y comprender estas materialidades conspiratorias y su traducción a un marco teórico occidental. En otras palabras, cómo interpretar la presencia de estas materialidades y volverlas pensables. Y cómo, por lo tanto, no tergiversar teóricamente su existencia y su uso. La tergiversación no sólo desafía la limitada comprensión de los acontecimientos históricos por parte del colonizador, sino que además favorece el surgimiento de visiones alternativas de la naturaleza y las tecnologías empleadas por la rebelión colectiva.

Este fetiche muestra una manera de instrumentalizar políticamente la materialidad religiosa y, al mismo tiempo, refleja la constante presencia de la espiritualidad en las filas de la insurgencia. Ilustra el amplio espectro de tecnologías materiales con las que se equiparon los negros africanos y sus descendientes para mitigar, subvertir y combatir la opresión colonial. De hecho, insiste en las dimensiones políticas de sus cosmologías. En sus investigaciones sobre las rebeliones de esclavizados durante el siglo XIX en Brasil, los historiadores João José Reis y Flávio dos Santos Gomes analizan la significativa y compleja presencia religiosa entre los africanos esclavizados y la forma en que ese corpus de conocimientos se veía reflejado en los órganos de contrapoder frente al Estado colonial. Para Reis y Gomes, la combinación del islam africano, el catolicismo popular, la hechicería y la brujería, como se denominaban a algunas de las prácticas religiosas de origen africano, “sirvieron como guías intelectuales, morales y prácticas para los esclavos rebeldes, así como arsenal para el ataque y la defensa”²³. En la actualidad, este aparato bélico constituye un archivo de prácticas que reivindica otras formas de entender el materialismo y sus posibilidades, formas que incluyen la composición y funciones de los materiales, así como su utilización dentro de los contextos sociopolíticos.  

            La religiosidad no sólo aporta un modelo alternativo de administración del poder, sino también un horizonte poético-político a la constante búsqueda de justicia epistémica. Pese al silenciamiento y borrado histórico de la cultura y el pueblo negros por parte de las élites blancas y sus instituciones políticas y culturales, algunos artistas han llevado a cabo un ejercicio de memoria que reafirma las tecnologías ancestrales negras presentes en el continente americano y el Caribe. A pesar del encarcelamiento de los curanderos africanos y afrodescendientes, de la criminalización de su medicina y confiscación de sus objetos, estos artistas proponen caminos alternativos de sanación. Pese al racismo, la exotización, la folclorización y la inferiorización de la cosmología afrodiaspórica, sus investigaciones ofrecen nuevos horizontes para la práctica artística.

Invocando la obra de la poeta estadounidense Audre Lorde, Tiago Sant’Ana afirma, por ejemplo, que “las herramientas del Amo jamás desmantelaránla casa del Amo” (fig. 3)²⁴.  Con ello, Sant’Ana rememora el pasado colonial y el trabajo de los esclavizados en las plantaciones de caña de azúcar brasileñas. Además, la advertencia de Lorde exige un doble gesto: el de la invención y el del inventario. El pasado, imposible de repetir, sólo se puede actualizar como otro pasado. Al restaurarlo en el presente, inevitablemente se lo reinventa o incluso rehace. Sus actualizaciones, por tanto, son llamados a la creación: “Armaduras fusionadas con arte axé y bañadas en ebô para luchar contra los males del silenciamiento”²⁵.  En este sentido, el materialismo conspirativo ofrece un mecanismo para identificar las herramientas producidas por fuera de los marcos de poder coloniales, más bien en sus márgenes, abriéndose un camino en su contra.

Vanguardia revolucionaria

En este archivo de guerra, junto al fetiche, me he encontrado con el caso de Joaquim Mina, un famoso curandero y “hechicero” africano afincado al oeste de São Paulo y detenido en 1856. Según las actas de la acusación penal en su contra, cuatro esclavizados de la hacienda Pau d’Alho lo habían buscado para que les ayudara a asesinar a su amo. Para conseguirlo, les pidió algunos materiales con los que fabricar el arma homicida: “Un palo tallado, de palmo y medio de largo, tejido con fibras blancas y negras, con un pedal de vidrio incrustado”. Durante la ceremonia de fabricación, “el ayudante de Joaquim pidió a uno de los creoles un carbón. . . y luego ‘escupió’… sobre el palo para bendecirlo”. El arma, similar a un nkisi –según el historiador que recuperó la caja– era un artefacto religioso del pueblo centroafricano Baongo. Tenía la forma del cuerpo humano, con dos piernas y una cabeza, y debía ser enterrado con la cabeza hacia fuera “en alguno de los senderos por donde solía caminar el amo, porque en ese momento la figura se iba a convertir en una serpiente venenosa e iba a morder a la víctima”²⁶(fig. 4). 

            El acto de enterrar este objeto de poder vuelve a cobrar impulso en la Serie Fetiche de Ana Mendieta, sobre todo en Untitled (Fetish Series, Iowa) [Sin título (Serie Fetiche, Iowa)], en la que la artista talló su propia silueta enterrada y le clavó palos de punta afilada, como si fueran nkisi (fig. 4). Estos objetos dotados con un poder de ordenamiento, y que los colonizadores europeos llamaron “fetiches de clavos”, cumplían una función protectora y de ataque, como “armas automáticas”²⁷. En la cultura bakongo, estos objetos punzantes se consideran tanto inagotables receptáculos de vitalidad como cuerpos que conservan su propia voluntad y agenciamiento. Resignificados en la diáspora africana en el continente americano y el Caribe, se siguen fabricando y utilizando en la dinámica sociorreligiosa de algunas comunidades afroatlánticas.

La religiosidad, como hemos visto, se dinamizaba por la materialidad producida junto a fuerzas que reforzaban el deseo continuo de liberación. En este vínculo político-religioso destacaban las figuras de los líderdes religiosos, a menudo denominados “hechiceros” (sacerdotes, pais e mães de santo, curanderos, vodunsis y zeladores de santo, entre otros). Según el historiador Walter Rucker, en los ámbitos caribeño y norteamericano, estos “hechiceros” ocuparon un lugar primordial en las coyunturas de insurgencia, conformando “una vanguardia revolucionaria”²⁸que colocó a la “brujería” en el centro de la movilización política, el agenciamiento y el miedo que surgía entre las élites locales por el uso táctico de polvos o pociones mágicas ingeridas o frotadas en la ropa. Estas sustancias –como el aduru, una medicina akan de la costa occidental africana– otorgaban invulnerabilidad, poderes especiales e ímpetu rebelde.

Los remedios, garrafadas y otros brebajes también ocuparon un rol importante en las tensiones coloniales en Brasil. Los curanderos y líderes religiosos trataban las enfermedades utilizando sus dones y conocimientos para elaborar medicinas, baños de hierbas y venenos o feitiços (hechizos) con los que promovían una silenciosa lucha contra sus amos. Una de estas bebidas se hizo conocida como amansa senhor (“amansadora de amos”) porque los esclavos la utilizaban para reducir o incluso matar a sus amos. Elaborada con la hierba de gallina de Guinea –conocida en Brasil como guiné o amansa senhor (Petiveria alliacea)– la manipulaban empleando secretismos y misterios con el fin de apaciguar a la víctima y volverla incapaz de infligir violencia²⁹.

La escultura Paratudo del artista brasileño Dalton Paula se inspiró en un proyecto de investigación relacionado con ese “armamento silencioso” al que pertenecen la amansa senhor y los feitiços (fig. 5). Compuesta con botellas de Paratudo, un licor brasileño, la pieza también contiene guiné, que Paula añadió a la bebida original. Luego, amarró las botellas con una red de pesca y las colgó de una cuerda más gruesa. La escultura, diseñada para la exposición individual Amansa-senhor (2015) en Sé (São Paulo), desarrolla un análisis de los usos tácticos del conocimiento espiritual y medicinal indígena y afrodescendiente con el fin de resistir o armarse contra la opresión colonial. Al mismo tiempo, incorpora elementos orgánicos y perecederos que se activan a través de fuerzas guiadas por un poder cosmológico y espiritual.

La dinamización de conocimientos ancestrales, en especial referidos a plantas, ha ocupado un lugar destacado en la obra de artistas como Ayrson Heráclito. En su serie Sacudimentos, por ejemplo, Heráclito llevó a cabo dos rituales de limpieza espiritual en dos grandes monumentos arquitectónicos vinculados a la trata de esclavizados en el Atlántico: la Maison des Esclaves (Gorée, Senegal) y la Casa da Torre (Bahía, Brasil). En la performance, grabada en vídeo, se puede ver a un grupo de hombres con manojos de hojas sagradas y calentadas en las manos, que golpean y luego frotan las paredes de los edificios (fig. 6). El sacudimento o limpieza espiritual se utiliza en las religiones africanas para expulsar a los eguns o espíritus de los muertos de los espacios domésticos. Con este gesto político-espiritual, el artista alteró la historia exorcizando los fantasmas de la colonización. En su obra, Heráclito trabaja un “activismo místico”³⁰y actúa como “artista exorcista”³¹ ya que incorpora lo político a las prácticas espirituales afrobrasileñas. Por sus repercusiones, intervenciones e interrupciones del poder y la violencia, esta práctica activista opera en el interior de las estructuras coloniales, más allá de los agenciamientos desencantados, señalando métodos alternativos para desafiar el funcionamiento del colonialismo.

Amuletos rebeldes

Para la exposición Atos de revolta: outros imaginários sobre independência [Actos de rebelión: Otros imaginarios sobre la independencia] (2022-23), por encargo del Museu de Arte Moderna de Río de Janeiro, Tiago Sant’Ana realizó la instalación Museu da Revolta Bahiense. Al colocarlo en el centro de la instalación, el artista señaló el problemático papel que la figura del museo ejerció en la construcción histórica de Brasil, al silenciar en gran medida los acontecimientos impulsados por africanos y afrodescendientes, a la vez que mostró cómo disputarlo. En Museu da Revolta Bahiense, Sant’Ana recolectó un grupo de objetos que remiten a las revueltas protagonizadas por los afrodescendientes en Bahía en el siglo XIX. Mediante la colección de objetos cuyas historias oscilan entre la ficción y la verdad, la instalación ponía a prueba los límites, los conflictos y las posibilidades del archivo en la construcción de una historia nacional unificada en Brasil. En tanto registro especulativo, creaba una fábula sobre los objetos en el tiempo y sobre el tiempo de los objetos.

Entre estos objetos se encontraban los escritos de guardar o corpo [escritos para cuidar el cuerpo], un pequeño libro encuadernado en cuero con inscripciones en árabe descrito como “un amuleto con oraciones y frases esperanzadoras para proteger el cuerpo y el alma de las personas que luchaban contra la esclavitud y la intolerancia religiosa, y con ideas para establecer una república islámica en Bahía” (figs. 7, 8). Este tipo de libros- amuleto, también denominados patuás, aparecieron junto a otros manuscritos en la Rebelión de los Malês de 1835, una de las revueltas más importantes de Brasil, protagonizada en Bahía por personas esclavizadas de origen nagó y houssá.

Según el historiador João José Reis, estos patuás, al igual que el “fetiche” del haitiano sublevado, eran bolsitas de cuero que, en diversas versiones según su uso y finalidad, podían contener distintos elementos y “cosas insignificantes”, como “algodón cubierto con un poco de polvo”, “trozos de basura”, “conchas de cauri” o incluso “un pequeño trozo de papel escrito en letras árabes”³². Uno de estos “libritos” fue donado por un miembro de la élite bahiana en la época de la insurgencia al Instituto Histórico y Geográfico Brasileño (IHGB)³³. En la carta que acompañaba la donación, el benefactor lo describía como un curioso objeto extraído del cuello de uno de los “africanos asesinados en la sublevación”, quien le había “atribuido el milagroso poder de ahuyentar las balas y librarlo de la muerte”³⁴. Más allá de la materialidad aparentemente “insignificante” de los patuás, los elementos iconográficos incluidos en estos talismanes tenazmente confirman el poder de agenciamiento de los símbolos y las palabras, lo que denota su aspecto tecnológico.      

Como parte de una serie de tácticas que en la actualidad siguen utilizando muchas comunidades afrodiaspóricas, el grafismo del amuleto Malê, al igual que los pontos riscados bantúes en la umbanda y en el candomblé o el Jeje vèvè en el vodou, también se emplean para llamar e invocar entidades. La reaparición de esta grafía, a menudo hecho con pemba³⁵blanca –como se puede ver en una pieza de 1947 realizada por el artista haitiano Wilson Bigaud (fig. 9), nos muestra su itinerancia por la diáspora afroamericana a lo largo del continente americano y el Caribe, pero también su importancia iconográfica a la hora de establecer una conexión con el mundo espiritual.

En Bastideana no. 3: Ponto Riscado de Exu Cruzado com Xangô (fig. 10), Abdias do Nascimento retrató dos entidadesdel Candomblé: el “ponto riscado” de Exu y el hacha de Xangô, que aparece en rojo al fondo de la tela. Exu, como señor de los caminos y de las encruzilhadas, inicia el movimiento y es el orixá de la comunicación y del lenguaje, mientras que Xangô representa la justicia y el fuego. Consciente de la imposibilidad de representar estos seres, el ponto riscado hace que estén presentes. Al ser mecanismos empleados para invocar dioses, seres y encantados, estos símbolos permiten su manifestación, siempre y cuando se les llame respetuosamente, para operar en nuestro ámbito humano.

Un archivo de los materialismos conspiratorios

Los fetiches de los insurgentes, las plantas amansadoras, los amuletos de rebeldía y demás símbolos de poder forman colectivamente este archivo de materialismo conspiratorio. La composición material de estos objetos está profundamente ligada a sus respectivos sistemas cosmológicos, arraigados a su vez en las religiones de ascendencia africana. Esta conexión con el poder inherente que emana de ellos trasciende una comprensión puramente racional de la materialidad.

En el marco del materialismo conspiratorio se hace especial hincapié en el poder y agenciamiento de estos objetos, ya que son utilizados de forma estratégica contra la hegemonía colonial y como herramientas de contención simbólica y política. Al abordar estos objetos a través de las diversas prácticas artísticas presentadas aquí, pretendo ir más allá de establecer únicamente un vínculo entre la religiosidad en el continente americano y Caribe y los esfuerzos artísticos contemporáneos, para trazar un horizonte político-poético que nos anime a trascender los fundamentos seculares y desencantados de la estética occidental.

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My initial encounter with Marta Staņa (1913–1972) and her work in architecture occurred in 2002 when, as a young architecture journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Latvian-Australian architect Andrejs (Andrew) Andersons (born 1942), who hailed from Riga. During our conversation, Andersons highlighted Staņa’s remarkable work, which, to my surprise, was not widely known in contemporary architecture circles at that time.

Further investigation revealed that Staņa was better recognized among artists and designers, many of whom had been her students at the Riga Art and Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Andersons’s insights inspired me to delve deeper into Staņa’s story, prompting me to conduct interviews with her contemporaries who were still alive at the time. Additionally, I visited the Latvian Museum of Architecture, where a portion of her archive is housed

In the years that followed, I dedicated myself to research and had the privilege of curating an exhibition showcasing Staņa’s work. The exhibition Behind the Curtain. Architect Marta Staņa, held in 2010 at two venues in Riga—the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and the Dailes Theatre—focused on her public buildings and architectural competition entries. However, there remained a folder containing newspaper clippings and notes about her smaller projects, including private homes, summer cottages, exhibition designs, illustrations for magazines, and even designs for gravestones. I put this folder aside to explore in the future. It is also essential to know that many of her design proposals, books, photographs, and personal belongings remain in the possession of individuals residing in the houses she designed. Some documents were lost during the restructuring of archives belonging to Soviet-era organizations, and some of the recollections of her contemporaries lack supporting documentary evidence. Nevertheless, thanks to the gradual digitization of museum collections, it has become possible to compile a relatively comprehensive list of her works.

For example, the small Tukums Museum preserves a furniture set consisting of a chair, a dining table, and a sideboard, along with a rug, wall art pieces, and metal candlesticks. This set was displayed in 1962 in the annual design exhibition held at the Latvian National Museum of Art, a highly popular show, the design of which Staņa also contributed to. Her innovative approach of presenting individual furniture pieces organized in sets, juxtaposed with traditional and contemporary crafts, ceramics, and textiles, was praised by her students and critics alike. This unique integration of modern furniture within the broader context of various art forms as well as architecture was a characteristic not only of the exhibitions she designed and co-curated but also of her own designs.

In 1963, she provided the design for an exhibition of work by her close friends and collaborators Erna Rubene (1910–1990), a respected master of traditional crafts, and Margarita Melnalksne (1909–1989), a ceramic artist. For their show, Staņa designed the general layout and furniture stands and created furniture pieces, such as tables and cabinets, to provide context for the entire exhibition.

Having designed the Dailes Theatre (1959–77) in Riga, the most celebrated public building in the mid-twentieth-century modernist style in Latvia, Staņa is one of a few Latvian architects whose main architectural work built during the Soviet occupation has retained its original shape and function. Among her other notable projects are a sleek cinema extension, innovative residential building typologies, schools, private residences, and summer cottages. Unfortunately, apart from the Dailes Theatre building, all of these structures have been modified to meet contemporary functional and energy efficiency requirements. While Staņa’s legacy encompasses a significant number of ambitious projects, ranging from high-rise office buildings and apartment blocks to schools and cultural venues, many of these exist solely as blueprints and architectural competition proposals.

After earning a diploma from the Jelgava Teachers Institute, Staņa initially pursued a career in teaching before enrolling in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Latvia in 1936. Upon graduating from the Faculty of Architecture in 1945, she was offered an assistant position under Professor Ernests Štālbergs. However, the tumultuous events of the time, including the repatriation of Baltic Germans, the initial Soviet occupation, subsequent deportations, the German occupation and persecution of Jews, and the subsequent emigration of Latvians to avoid the consequences of the Soviets’ return in 1945, greatly disrupted the established architecture school. The academic staff faced complete reconstitution, and Staņa became a member of the faculty during this process. She stood out as a talented young architect and a protégé of Štālbergs. Moreover, her previous teaching qualifications made her the sole professional educator among the other faculty graduates and other possible candidates for the job. Unfortunately, the academic community in the field of architecture, already weakened by the circumstances, suffered another blow when Staņa and her professor were dismissed from their positions at the University of Latvia during the academic purges of 1949–50. Immediately after that, the Faculty of Architecture was also closed, completely destroying the national school of architecture. Architecture was further taught at the Faculty of Building Construction at Riga Technical University.

During most of the 1950s, Staņa was engaged in a significant project for the remote fishermen’s kolkhoz, a newly made Soviet collective farm, in the coastal village of Skulte (Zvejniekciems), now part of Saulkrasti city. Her involvement included designing a master plan for the village, encompassing various facilities such as a workers’ club, a school, and a low-rise housing complex for teachers. The kolkhoz, which emerged from a prosperous fishermen’s cooperative that had been nationalized by the Soviets, possessed substantial resources and ambitions, enabling the commissioning of an entire village.

Initially, Staņa’s early proposals for the village adhered to the obligatory Stalinist architectural style prevalent at the time. However, in the mid-1950s, she embraced a newfound liberation inspired by the sweeping modernisation throughout the Soviet Union. This shift allowed her to explore innovative approaches in her designs. One noteworthy project that exemplified this progressive mindset was the school in Zvejniekciems. Developed immediately after the club, showcasing the canonical Stalinist architecture, the school design offered pioneering qualities, such as a horizontally arranged layout, with distinct volumes dedicated to each function. Abundant natural light flooded the learning spaces, creating an inviting environment. Furthermore, the school offered direct access to the surrounding nature, fostering a harmonious connection between the built environment and the outdoors.

Following her victory in the Dailes Theatre building competition in 1959, Marta Staņa joined the State Design Institute in 1960, where she dedicated herself to the ongoing design of the theatre until her final days. Her proposal with the main foyer’s horizontal volume situated on the second level remains unique within the context of Riga, where historical architecture predominantly prevails. By incorporating wide windows in foyers and designing a hall capable of accommodating 1,000 audience seats, Staņa introduced a fundamentally new architectural and theatrical experience opening it up to the city. Unfortunately, in line with the typical constraints of the Soviet economy, the construction of the theatre spanned 18 years due to changes and material shortages. However, despite modifications made throughout the design process, the architect’s original idea remained intact. The architecture of the theatre encompassed not only the building itself but also the surrounding public space, which underwent renovations in 2023 by MADE architects. This serves as a rare example of a building constructed during the Soviet era that has not only retained its original purpose but also complies with modern standards of public space and accessibility.

During her tenure at the institute, Staņa actively participated in numerous local and international design competitions, earning the admiration of colleagues for her ability to swiftly translate ideas into drawings, proving her talent for architecture and exceptional artistic skills. Among other notable works during her time at the institute were experimental apartment blocks characterized by spacious balconies, efficient utilization of space and natural light, and unconventional arrangements of facade panels. Additionally, outside of her official working hours, she passionately designed private homes and summer cottages for her colleagues and friends. These projects, created on limited budgets, exemplified Staņa’s remarkable ability to work harmoniously with available, low-quality materials, often repurposing leftover resources while maintaining a connection with nature.

For most of her projects, Staņa also provided interior design ideas, including furniture, lighting, and textiles. Staņa’s passion for illustration led her to collaborate with magazines, where together with her friend Erna Rubene she shared their expertise through illustrated advice on modern living. Her artistic skills and a keen eye for design were instrumental in providing practical and visually appealing suggestions to readers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Staņa also dedicated herself to teaching, primarily within the interior design departments of Riga Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Although teaching may have held a lower status in terms of prestige, it was highly regarded by students who valued her unique guidance and expertise. Staņa’s educational method incorporated the concept of working with space and its objects as a cohesive ensemble, showcasing her approach to complex and rational thinking. She consistently encouraged her students to strive for excellence, offered constant encouragement and provided inspiration. Although she did not receiving any awards during her lifetime, her students, such as stage designer Andris Freibergs (1938–2022), who has mentored a new generation of internationally acclaimed stage designers, attest to the enduring effectiveness of her teaching methods and her talent as an educator: “I was so taken by her. I joined the interior design department of the Art Academy because Marta Staņa started teaching there.”¹ Many young designers had the opportunity to prove themselves by contributing to Staņa’s architectural projects, for example, in Zvejniekciems, where both the club and school buildings display graduation works, such as stained glass windows, ceramics and textiles, of Riga Art and Design School students.

Staņa died of cancer in 1972 and her career as an architect was relatively brief, lasting less than twenty years. Her work is characterized by a distinct clarity of vision, scope, and bold lines, skillfully incorporating people in motion and elements of nature. She viewed architecture, both in practice and education, as a unified approach to space, where architecture harmoniously interacts with the surrounding environment, interior spaces, and art objects within them. Staņa has not left a written theoretical legacy. Even in discussions held at the Latvian Association of Architects, she participated with simple, rational comments. She also helped her colleagues practically, even working in several teams during one competition. Staņa was not able to see the Dailes theatre building completed, nor was she able to live in the house and work in the studio she designed and started to build for herself by the Baltic Sea. Many of her ideas remained only as drawings. “I was born too soon. No one can build my ideas,”²she has said.

The assignment of roles to female architects was one of the many architectural histories explored during the 2019 exhibition A Room of One’s Own at the Estonian Architecture Museum³ in Tallinn. The curators raised questions about authorship in architectural collaborations and the distribution of awards in the field. In 1967, Staņa completed a mandatory biography questionnaire before her trip to former Czechoslovakia. She confirmed that it would be her first trip abroad and that she had never received awards for her work. While the Soviet labour market maintained equality between men and women, awards and participation in such trips were privileges reserved for male colleagues with prominent positions and Communist Party membership.

Regarding work placements, every architecture student was guaranteed a job at one of the State Design Institutes. However, not everyone managed to secure a position at the prestigious City division, which offered the opportunity to work on large public buildings. Women architects were often sent to remote locations, the countryside, or employed in other industries, such as road design. Female architects also played valuable roles in competitions, yet authorship and recognition frequently favoured male leaders. For instance, in 1963, an article⁴ in the magazine Māksla reported the participation of the Latvian team in the international competition for the monument in Playa Girón, Cuba. Similar to other competitions, a team of renowned professionals was formed, later working on Staņa’s idea. However, the accompanying photograph only featured her male companions. In that same year, one of the authors, Ivars Strautmanis, highlighted this competition as a personal achievement in the newspaper Rīgas Balss⁵, without mentioning other team members. Both articles in this case reflect the male perspective of the author, photographer, and editor. Such articles, omitting co-authors, reinforce the perception of authorship, perpetuating it in subsequent publications and conversations to this day. Additionally, it was common practice not to invite female team members to present projects on television or in documentaries, which were abundant to promote Soviet propaganda through culture. When women managed to appear on screen, they were often given the role of attractive background or exhibition visitors.

However, Staņa did not require an official title to earn recognition and praise from art and cultural circles. Her projects may have been unrealised or small in scale, budget, and impact on the official architectural agenda, nevertheless, her position on the periphery led her to work on cultural projects. These projects, though modest, have recently become accessible for examination thanks to the digitalization efforts of museums and archives. It has been a tremendous pleasure to discover footage of the interior she designed for the editorial office of Māksla magazine or blueprints of storage cabinets created for the Museum of Literature and Music while writing this article and adding two more works to her portfolio. In the Soviet Union, architects were not rewarded with prizes or bonuses for empowering the female community, designing museum cabinets, or experimenting with houses for private clients using leftover construction materials. Staņa’s architecture, indeed, exemplified empathy and embodied the paradigms of our time, transcending the boundaries of the 20th century.

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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