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.

The post Learning with Dolls in the Work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith appeared first on post.

The following essay by art historian Talita Trizoli reveals the influence of a Catholic and spiritual pathos in the work of influential though relatively unknown Brazilian critic Maria Eugênia Franco. Taking as case studies Franco’s writings on artists such as Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux, and Mestre Nosa and artworks attributed to unrecognized Baroque artisans, Trizoli establishes a direct relationship between Catholic motifs and the development of modernity in Brazilian art and identities.

Religion is eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in those groups. —Emile Durkheim¹

Between 1948 and 1954, Brazilian art critic and curator Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) had a regular column in O Estado de São Paulo, a real achievement given this newspaper, and several others, was marked by misogyny and conservative values.²Over the course of seven years, Franco offered commentary and analyses, predominantly about the art circuit in São Paulo, in addition to lucid criticism of the systemic aspect of the milieu and formal observations on the work of specific artists, most of whom were contemporary.³

Still relatively unfamiliar to the general public, Franco’s critical writings allow us to understand miscellaneous efforts in the modern Latin American context to reconcile form and content—a conflict inherent to aesthetic programs in their various versions and a recurring theme in Brazilian art criticism.⁴

A large part of Franco’s critical work deals with artists and artistic events on the so-called Rio–São Paulo axis, raising structural issues surrounding the organization of the Brazilian art circuit, mainly as it relates to audience formation and cultural institutions.⁵ In terms of the selection of articles commented upon here, the content concerns sacred themes explored by Brazilian artists not only as an object of formal exercise but also as a representation of an affective memory linked to the construction of national identity, since figures dear to popular culture and religious festivals, in this case saints and passages from the life of Christ, have been chosen to allegorize reality in Brazil. 

Embedded in the constitution of Brazilian national identity, the mystical narratives of Catholicism, a fundamental element of Portuguese colonization, formed a set of folkloric entities in the collective imagination that mixed with the mythologies of the various original Indigenous peoples and the shamanic practices of the African subjects exiled by the slave regime. Although the poetic and violent encounter between these cultures generated a rich symbolic ensemble, the Catholic-Apostolic-Roman structure remained the organizing imperative of Brazilian culture.⁶

Coming from a Catholic family, like most of the Brazilian population at the time, Franco was familiar with Christian religious “mysteries” even though she was not a practicing Catholic.⁷Indeed, from the Barroco Mineiro, or Baroque of Minas Gerais, chosen as the first artistic manifestation of the Brazilian spirit, to the religious calendar of collective festivals and the obvious predominance of biblical passages in the history of art, some knowledge of Christian mysticism was almost inevitable.⁸

For Franco, the mystery of the Catholic religious experience emerged as a theme already widely recognized in the artistic sphere rather than as an element of amazement or one of discovery. This aspect can also be seen in the artistic production of her sister, painter Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especially in a series of abstracted representations of Saint Anne (figs. 1, 2) and in banners she presented as objects of scrutiny for the application of chromatic nuance and composition inspired by Giorgio Morandi.⁹

Committed to remaining professionally impartial, Franco did not write frequently about the work of her sister or brother-in-law, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), who was also a painter. (Rather, her exchanges with both frequently took place in person or through letters). She dedicated some of her columns, however, to the work of partner artists in which the sacred theme is manifested alongside formal investigation and dramatic Christian narratives (the mystical pathos), which are mobilized for the sentimental education of the spectator.¹⁰Of these texts, an analysis of artist Samson Flexor (1907–1971) and his work in the article “Flexor e a arte religiosa” (“Flexor and Religious Art”) is significant.¹¹

Flexor was born in Moldova, in the city of Soroca, but after traveling through Brussels and Paris, he settled permanently in Brazil in 1948. Having earned a degree in painting from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studying art history at the Sorbonne—in addition to holding a degree in chemistry, which he had previously earned in Brussels—Flexor was an artist who was intellectual about his own work.¹²He is considered among the pioneers of abstraction in Brazil, mainly after critical contact with Belgian art critic Léon Degand (1907–1958), first director of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) and an advocate of abstraction. It is important to highlight that Flexor was in no way a defender of a dogmatic and protocol-based artistic practice; indeed, he believed in the affective and dramatic dimensions of art—as can be seen in his clashes with members of the Concrete art movement, whom he nicknamed “Concretinos” (a mixture of “concrete” and “cretins” in Portuguese).¹³

It is from this sense of religious pathos that Franco approached Flexor’s work. In her article about the artist, Maria Eugênia highlights two solo exhibitions on display in São Paulo, one at Galeria Domus, the other at MAM. She foregrounds Flexor’s technical dexterity and emphasizes his character as a “subject painter,” highlighting the eleven paintings in the series Composições sobre temas da Paixão (Compositions on Themes of the Passion) at MAM. These canvases, with their Cubo-Expressionist treatment of forms and their icy hues, warm blues, and earth tones, represent passages from Christ’s martyrdom, evoking the most moving moments of his suffering and cathartic self-denial (figs. 3–5). 

It is noteworthy that Flexor was born into a Jewish family but converted to Catholicism in France. After the death of his first wife, Tatiana Yablokof, during childbirth, the painter received spiritual guidance and professional support from local priests, who commissioned the grieving artist to produce several frescoes based on biblical events. From then on, biblical passages, with an emphasis on Christ’s crucifixion at Calvary, would be a recurring theme in his work, even in later life, when his artistic focus became more personal (though nonetheless tragic).¹⁴Maria Eugênia comments in her article on the artist: 

Catholic culture has been predominant in Brazil since the territory was colonized, even determining its later structure as an empire and democracy—despite the modern premise of a secular state within the Enlightenment model.¹⁶As far as the artistic world is concerned, the use of mystical drama in sacred art is both a means of catalyzing attention and a strong empathic device in the narrative of suffering and sacrifice in the name of transcendence—not for nothing, the choice of certain passages and figures from the Bible to consolidate values or reformulate contingencies is recurrent in representations. I consider this condition an example of the intense presence in Brazilian culture of variants of Our Lady—widely used as a resource for appeasing and welcoming the suffering of the population—but also the symbolic correlation of Christ martyred on the cross with the figure of Brazilian national hero Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, who in 1792, became the only member of the revolutionary Inconfidência Mineira to be arrested, tried for treason, and publicly dismembered.¹⁷

The search for a dramatic dimension to the Christian mystery is a problem inherent to Maria Eugênia Franco’s critical analyses of artists other than Flexor, but without the loss of focus on the formal and systemic structuring aspect of the milieu. These dramatic, almost passionate elements identified by not only Franco but also fellow writers such as Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) and Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) are reminiscent of the expressionist influence of immigrant artists established in Brazil and their pupils.¹⁸ Moreover, they are applied to the thematic treatment of scenes typical of the country, as is the case in works by Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962), and Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), among others. Its use by Flexor, but also by painter and poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984), as we will see later through Franco’s perspective, is linked to the experience of collective human suffering during World War II. 

In Franco’s article about Henri Michaux’s watercolors, written during her French stay, one can see by the use of adjectives and a certain psychologizing analysis, her effort to narrate the dimension of anguish and fascinating displacement in the artist’s images, with their washes and autonomist drawing techniques (figs. 6, 7).¹⁹Michaux, of Belgian origin and naturalized French, is still known today for his dramatic forms and investigations of human suffering, which are poetically enhanced by manifestations of the unconscious in the form of dreams and numbing delusions. Portraits and self-portraits made with watercolor stains and thin, tense lines of ink that overlap, forming a suspended plot on the white of the paper, indicate the artist’s proximity to Surrealism or even Dadaism. However, the artist distanced himself from the uncontrolled aspects of these isms, as he was interested in the fissure of human subjectivity, the feeling of lack of belonging intensified by the experience of war.²⁰
Franco describes the paintings on display at the gallery as follows: 

It is interesting that in her articles on Flexor and Michaux, Franco emphasizes the relationship between studies of form and those of composition as they pertain to the dramatic and psychic demands of subject matter. This theme was already present in 1944 in her article²²on the statuary ensemble in Ouro Preto by Antônio Francisco Lisboa (popularly known as Aleijadinho, 1738–1814), her first aesthetic essay, and it is repeated in later articles on the mythical artist and the importance of the Baroque in the constitution of Brazil’s colonial artistic fortune.²³  

Referencing the studies of Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), pioneer in identifying the Baroque of Minas Gerais as the first sui generis Brazilian artistic style, Franco points out the artistic and historical importance of the figure of the crippled craftsman, who suffered like Christ, and calls for a greater presence of his work and state support for its circulation.²⁴In a typed manuscript now in the personal archive of her nephew Alexandre Dacosta, Franco describes an unofficial tour of the Minas Gerais museum complex in 1944.²⁵She writes:

Franco continues her essay with an emotional and qualitative description of the oratorio in question, but what is striking about this youthful text is the description of the scourging of Jesus on the Way of the Cross. As a dramatic, political, and formal exercise, this theme is an exhaustive one for artists, and Franco addressed it repeatedly in her criticism.²⁷The passages of suffering, violence, commotion, and welcome, consisting of fourteen stations, provide a narrative of emotional purging for the faithful, whereby the aim is both to grow closer to the divine through mystical experience and to obtain indulgence for moral failings—in this sense, the formal solution of the unknown artist of the oratory, of begging, of carving the small polychrome figures on a blue background in a narrative of ascendancy through the sacrifice of the son of God, reinforces the idea of ascension and transcendence through the experience of violence.

In 1969, Franco undertook her last public analysis of a sacred and popular representation of Christ’s Calvary, this time not in a newspaper column but rather in an essay published in a limited edition of woodcuts by Mestre Nosa.²⁸The artist from Ceará, whose baptismal name was Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897–1983), had recently arrived in São Paulo and was a prominent figure in the movement for the marketing and appreciation of popular culture. His set of fifteen prints, first commissioned by artist Sérvulo Esmeraldo (1929–2017) and then published in two limited editions—the first in France in 1965 by editor Robert Morel through Esmeraldo, and the second in 1969 by editor Julio Pacello—fueled that frisson of the “primitive,” “innocent,” and “pure” of so-called popular art. Franco’s text reinforces these notions of vernacular artistic production but adds her own set of aesthetic predicates referring to the sacred and formal sphere:

It is interesting that in her critical analysis of the oratorio and of Nosa’s woodcuts, Franco emphasizes the ingenuity of the formal solutions in the face of so-called simplistic representations of a classic and consecrated religious theme in the Christian context. The Way of the Cross and the suffering endured by Jesus have historically been mobilized as moralizing devices for the masses, among whom material self-denial and physical submission constitute an imperative condition for the ascension of the spirit—especially amid economic fragility and political turmoil, as was the case during Franco’s time as an arts professional in the critical and curatorial sectors. Whether under the dictatorial New State (Estado Novo; 1937–45) during the rule of Getúlio Vargas or under later military dictatorship (1964–85), artistic productions of a religious nature had, dubiously, the public function of cultural familiarity and of creating critical metaphors for social causes.

However, with regard to this set of articles by Maria Eugênia Franco, religious themes in Brazilian modern art are a bastion of the constitution of national identity, an aspect of obsession in the late modern generation of the Return to Order. Franco seems to have made a circle of eternal return, albeit indirectly and tangentially, to the mystical Christian realm amid her own struggles to construct the artistic environment and the aesthetic-educational formation of the public³⁰ (synthesis of form with content, synthesis of artistic investigative practice, and the dramatization of affections), even though today she is barely remembered by her peers.

Portuguese

O seguinte ensaio da historiadora da arte Talita Trizoli revela a influência de um pathos católico e espiritual na obra da influente, embora relativamente desconhecida, crítica brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco. Tomando como estudos de caso os escritos de Franco sobre artistas como Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux e Mestre Nosa e obras atribuídas a artesãos barrocos não reconhecidos, Trizoli estabelece uma relação direta entre motivos católicos e o desenvolvimento da modernidade na arte e identidades brasileiras.

[…] la religion est une chose éminemment sociale. Les représentations religieuses sont des représentations collectives qui expriment des réalités collectives; les rites sont des manières d’agir qui ne prennent naissance qu’au sein des groupes assemblés et qui sont destinés à susciter, à entretenir ou à refaire certains états mentaux de ces groupes³¹ ― Émile Durkeim 

Entre 1948 e 1954, a crítica de arte, gestora e curadora brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) teve uma coluna regular de crítica de arte no jornal O Estado de São Paulo, um verdadeiro feito, considerando que este jornal, assim como vários outros, era marcado pela misoginia e pelos valores conservadores.³²Ao longo de sete anos, Franco teceu comentários e análises predominantemente sobre o circuito artístico de artes na capital paulista, além de apresentar críticas lúcidas no aspecto sistêmico do meio e observações formais sobre a produção artística, em sua maioria, contemporânea.³³

Ainda pouco conhecida do grande público, a produção crítica de Franco possibilita compreender os esforços de miscelânea entre forma e conteúdo no âmbito moderno latino-americano, um conflito inerente aos programas estéticos em suas diversas versões e um tema recorrente na crítica de arte brasileira.³⁴

Grande parte da obra crítica de Franco aborda artistas e eventos artísticos do chamado eixo Rio-São Paulo, levantando questões estruturais em torno da organização do circuito artístico brasileiro, principalmente no que se refere à formação de público e às instituições culturais.³⁵Em termos da seleção dos artigos aqui comentados, o conteúdo diz respeito a temas sagrados explorados pelos artistas brasileiros não apenas como objeto de exercício formal, mas também como representação de uma memória afetiva vinculada à construção da identidade nacional, uma vez que figuras caras à cultura popular e às festas religiosas, no caso santos e passagens da vida de Cristo, foram escolhidas para alegorizar a realidade brasileira.³⁶

Incrustadas na constituição da identidade nacional brasileira, as narrativas místicas do catolicismo, elemento fundamental da colonização portuguesa, formaram um conjunto de entidades folclóricas no imaginário coletivo que se misturam às mitologias dos diversos povos indígenas originários e às práticas xamânicas dos súditos africanos exilados pelo regime escravista. Embora o encontro poético e violento entre essas culturas tenha gerado um rico conjunto simbólico, a estrutura católico-apostólico-romana permaneceu como o imperativo organizador da cultura brasileira.

Vinda de uma família católica, como a maioria da população brasileira da época, Franco estava familiarizada com os “mistérios” religiosos cristãos, embora não fosse católica praticante.³⁷De fato, do Barroco Mineiro, ou Barroco de Minas Gerais, escolhido como a primeira manifestação artística do espírito brasileiro, ao calendário religioso de festas coletivas e à óbvia predominância de passagens bíblicas na história da arte, algum conhecimento do misticismo cristão era quase inevitável.³⁸

Para Franco, o mistério da experiência religiosa católica surgiu como um tema já amplamente reconhecido na esfera artística, em vez de um elemento de espanto ou descoberta. Esse aspecto também pode ser visto na produção artística de sua irmã, a pintora Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especialmente em uma série de representações abstratas de Santa Ana (figs. 1, 2) e em faixas que ela apresentou como objetos de escrutínio para a aplicação de nuance cromática e composição inspiradas por Giorgio Morandi.³⁹

Comprometida em permanecer profissionalmente imparcial, Franco não escrevia frequentemente sobre o trabalho de sua irmã ou cunhado, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), que também era pintor. (Em vez disso, suas trocas com ambos frequentemente ocorriam pessoalmente ou por meio de cartas). Ela dedicou algumas de suas colunas, no entanto, ao trabalho de artistas parceiros nos quais o tema sagrado se manifesta ao lado da investigação formal e das narrativas cristãs dramáticas (o pathos místico), que são mobilizadas para a educação sentimental do espectador.⁴⁰Destes textos, destaca-se a análise do artista Samson Flexor (1907–1971) e sua obra no artigo “Flexor e a arte religiosa”.⁴¹

Flexor nasceu na Moldávia, na cidade de Soroca, e após trânsito por Bruxelas e Paris, estabeleceu-se em definitivo no Brasil em 1948. Com formação em pintura pela Belas Artes de Paris, mas também com passagens pela Sorbonne na área de história, e uma formação prévia em Química em Bruxelas, Flexor foi um artista intelectualizado sobre a própria obra.⁴²Ele é considerado um dos percursores da abstração no Brasil, principalmente após contato crítico com o primeiro diretor do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, o belga Léon Degan (1907-1958), partidário da abstração. É Importante frisar que o artista não era de modo algum defensor de uma prática artística dogmática e protocolar, pois acreditava na dimensão afetiva e dramática da obra de arte – como se pode ver nos seus confrontos com os membros do movimento da arte concreta, a quem apelidou de “Concretinos”.⁴³

É a partir desse dispositivo dramático que Franco se aproxima da obra de Flexor. No referido artigo de 25 de abril de 1940, Maria Eugênia nomeia duas mostras individuais do artista em cartaz na cidade, uma na galeria Domus, outra no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Ela coloca em primeiro plano sua destreza técnica e pontuar seu caráter de “pintor de assunto”, mas dando destaque ao conjunto presente no MAM, “Composições sobre temas da Paixão”. Essas telas, com seu tratamento cubo-expressionista das formas e seus tons gelados, azuis quentes e tons de terra, representam passagens do martírio de Cristo, evocando os momentos mais comoventes de seu sofrimento e autonegação catártica (figs. 3–5).

Vale notar que, Flexor nasceu em uma família judia, mas converteu-se ao catolicismo na França após a morte de sua 1ª esposa no parto, Tatiana Yablokof, e o respectivo acolhimento espiritual e profissional de padres, os quais encomendaram diversos afrescos sobre eventos bíblicos para o artista em luto. As passagens bíblicas de Cristo, com ênfase em seu calvário, seriam então um tema recorrente para Flexor, mesmo quando o artista adentra a uma produção tardia mais pessoal, mas também trágica.⁴⁴ Maria Eugênia comenta que:

A predominância imperativa da cultura católica no Brasil ocorre desde a colonização do território, determinando inclusive sua posterior estruturação como império e democracia — apesar da premissa moderna de um Estado laico dentro do modelo iluminista.⁴⁶No que se refere ao mundo artístico, o uso do drama místico na arte sacra é ao mesmo tempo um meio de catalisar a atenção e um forte recurso empático na narrativa do sofrimento e do sacrifício em nome da transcendência — não à toa, a escolha de certas passagens e figuras da Bíblia para consolidar valores ou reformular contingências é recorrente nas representações. Podemos considerar como exemplo dessa condição a intensa presença na cultura brasileira de variantes de Nossa Senhora — amplamente utilizadas como recurso para apaziguar e acolher o sofrimento da população —, mas também da correlação simbólica de Cristo martirizado na cruz com a figura do herói nacional brasileiro Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, conhecido como Tiradentes, que, em 1792, tornou-se o único integrante da revolucionária Inconfidência Mineira a ser preso, julgado por traição e esquartejado publicamente.⁴⁷

A busca por uma dimensão dramática no mistério cristão é objeto que tangencia as analises críticas de Maria Eugênia Franco em alguns artistas para além de Flexor, mas sem a perda de foco do aspecto estruturante formal e sistêmico do meio. Esses elementos dramáticos, quase apaixonados, identificados não apenas por Franco, mas também por outros escritores como Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) e Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) lembram a influência expressionista de artistas imigrantes estabelecidos no Brasil e seus alunos.⁴⁸Além disso, são aplicadas ao tratamento temático de cenas típicas do país, como é o caso de obras de Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962) e Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), entre outros. Seu uso por Flexor, mas também pelo pintor e poeta Henri Michaux (1899–1984), como veremos mais adiante pela perspectiva de Franco, está ligado à experiência do sofrimento humano coletivo durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

No artigo de Franco sobre as aquarelas de Henri Michaux, escrito durante sua estadia na França, percebe-se, pelo uso de adjetivos e uma certa análise psicologizante, seu esforço em narrar a dimensão de angústia e deslocamento fascinante nas imagens da artista, com suas aguadas e técnicas de desenho autonomistas (figs. 6, 7).⁴⁹Michaux, de origem belga e naturalizado francês, é conhecido até hoje por suas formas dramáticas e investigações sobre o sofrimento humano, poeticamente potencializadas por manifestações do inconsciente em forma de sonhos e delírios entorpecentes. Retratos e autorretratos feitos com manchas de aquarela e linhas finas e tensas de tinta que se sobrepõem, formando uma trama suspensa sobre o branco do papel, indicam a proximidade do artista com o surrealismo ou mesmo com o dadaísmo. No entanto, o artista se distanciou dos aspectos descontrolados desses ismos, pois se interessava pela fissura da subjetividade humana, o sentimento de falta de pertencimento intensificado pela experiência da guerra.⁵⁰Franco descreve as pinturas em exposição na galeria da seguinte forma:

É pertinente notar que em ambos os artigos sobre Flexor e Michaux, Franco coloca ênfase na interlocução entre os estudos de forma e composição em relação a demanda dramática e psíquica do tema dos artistas. Esse aspecto já se encontra presente no primeiro ensaio estético da autora em 1944⁵² sobre o conjunto estatuário na cidade de Ouro Preto de Antonio Francisco Lisboa (1738-1814), popularmente conhecido como o Aleijadinho de Vila Rica, e que se repetirá nos artigos posteriores sobre o mítico artista e a importância do barroco brasileiro na constituição da fortuna artística colonial no Brasil.⁵³

Tendo como referência nomeada os estudos de Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), precursor do indicativo do barroco mineiro como a primeira manifestação artística brasileira sui generis, Franco aponta tanto a importância artística e histórica da figura do artesão aleijado, sofredor como cristo, clamando juntamente por uma maior presença e apoio estatal para a circulação de suas obras.⁵⁴Em texto datilografado presente no acervo pessoal de seu sobrinho, há o seguinte material produzido dentro de uma excursão extraoficial de averiguação do complexo mineiro de museus⁵⁵ em 1944: 

Franco segue com um descritivo afetivo e qualitativo do oratório em questão, mas o que chama atenção nesse texto de juventude é a repetição do episódio dos flagelos de Jesus na Via Sacra. Como exercício dramático, político e formal, este tema é exaustivo para os artistas, e Franco abordou-o repetidamente na sua crítica.⁵⁷As passagens de sofrimento, violência, comoção e boas-vindas, compostas por quatorze estações, fornecem uma narrativa de purificação emocional para os fiéis, cujo objetivo é tanto aproximar-se do divino por meio da experiência mística quanto obter indulgência por falhas morais — nesse sentido, a solução formal do artista desconhecido do oratório, da mendicância, da escultura de pequenas figuras policromadas sobre fundo azul em uma narrativa de ascendência por meio do sacrifício do filho de Deus, reforça a ideia de ascensão e transcendência por meio da experiência da violência.

Em 1969, Franco empreendeu sua última análise pública de uma representação sagrada e popular do Calvário de Cristo, desta vez não em uma coluna de jornal, mas sim em um ensaio publicado em uma edição limitada de xilogravuras de Mestre Nosa⁵⁸ (ou Noza, variando a grafia). O artista cearense recém chegado a São Paulo, cujo nome de batismo era Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897-1983), foi figura de destaque no movimento de valorização mercadológica da cultura popular, e seu conjunto de 15 imagens primeiramente encomendas pelo artista Sérvulo Esmeraldo, e depois editadas limitadamente em duas ocasiões – a 1ª na França pelo editor Robert Morel em 1965 por intermédio de Esmeraldo, a segunda em 1969 pelo editor Julio Pacello – alimentou esse frison do “primitivo”, “inocente” e “puro” da arte dita popular. 

É interessante que em sua análise crítica do oratório e das xilogravuras de Nosa, Franco enfatize a engenhosidade das soluções formais diante das chamadas representações simplistas de um tema religioso clássico e consagrado no contexto cristão. A Via Sacra e o sofrimento suportado por Jesus foram historicamente mobilizados como dispositivos moralizantes para as massas, entre as quais a abnegação material e a submissão física constituem uma condição imperativa para a ascensão do espírito — especialmente em meio à fragilidade econômica e à turbulência política, como foi o caso durante o tempo de Franco como profissional das artes nos setores crítico e curatorial. Seja sob o ditatorial Estado Novo (1937–45) durante o governo de Getúlio Vargas ou sob a ditadura militar posterior (1964–85), as produções artísticas de natureza religiosa tinham, duvidosamente, a função pública de familiaridade cultural e de criar metáforas críticas para causas sociais.

No entanto, no que se refere a esse conjunto de artigos de Maria Eugênia Franco, os temas religiosos na arte moderna brasileira são um bastião da constituição da identidade nacional, um aspecto de obsessão na geração tardo-moderna do Retorno à Ordem. Franco parece ter feito um círculo de eterno retorno, ainda que indireta e tangencialmente, ao reino místico cristão em meio às suas próprias lutas para construir o ambiente artístico e a formação estético-educacional do público⁶⁰(síntese da forma com o conteúdo, síntese da prática artística investigativa e dramatização dos afetos), ainda que hoje ela seja pouco lembrada por seus pares.

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This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world in the artists’ creative process. By exploring the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman actors in artistic expression, Germana Roquez prompts us to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of representing the natural environment, drawing from both rural and urban contexts in Peru as case studies.

The modern Western concept of landscape has traditionally implied the existence of an observing subject and an observed territory. It corresponds to an anthropocentric perspective, in which humans are superior to nature and thus allowed to control the territory and extract its resources. In the arts, this understanding has conventionally meant the depiction of an expanse of natural scenery from a single, detached viewpoint. While artists in recent decades have proposed diverging manners of representing the landscape (or the territory that surrounds them), new critical studies and theories have posed other ways in which it can be analyzed.¹The development of ecocriticism and new materialisms has been particularly instrumental in questioning the centrality of humans in ecological contexts and in highlighting the agency of nonhuman elements.²

However, as Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Sara Garzón have all noted, we must acknowledge that these seemingly new ideas in fact originated among Indigenous groups and have been a constant presence in their millenarian thought.³ Further, Indigenous artworks that reference the natural environment offer alternative thought models.⁴To understand Indigenous perspectives on the notion of territory, we must engage with diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. One important subject among many Indigenous groups is the concept of vital materiality and the interconnections between different beings and elements on earth. Indigenous and rural communities in the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America perceive that all entities in nature are interdependent, and yet that each one possesses agency and intentionality all its own. Moreover, many of these elements hold sacred significance.

Building upon Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, this text addresses the ways in which people from the rural communities of Sarhua in the Andes and Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazonia comprehend the material world that surrounds them and how this understanding guides their aesthetic production. First, I analyze painted boards produced in Sarhua and Shipibo-Konibo textiles. I argue that these objects are “embodied landscapes” interacting with human and nonhuman elements that define their material, formal, and iconographic configurations in both sacred and nonsacred ways. Next, I analyze a series of paintings created by contemporary Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists who have relocated (or whose parents relocated) to the capital city of Lima. This inquiry illustrates how these artists, while adhering to many traditional Western painterly conventions—particularly the use of representational images, cartographic renditions, and the landscape as the background or setting for human activities—are still able to evoke the natural environment from the sacred and animistic perspectives that they inherited from their communities.

Painted Boards and the Power of the Mountains

Sarhua is a rural community located in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian central Andes. Sarhuinos inhabit a small town in a valley surrounded by big mountains, and they use the adjacent lands for agriculture and livestock labor. Among the community’s most important symbolic objects are the Tablas, long painted boards that date as far back as the 19th century. About 118 inches high and 12 inches wide, they are normally attached to the ceiling of a newly constructed house.

Their main functions are to represent kinship relations and to maintain systems of reciprocity within the community.⁵But Tablas also protect the house and the family that lives in it, together with their lands, animals, crops, goods, and chattels. People in Sarhua, as in other Andean regions, consider the mountains, known as the apus or wamanis, to be agentic, powerful beings.⁶I pose that the Tablas care for the houses in the same way that the apus care for the town. Both the materiality and iconography of the Tablas and their participation in ritual are central to this analysis.

Sarhuinos make the Tablas when a couple is constructing the roof of their new house. The Tablas are read from bottom to top, beginning with a dedication from the compadres,⁷followed by depictions of the Virgin of the Assumption, the patron saint of Sarhua; the couple who owns the house; their close relatives (who appear in order of importance); and the sun.

Sarhuinos obtain the wood to make the Tablas from various trees, including pati, aliso, or molle, all of which grow in the valleys near the town, and use the burned branches of chillka, or willow, also from the valley, to outline the figures. They obtain the colored earths used to paint the figures from the mountains that surround Sarhua. To apply the colors, painters use retama sticks and feathers from local birds, and to fix the colors, they use qullpa, a type of resin they obtain from rocks located in the highlands.⁸ Indeed, the materials necessary to produce the Tablas come from the whole of the Sarhuino landscape. Native American curator Patricia Marroquín Norby has pointed out that in many works of Indigenous art, the source of the materials, the way in which they are collected, and their treatment speak to the relationship between the inhabitants and their territory. These works, therefore, do not represent the landscape; rather, they are the landscape.⁹

When the Tabla is ready, the compadre delivers it to the new homeowners in a ritual called Tabla Apaycuy. He and his wife, family, and friends, together with other local residents, carry the Tabla through the town of Sarhua along with goods such as corn, potatoes, fruits, and ichu, a grass from the highlands that is used for roofing.¹⁰Through the Tabla Apaykuy, the Tabla interacts with the entire Sarhuino landscape. More importantly, after the owners of the house attach the Tabla to the ceiling and celebrate with a great party, the Tabla gets in touch with the apus through a ritual called inchahuay, thereby acquiring the power to protect the house. During the inchahuay, guests walk and dance around the outside of the house wearing cloaks and conical hats made of ichu. Sarhuino painter Primitivo Evanán Poma indicates that through this practice, people invoke the apus for the protection of the house.¹¹Anthropologist Hilda Araujo points out that inchahuay is also the Sarhuino name for a layer of fog that, when it settles on the mountains on August 1, indicates a good year—that is, a year with a lot of rain. Thus, when the Sarhuinos wear these conical hats, they act as “mountains of good luck.”¹²

According to Andean concepts of animism, places and things are sentient entities that have the power to act. Further, as Bill Sillar notes, “Things that have had prior relationship, or evoke similarities, with other places, things or people may continue to have an effective relationship with their origin or referent.”¹³The Tablas de Sarhua, in fact, act like the apus or wamanis. Through their images and materiality, they are connected to and interact with the context surrounding them and have the agency to take care of the house and family, their goods, and their lands.

Shipibo-Konibo Textiles and the Power of Plants

The Shipibo-Konibo, an Indigenous community living in rural towns along the Ucayali River, in the Peruvian Amazon, have a different understanding of their territory and its visual representation in everyday objects. The Shipibo-Konibo consider themselves part of nature and the forest, trees, rivers, and land as entities with agency. Essential to the Shipibo-Konibo culture are the rao plants, or plants with power, which they consider to be intelligent beings.¹⁴Through ritual consumption of these plants, the Shipibo-Konibo connect with them and use them for medicinal purposes. They also use rao plants to guide them through their inner selves and to experience a deep communion with nature.¹⁵

Inspired by the visions formed when using rao plants such as piripiri (Cyperus sp.) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), Shipibo-Konibo women create and apply geometric patterns to bodies, clothing, ceramics, and other objects, materializing the koshi, or positive energy of the plants.¹⁶

Called kené in the Shipibo-Konibo language, these visual designs allude to the spots on the skin of the primordial anaconda ronin, who created the rivers and constellations as well as the paths that beings (animals, plants, spirits, and stars) use to travel and communicate.¹⁷Similar to interconnected labyrinths, they represent the river and the constellations that are central to the community’s worldview.¹⁸The Shipibo-Konibo’s understanding of the territory takes place through ritual and connection with the energy of plants, linking the territory with the cosmos and with human beings and their daily activities.

Among the objects that Shipibo-Konibo women cover with kené is the cloth they use to make traditional garments, such as the chitonte, or skirt for women, and the tari, or tunic for men. They construct these clothes from plain-weave fabrics made of a native variety of cotton that grows in the Ucayali region. Women used to grow the cotton, spin it, and weave it with a backstrap loom.¹⁹Once they have the cloth ready, they paint the kené using vegetal dyes that they make from the bark, fruits, leaves, roots, and seeds of local plants.²⁰Then they cover the cloth with gray clay sourced from the river’s edge and dry it in the sun. When they wash the cloth, the once pale designs are shown to have turned black and colorfast. Sometimes the women add bits of color derived from plants—such as red from achiote, yellow from the roots of the guisador, and purple from the ani plant.²¹ In other cases, they completely dye the new cloth using the bark of the mahogany tree to achieve a reddish tone or river clay, which results in a black fabric they then embellish with colorful embroidery and applied white strips.²²

As in the case of Tablas, Shipibo-Konibo textiles evoke the territory. This territory is not an alien space, as it is intrinsically linked to the body of the person who wears the garment made from the cloth created within it. The materiality of the clothing links the human body to local plants, water, and soil; and the patterns link it to networks—to the roots of plants, the paths of rivers, and the movement of stars.²³Moreover, the energy of the rao plants protects those wearing the clothing from various evils. The whole garment is testimony to a worldview in which the body is directly linked to nature and the territory on both cosmic and intimate levels.

Transitioning to a New Environment

During the second half of the twentieth century, when economic and social crises heavily affected rural regions in Peru, many people living in those areas had to migrate to the big cities, especially to the capital, Lima. There, migrants had to reshape their lives, fight for income and basic rights, learn Spanish, and negotiate the power structures in place. In the same way, they had to reshape their artistic practices to fit the market and the art system and to communicate with an urban audience.²⁴ In the 1970s, a group of Sarhuino painters in Lima began to produce smaller versions of the traditional Tablas and to depict costumbrista scenes of Sarhua for an urban audience. The new Tablas were a success, leading Sarhuinos to also depict social injustices and personal concerns.²⁵Shipibo-Konibo art followed a similar transition. Some of the Shipibo-Konibo who migrated to Lima in the 1980s shared the traditional knowledge of their people through figurative images describing traditional practices and rituals as well as their worldview and, more recently, their political struggles.²⁶In these new paintings, both Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists adopted Western conventions, transforming their engagement with the landscape. Although intended for other audiences and purposes, many of these pieces managed to refer in novel, clever, and creative ways, to the landscape from the perspective of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian ontologies and epistemologies.

The mountains form the background of many Sarhuino paintings produced in Lima—that is, they are shown as part of the landscape in the Western sense. Some painters, however, have taken an interest in evoking the agency, power, and sacredness of the apus. Since the 1970s, the painters of the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) have made several versions of Apu Suyos.

All of them feature the mountains of Sarhua, but in the form of men dressed in regal clothes. According to the inscription on the painting, the apus in the composition eat the offerings (fruits, wine, special bread, coca leaves, cigarettes, flowers, etc.) that the Sarhuinos have left for them on the table after a herranza, or cattle-marking celebration. A central figure, Millqa, receives the products, and invites the other apus to enjoy these “exquisite offerings.” All of them agree to protect the trusted sheep cattle.²⁷This portrayal of the Sarhuino landscape conveys the agency and power of the mountains to an urban audience, which is why the painters decided to use Western conventions and render the apus as human beings dressed like European kings.²⁸

In 1997, Carmelón Berrocal made Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, in which he represents the territory of his native town based on modern Western cartographic conventions.²⁹

However, this work exceeds the standard models based on precise measurements and instead highlights important places and elements for Sarhuinos—mountains, farmlands, roads, streets, chapels, canals, and rivers—whose proper names are indicated in writing. Also, the urban area is subjugated by the colossal mountains and the starry sky. This map, therefore, not only represents a territory, but also accounts for the power of the apus and nature over the life and culture of the Sarhuinos. Furthermore, Berrocal made the painting with colored soils collected from Sarhua. The painting is an intellectual depiction of the territory and yet also connected to it through its materiality.

In 2023, Venuca Evanán, the daughter of two Sarhuino painters who had relocated to Lima, produced La ofrenda de Francisca.

The composition of this work centers on the artist’s grandmother, Francisca, who is making a pagapu, or offering to the mountains, and giving thanks to the Pachamama, or the earth, for all that she offers. The four mountains in the background represent the four apus of Sarhua, which is Francisca’s hometown. In the foreground, Venuca has depicted the sea and coastal region where Lima is located and where she was born. The elements shown reference the relationship between humans and other natural beings as well as the migration story of the artist’s family. By including colored soils that she sourced from the mountains in Sarhua and sand that she collected from her neighborhood in Lima, Venuca reinforces this aspect of the artwork.³⁰

For Shipibo-Konibo people, the kené, the geometric designs that women visualize when connecting with rao plants, have been a means of reference to the context surrounding them, together with the concepts and knowledge to navigate it. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), born in the community of Roya, Pucallpa, learned kené from her grandmother and has applied it to both textiles and ceramics.³¹In Lima, she created her firsts paintings with materials and techniques like the ones she used before moving to the capital. First, she dyed the fabric with mahogany bark to obtain a reddish background, and then she painted the images with natural pigments she obtained from mud, plants, and soil from Roya.³²Onanya Baque Raoni (1990s) portrays an onanya, or traditional healer, who is using rao plants to cure a sick child and their mother.³³

Valera, who is also a traditional healer, speaks on different levels of the centrality of plants and their power in the Shipibo-Konibo worldview through the theme of onanya, the inclusion of kené designs in her subjects’ clothing, and her use of plants as a primary material.

Eventually Valera stopped using natural dyes and began painting with acrylic on cloth. She also began depicting the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people to Lima. In a 2011 painting, the artist addresses the natural environment of the Amazon Forest and the Andean mountains that the Shipibo-Konibo must cross to get to the Peruvian capital.

These places are rendered as interrelated environments, though some important differences stand out. While in the Amazon Forest, everything seems to work in perfect harmony, especially the relationship between women and plants, in Lima all the elements—three Shipibo women, a computer, the San Cristóbal mountain, and the tall buildings—are disconnected from one another. In this complex environment, while two Shipibo women learn new skills to succeed in an industrialized and globalized world, a third woman, dressed in traditional Shipibo-Konibo clothing, represents the connection to knowledge that their mothers and grandmothers learned from plants and transmitted through kené.³⁴

Harry Pinedo, son of Elena Valera and born in Lima, is also an artist. His painting El apu y la danza de Ronin (2022), characteristic of his work about the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo to Lima, shows two men and a woman performing a dance in honor of Ronin on the streets of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo in Lima.³⁵

Ronin is the mother serpent of waters, a primordial being who gave rise to the universe and whose skin is the basis of the kené designs.³⁶The Ronin dance and the presence of kené on the people’s clothing and the floor celebrate the harmony of the Shipibo-Konibo world. The San Cristóbal mountain, the main apu of the Lima area, a powerful being before the Spanish invasion and a sacred Indigenous space today reconquered by the Shipibo-Konibo, stands in the background.³⁷ Two big trees, located on either side of the mountain, are also prominent elements in the composition, highlighting the power and importance of plants to the Shipibo-Community in Lima.

These works question the Western anthropocentric conception of the landscape and allow us to conceive new understandings of landscape and territory. Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, therefore, constitute an effective approach to analyzing them. Produced in different contexts, however, they must also be analyzed on their own terms. Elizabeth Burns Coleman points out, in regards to Indigenous art, the importance of knowing “the kind of broad categories that are established in the society in which it [the object] was produced, as well as the category in which the artist that produced the work expected it to be understood or interpreted.”³⁸Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo people living in their rural communities are especially concerned with the vitality of matter and the interconnection of different beings in nature. They do not produce objects that represent the landscape or territory around them. Instead, these communities create, in collaboration with mountains and plants, acting entities that interact with their immediate contexts. Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo contemporary artworks made in Lima are no longer sentient given that they are made for urban, Western audiences. The artists have conveyed, through images, the power of the mountains and plants and their relationships with other beings. However, by using strategies such as representing natural beings with human traits and incorporating material elements from the natural environment and symbolic references to the knowledge of their respective communities, these artworks continue to be powerful objects that never cease to negotiate their Indigenous epistemologies.

Spanish

El presente ensayo de la historiadora de arte Gabriela Germana Roquez explora la importancia del paisaje en el arte de la comunidad Sarhua en los Andes y del pueblo shipibo-konibo en la Amazonia, ambos en Perú. En su análisis, Germana Roquez nos muestra el modo en que estas obras de arte representan, encarnan y reivindican el paisaje, destacando el papel activo que el mundo natural desempeña en el proceso creativo de los artistas. Al explorar la interconexión de los actores humanos y no humanos en la expresión artística, Germana Roquez nos invita a reflexionar sobre las dimensiones espirituales de la representación del entorno natural, tomando como casos de estudio tanto contextos rurales como urbanos de Perú.

El concepto occidental moderno de paisaje tradicionalmente ha supuesto la existencia de un sujeto observador y de un territorio observado. Esto responde a una perspectiva antropocéntrica, según la cual los seres humanos son superiores a la naturaleza y, por tanto, pueden controlar el territorio y extraer sus recursos. En el mundo del arte, este concepto generalmente ha llevado a representar la extensión del paisaje natural desde un punto de vista individual y distante. En las últimas décadas, mientras los artistas han propuesto diversas formas de representar el paisaje (o el territorio que les rodea), los nuevos estudios y teorías críticas han planteado también otras maneras de analizarlo.³⁹Tanto el desarrollo de la ecocrítica como del nuevo materialismo han sido particularmente decisivos a la hora de cuestionar la centralidad del ser humano en el contexto ecológico y de resaltar la agencia de los elementos no humanos.⁴⁰

Sin embargo, como han señalado Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo y Sara Garzón, debemos reconocer que estas ideas aparentemente nuevas en verdad surgieron en los grupos indígenas y han sido una presencia constante en su pensamiento milenario.⁴¹ Más aún, las obras de arte indígena que hacen referencia al entorno natural proponen estructuras de pensamiento alternativas.⁴² Para comprender la noción de territorio desde las perspectivas indígenas, tenemos que abordar diferentes epistemologías y ontologías indígenas. Un tema muy importante para los diversos grupos indígenas es el concepto de materialidad vital y la interconexión entre los distintos seres y elementos de la Tierra. Las comunidades indígenas y rurales de las regiones andina y amazónica de América del Sur consideran que, en la naturaleza, todas las entidades son interdependientes y, sin embargo, cada una posee agencia e intencionalidad propia. Es más, muchos de estos elementos revisten un valor sagrado.

Basándose en las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, el presente texto explora el modo en que los habitantes de las comunidades rurales de Sarhua, en los Andes, y shipibo-konibo, en la Amazonia, conciben el mundo material que les rodea y cómo esa concepción guía su producción estética. En primer lugar, analizaré las tablas pintadas que se elaboran en Sarhua y los tejidos shipibo-konibo. Propongo que estos objetos son “paisajes encarnados” que interactúan con los elementos humanos y no humanos que definen sus configuraciones materiales, formales e iconográficas, tanto a nivel sagrado como no sagrado. Luego examinaré una serie de pinturas creadas por artistas sarhuinos y shipibo-konibo contemporáneos que se han trasladado (o cuyos padres se han trasladado) a la capital, Lima. Este análisis mostrará cómo estos artistas, aunque se han adherido a diferentes convenciones pictóricas occidentales tradicionales –en particular, al uso de imágenes figurativas, de reproducciones cartográficas y del paisaje como fondo o escenario de la actividad humana– siguen siendo capaces de invocar el entorno natural desde las perspectivas sagradas y animistas que heredaron de sus comunidades.

Las tablas pintadas y el poder de las montañas

Sarhua es una comunidad rural situada en la región de Ayacucho, en los Andes peruanos centrales. Los sarhuinos habitan un pequeño poblado en un valle rodeado por grandes montañas, y usan los terrenos aledaños para labores agrícolas y ganaderas. Las Tablas –largos listones de madera pintada que datan del siglo XIX– se encuentran entre los objetos simbólicos más importantes de la comunidad. Miden unos tres metros de alto por treinta centímetros de ancho, y normalmente se colocan en los techos de las casas recién construidas.

Su principal función es representar las relaciones de parentesco y mantener los sistemas de reciprocidad dentro de la comunidad. ⁴³Pero las Tablas también protegen la casa y a la familia que la habita, junto con sus tierras, animales, cultivos, bienes y enseres. La gente de Sarhua, igual que en otras regiones andinas, considera a las montañas –a las que llaman apus o wamanis– como seres poderosos y con agencia.⁴⁴ Planteo, por lo tanto, que las Tablas cuidan las casas de la misma manera que los apus cuidan el pueblo. Tanto la materialidad como la iconografía de las Tablas y su participación en los rituales son fundamentales para este análisis.

            Los sarhuinos hacen Tablas cada vez que una pareja empieza a construir el techo de una nueva casa. Las Tablas se leen de abajo hacia arriba, comenzando con una dedicatoria de los compadres,⁴⁵ seguida de representaciones de la Virgen de la Asunción (patrona de Sarhua), de la pareja propietaria de la casa, de sus parientes cercanos (que aparecen en orden de importancia) y del sol.

Los sarhuinos obtienen la madera para hacer las Tablas de distintos árboles –entre ellos el pati, el aliso o el molle– que crecen en los valles cercanos al pueblo, y usan las ramas quemadas de chillka o sauce, también provenientes del valle, para delinear las figuras. Las tierras de colores que usan para pintar las figuras las obtienen de las montañas que rodean Sarhua. Para aplicar los colores, los pintores usan varas de retama y plumas de aves locales, y para fijarlos, aplican qullpa, un tipo de resina que obtienen de piedras ubicadas en las zonas de más altura.⁴⁶ Así, todos los materiales necesarios para producir las Tablas proceden del paisaje sarhuino. La curadora de arte indígena Patricia Marroquín Norby ha señalado que, en muchas obras de arte indígena, el origen de los materiales, la forma en que son recolectados y el tratamiento que reciben reflejan la relación de los habitantes con su territorio. Por tanto, estas obras no representan el paisaje, sino que son el paisaje.⁴⁷

Cuando la Tabla está lista, el compadre se la entrega a los nuevos propietarios en un ritual llamado Tabla Apaycuy. El compadre y su esposa, familia y amigos, acompañados de otros residentes locales, transportan la Tabla a través del pueblo de Sarhua junto con otras mercancías como maíz, papas, frutas e ichu, una hierba de las tierras altas que se utiliza para techar.⁴⁸Mediante la ceremonia del Tabla Apaykuy, la Tabla interactúa con todo el paisaje sarhuino. Y lo que es más importante, luego de que los dueños fijan la Tabla al techo de la casa y celebran con una gran fiesta, la Tabla entra en contacto con los apus a través de un ritual llamado inchahuay, donde adquiere el poder de proteger la casa.⁴⁹Durante el inchahuay, los invitados pasean y bailan alrededor de la casa con capas y sombreros cónicos hechos de ichu. El pintor sarhuino Primitivo Evanán Poma afirma que, mediante este ritual, la gente invoca a los apus para que protejan la casa. La antropóloga Hilda Araujo explica que la palabra inchahuay también es el término sarhuino que se usa para designar una fina capa de niebla que, si se asienta en las montañas el 1 de agosto, es señal de que vendrá un buen año, es decir, un año con abundantes lluvias. Así, cuando los sarhuinos usan esos sombreros cónicos, están actuando como “montañas de buena suerte”.⁵⁰

Según las concepciones andinas de animismo, los lugares y las cosas son entidades sensibles que tienen poder para actuar. Es más, como señala Bill Sillar, “las cosas que han tenido una relación previa o que suscitan similitudes con otros lugares, cosas o personas pueden seguir manteniendo una relación efectiva con su origen o su referente”.⁵¹ Las Tablas de Sarhua, de hecho, actúan como apus o wamanis. A través de sus imágenes y de su materialidad, están conectadas e interactúan con el contexto que las rodea, y tienen agencia para cuidar de la casa y de la familia, de sus bienes y sus tierras.

Los textiles shipibo-konibo y el poder de las plantas

Los shipibo-konibo, una comunidad indígena que habita en pueblos rurales a lo largo del río Ucayali en la Amazonia peruana, tienen una forma distinta de entender el territorio y su representación visual en los objetos cotidianos. Los shipibo-konibo se consideran parte de la naturaleza y ven el bosque, los árboles, los ríos y la tierra como entidades con agencia. Las plantas rao, o plantas con poder, son fundamentales para ellos y las consideran seres inteligentes.⁵²A través del consumo ritual de estas plantas, los shipibo-konibo entablan una conexión con ellas y las utilizan con fines medicinales. También recurren a las plantas rao para que éstas los guíen por su interior y experimentar una profunda comunión con la naturaleza.⁵³ Inspiradas en las visiones que perciben cuando consumen plantas rao como el piripiri (Cyperus sp.) y la ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), las mujeres shipibo-konibo crean y plasman motivos geométricos en sus cuerpos, ropas, cerámicas y otros objetos, materializando la koshi o energía positiva de las plantas.⁵⁴

Estos diseños visuales, denominados kené en el idioma shipibo-konibo, evocan las manchas de la piel de la anaconda primigenia ronin, quien creó los ríos y las constelaciones, así como los caminos que utilizan los seres vivos (animales, plantas, espíritus y estrellas) para trasladarse y comunicarse.⁵⁵Similares a laberintos conectados entre sí, representan tanto el río como las constelaciones que son fundamentales para la cosmovisión de la comunidad.⁵⁶ A través del ritual y de la conexión con la energía de las plantas, los shipibo-konibo comprenden el territorio y lo vinculan al cosmos y a los seres humanos y sus actividades cotidianas.   

Entre los objetos que las mujeres shipibo-konibo cubren con kené destaca la tela que usan para confeccionar prendas tradicionales, como el chitonte, o falda para las mujeres, y el tari, o túnica para los hombres. Confeccionan estas prendas con telas de tejido liso realizadas a partir de una variedad autóctona de algodón que crece en la región de Ucayali. Las mujeres solían cultivar el algodón, hilarlo y tejerlo con un telar de cintura.⁵⁷Cuando la tela ya está lista, pintan el kené con tintes vegetales que elaboran con cortezas, frutos, hojas, raíces y semillas de plantas locales.⁵⁸Luego cubren la tela con arcilla gris procedente de la orilla del río y la secan al sol. Cuando la lavan, los diseños que eran pálidos se oscurecen y se fijan a la tela. A veces las mujeres añaden toques de colores derivados de plantas, como el rojo del achiote, el amarillo de las raíces del guisador y el púrpura de la planta ani.⁵⁹En otros casos, tiñen completamente la tela nueva utilizando la corteza del árbol de caoba para conseguir un tono rojizo o arcilla del río, lo que da como resultado un tejido negro que luego adornan con bordados de colores y apliques de tiras blancas.⁶⁰

Al igual que en el caso de las Tablas, los tejidos shipibo-konibo evocan al territorio. Este territorio no es un espacio ajeno, sino que está intrínsecamente unido al cuerpo de la persona que usa la prenda elaborada con la tela que se fabricó en él. La materialidad de la prenda conecta el cuerpo humano a las plantas, al agua y al suelo del lugar; y los diseños lo conectan a otros entramados: a las raíces de las plantas, a los caminos de los ríos y al movimiento de las estrellas.⁶¹ Además, la energía de las plantas rao protege a quien lleva la ropa de distintos males. Toda la prenda es el testimonio de una cosmovisión en la que el cuerpo está directamente unido a la naturaleza y al territorio, tanto a nivel cósmico como íntimo.

La transición a un nuevo entorno

Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, una serie de crisis económicas y sociales afectaron gravemente a las regiones rurales de Perú y muchas personas tuvieron que migrar a las grandes ciudades, sobre todo a la capital, Lima. Allí, los migrantes tuvieron que rehacer sus vidas, luchar por conseguir ingresos y derechos básicos, aprender español y negociar las estructuras de poder existentes. También debieron reconfigurar sus prácticas artísticas para adaptarse al mercado y al sistema del arte, y para aprender a comunicarse con un público urbano.⁶²

En la década de 1970, un grupo de pintores sarhuinos en Lima empezó a producir versiones más pequeñas de las tradicionales Tablas y a representar en ellas escenas costumbristas de Sarhua orientadas a un público urbano. Las nuevas Tablas fueron un éxito, lo que llevó a los sarhuinos a representar también las injusticias sociales y sus preocupaciones personales.⁶³ El arte shipibo-konibo siguió una transición parecida. Algunos de los shipibo-konibo que emigraron a Lima en la década de 1980 mostraron los conocimientos de su pueblo mediante imágenes figurativas que describían prácticas y rituales tradicionales, así como su cosmovisión y, más recientemente, sus luchas políticas.⁶⁴En estas nuevas pinturas, tanto los artistas sarhuinos como los shipibo-konibo adoptaron convenciones occidentales, lo que supuso una modificación en su relación con el paisaje. Si bien estas piezas fueron pensadas para otros públicos y con otros propósitos, muchas supieron referirse al paisaje de forma novedosa, inteligente y creativa, desde la perspectiva de las ontologías y epistemologías indígenas andinas y amazónicas. 

Las montañas son parte del fondo de muchos cuadros sarhuinos realizados en Lima, es decir, se las presenta como parte del paisaje en el sentido occidental. Sin embargo, algunos pintores se han esforzado por evocar la agencia, el poder y el carácter sagrado de los apus. Desde la década de 1970, los pintores de la Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) han realizado varias versiones de Apu Suyos.

En todas se pueden ver las montañas de Sarhua, pero personificadas como hombres vestidos con ropas de la realeza. Según la inscripción en la pintura, los apus de la composición comen las ofrendas (frutas, vino, pan especial, hojas de coca, cigarrillos, flores, etc.) que los sarhuinos les han dejado sobre la mesa después de la herranza o fiesta de marcación de ganado. Una de las figuras centrales, Millqa, recibe los productos e invita a los demás apus a disfrutar de estas “exquisitas ofrendas”. Todos se ponen de acuerdo para proteger el ganado ovino de los leales.⁶⁵Esta representación del paisaje sarhuino busca transmitir la agencia y el poder de las montañas a un público urbano, razón por la cual los pintores decidieron utilizar las convenciones occidentales y representar a los apus como seres humanos vestidos como reyes europeos.⁶⁶En 1997, Carmelón Berrocal hizo el cuadro Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, en el que representa el territorio de su pueblo natal según las convenciones cartográficas occidentales modernas.⁶⁷

Esta obra, sin embargo, excede los diseños estándares basados en mediciones precisas y destaca, en su lugar, los espacios y elementos importantes para los Sarhuinos –las montañas, las tierras de cultivo, los caminos, las calles, las capillas, los canales y ríos– cuyos nombres propios aparecen indicados por escrito. Además, el casco urbano se presenta dominado por las colosales montañas y el cielo estrellado. Este mapa, por tanto, no sólo representa un territorio, sino que también da cuenta del poder de los apus y de la naturaleza sobre la vida y la cultura de los sarhuinos. Más aún, Berrocal pintó el cuadro con tierras de colores recogidas en Sarhua. El cuadro es una representación intelectual del territorio, pero además está conectado a él por su materialidad.   

En 2023, Venuca Evanán, hija de dos pintores sarhuinos que tuvieron que reestablecerse en Lima, pintó La ofrenda de Francisca.

La composición gira en torno a la abuela de la artista, Francisca, quien realiza un pagapu u ofrenda a las montañas y da gracias a la Pachamama, o tierra, por todo lo que nos ofrece. Las cuatro montañas del fondo representan los cuatro apus de Sarhua, ciudad natal de Francisca. En primer plano, Venuca representó el mar y la región costera en que se encuentra Lima y donde ella nació. Los elementos representados remiten al vínculo entre los seres humanos y otros seres naturales, así como a la historia de migración de la familia de la artista. Venuca subraya este aspecto de la obra incluyendo tierras de colores que obtuvo en las montañas de Sarhua y arena que recogió en su barrio de Lima.⁶⁸

Para el pueblo shipibo-konibo, el kené –los diseños geométricos que las mujeres visualizan cuando se conectan con las plantas rao– ha sido el medio para referirse al contexto que les rodea, así como a los conceptos y conocimientos necesarios para desenvolverse en él. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), nacida en la comunidad de Roya (Pucallpa) aprendió el kené de su abuela y lo ha aplicado tanto en textiles como en cerámica.⁶⁹En Lima creó sus primeras pinturas con materiales y técnicas similares a las que utilizaba antes de trasladarse a la capital. Primero, teñía las telas con corteza de caoba para obtener un fondo rojizo, y luego pintaba las imágenes con pigmentos naturales que obtuvo del barro, las plantas y la tierra de Roya.⁷⁰Onanya Baque Raoni (década de 1990) retrata a un onanya, o curandero tradicional, que utiliza plantas rao para curar a un niño enfermo y a su madre.⁷¹

Valera, que también es curandera tradicional, plantea en distintos niveles la centralidad de las plantas y su poder en la cosmovisión shipibo-konibo, a través de la figura del onanya, la inclusión de diseños kené en la ropa de sus personajes y el uso de las plantas como materia primordial.

Con el tiempo, Valera dejó de utilizar tintes naturales y empezó a pintar con acrílico sobre tela. También comenzó a representar la migración del pueblo shipibo-konibo a Lima. En un cuadro de 2011 la artista retrata el entorno natural de la selva amazónica y las montañas andinas que los shipibo-konibo deben atravesar para llegar a la capital peruana.

Estos lugares están representados como entornos que se relacionan entre sí, pero se pueden ver ciertas diferencias importantes. Mientras que en la selva amazónica parece que todo convive en perfecta armonía, en especial la relación entre las mujeres y las plantas, en Lima todos los elementos –las tres mujeres shipibo, la computadora, el cerro San Cristóbal y los altos edificios– están desconectados entre sí. En este complejo entorno, mientras dos mujeres shipibo aprenden nuevas habilidades para triunfar en un mundo industrializado y globalizado, una tercera mujer, vestida con prendas tradicionales shipibo-konibo, simboliza la conexión con los conocimientos que sus madres y abuelas aprendieron de las plantas y transmitieron a través del kené.⁷²

Harry Pinedo, hijo de Elena Valera y nacido en Lima, también es artista. Su cuadro El apu y la danza de ronin (2022), característico de su obra sobre la migración de los shipibo-konibo a Lima, muestra a dos hombres y una mujer ejecutando una danza en honor a ronin en las calles de la comunidad shipibo-konibo de Cantagallo, en Lima.⁷³

Ronin es la serpiente madre de las aguas, un ser primigenio que dio origen al universo y cuya piel es la base de los diseños kené.⁷⁴La danza de ronin y la presencia del kené en la vestimenta de la gente y en el suelo, celebran la armonía del mundo shipibo-konibo. Al fondo se alza el cerro San Cristóbal, apu principal de la zona de Lima, un ser poderoso antes de la invasión española y un espacio indígena sagrado, reconquistado en la actualidad por los shipibo-konibo.⁷⁵Los dos grandes árboles ubicados a ambos lados de la montaña también son elementos destacados en la composición, ya que subrayan el poder y la importancia de las plantas para la comunidad shipibo en Lima.     

Todas estas obras cuestionan la visión antropocéntrica occidental del paisaje y nos permiten concebir nuevas maneras de entender el paisaje y el territorio. Las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, por lo tanto, constituyen un enfoque efectivo para analizarlas. Sin embargo, por haber sido producidas en contextos distintos, también hay que analizarlas en sus propios términos. Refiriéndose al arte indígena, Elizabeth Burns Coleman recuerda que es importante conocer “el tipo de categorías generales que rigen la sociedad en la que fue producido [el objeto], así como la categoría con la que el artista que produjo la obra esperaba que fuera entendida o interpretada”.⁷⁶ Los sarhuinos y los shipibo-konibo que viven en sus comunidades rurales están especialmente interesados en la vitalidad de la materia y la interconexión de los distintos seres en la naturaleza. No producen objetos que representan el paisaje o el territorio que les rodea, sino que crean, en colaboración con las montañas y las plantas, entidades con agencia que interactúan con sus contextos más cercanos.

Las obras de arte sarhuino y shipibo-konibo contemporáneas realizadas en Lima han dejado de ser entidades sensibles dado que fueron realizadas para un público urbano y occidental. Los artistas han transmitido, a través de imágenes, el poder de las montañas y las plantas y sus relaciones con otros seres. Sin embargo, al utilizar ciertas estrategias –como la representación de seres naturales con rasgos humanos, la incorporación de elementos materiales del entorno natural y las referencias simbólicas a los conocimientos de sus respectivas comunidades– estas obras de arte siguen siendo objetos poderosos que no dejan de negociar con sus epistemologías indígenas.

The post Sacred and Agentic Landscapes in Peruvian Contemporary Indigenous Art / Paisajes sagrados y con agencia en el arte indígena contemporáneo peruano appeared first on post.

“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.

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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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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In Campesinos Testifying, Palace of Justice, Cuzco (c. 1929) by Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), six Andean peasants huddle together at the Cuzco courthouse—four on a wooden bench and two standing behind them. Behind this group, two men are seated along a wall and, to their right, two functionaries sit at a table, one bent over his paperwork. Receding into the background of the room, these four men in suits underscore the peasants’ incongruous presence in a government office. The stripes of their rough ponchos contrast with the faded floral carpet beneath their bare feet. Bearing expressions that flicker from impassive to imploring, obdurate to contrite, the peasants meet the camera’s lens with serious gazes. Scant information about this arresting—and possibly arrested—group exists beyond the title of the photograph. Who are these people and what brought them to court? The image alone provides no answer.

Active between 1908 and 1954, Chambi photographed widely in the southern Andes of Peru, achieving significant renown in his own day. Born to an Indigenous family in a small highland town in the province of Puno, Chambi was a native speaker of Quechua, the most common Indigenous language spoken in the Andes. His skill behind the camera afforded him social mobility in a region riven by racial and economic inequality. Having first laid eyes on the apparatus as a teenager outside the gold mine where his late father had labored, Chambi apprenticed with the photographer Max T. Vargas (1874–1959) in Arequipa before opening his own photography studio in Cuzco. There, in the former Inca capital, Chambi made portraits of the middle and upper classes; shot scenes of urban and rural life in the city and its surroundings; and documented architectural and archaeological sites. At the time of his death in 1973, Chambi’s archive contained some thirty thousand negatives; in 1978, his son Víctor Chambi, collaborated with U.S. photographer Edward Ranney (born 1942) on a restoration project. The following year, in 1979, they selected a group of negatives to reprint for an exhibition that traveled to The Museum of Modern Art and subsequently entered MoMA’s collection.¹

Campesinos Testifying is presently on view at the Museum in a collection gallery related to Indigenism, a movement of considerable cultural and political influence across Latin America in the early twentieth century that sought to redress the oppression of Indigenous peoples. The Peruvian Marxist critic José Carlos Mariátegui offered one of the first literary theories of Indigenism, describing it as an emergent yet transitional genre, as a prerequisite for a future literature written by and for Indigenous people. “Indigenist literature cannot give us a rigorously veristic version of the indio,” he wrote, in the parlance of the time. “It must idealize and stylize the indio. Nor can it give us its proper spirit, for it is still a literature of mestizos.”² In these few lines Mariátegui makes two foundational observations about Indigenist art: first, that Indigenism is the prerogative of non-Indigenous or mixed-race intellectuals; second, that it aspires to representation but not realism. As an artist of Indigenous heritage and a photographer, Chambi challenged these precepts, even collaborating with Indigenist intellectuals who often chose or commissioned his work to illustrate their writings.³ A photograph like Campesinos Testifying, which has lost the original context of its production, demonstrates how Chambi’s work might speak for itself.

Campesinos Testifying pictures a trial, but researchers have yet to find written records that, corresponding to the event, confirm whether the peasants were defendants or plaintiffs. Literary historian Jorge Coronado located a descendant of one lawyer pictured in the photograph,who alleged that the peasants were on trial for attempting to assassinate a powerful landowner.⁴ Uprisings plagued plantations and farms in Peru’s rural provinces throughout the 1920s, and the press sensationalized particularly violent episodes, stoking elites’ fears of revolution.⁵ But Andean peasants also employed nonviolent methods as they resisted the exploitation of their labor and dispossession of their lands under the feudal structure of the agricultural economy. They petitioned local and federal authorities, for example, attempting to claim rights granted by the 1920 constitution, in which the state first legally recognized Indigenous communities—even as the justice system proved inadequate in the face of the political influence of wealthy landowners.⁶

In Chambi’s time, photography was perceived as a privileged mode of objective representation. During the nineteenth century, photographs gained the status of evidence through their role in the development of criminology, forensics, and surveillance.⁷ Campesinos Testifying shirks this social function. Even before the loss of context rendered the image ambiguous, it had failed to serve as a testimonial, revealing the camera to be an unreliable witness. According to historian Alfredo Flores Galindo, when called to court to testify against their interests, Andean peasants occasionally refused to speak. ⁸ As a mute record, perhaps Chambi’s photograph mirrors this strategy, its silence intentional rather than circumstantial.

The author wishes to thank Beverly Adams for facilitating this publication, as well as Horacio Ramos, Hannah Rose Blakeley and Fedor Karmanov for thinking through it with her.

Campesinos Testifying was on view at the Museum in a collection gallery related to Indigenism, a movement of considerable cultural and political influence across Latin America in the early twentieth century that sought to redress the oppression of Indigenous peoples.

The post <strong>Bearing Witness: Martín Chambi’s <em> Campesinos Testifying, Palace of Justice, Cuzco </em>(c. 1929)</strong> appeared first on post.

Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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I spent my childhood in the hills or in the sea. I liked to listen to the fog. I ran cross-country, I ran through the woods, the grass, and the meadows; I ran all the time, so much I wore out my knees and now my knees ache at random. When my friends and I got our licenses, we often went to the Marin Headlands. By the time we got to it, the Headlands was a national park; it still is. First though, it was Coast Miwok lands. All of California is unceded. Later, the area was home to Portuguese and Spanish dairy farmers, and marked by all the violence of their arrival. Since the 1900s, it has been a federal military base, which swelled into a monster of an outpost in the 1940s to protect Americans from the perceived threat from the other side of the Pacific. Nobody came. Nevertheless, it was deemed appropriate to intern our own citizens and residents.¹ I remember mulling over this violence when I was still young: Why did that happen like that? It is funny to remember that sense of confusion, despite not knowing or having any of the knowledge then that I do now about the trinity of imperialism, racism, and colonization. Though it was nameless then, I still felt the ambient, unflinching whine of the accumulation of capital, among its cacophonous cohort of atrocities.

There are two ways to get to the Headlands. The way the tourists go, which involves traffic on the weekends and an incredible drop straight to the ocean. Or the way you go when you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge before: through a five-minute-long one-way tunnel that spits you out into a valley surrounded by gentle hills, rambling to the sea. Winding through and around and then down a little (if you drive fast, you can make your stomach flip), the beach unveils itself, a lagoon, a parking lot, the cliffs, dark sand; there’s a particular vibrancy and depth to the blue of the Headlands; everything is shrouded with it, the dark swirling, freezing ocean. The sand is so fine and on some days nearly black. The surf in its verticality is so strong, there is kind of a steepness imprinted in the sand, not quite an embankment, a steep slip to the ocean. Meters-high rocks, scale, scale, scale, wind, brush, sage, rumors of a helicopter landing for unknown reasons, and then back in the hills, which were filled with bunkers, deep, crazy caverns, cracking and dripping. I’ve never seen anything darker, filled with people, at least we wagered, kids from other high schools had tall tales buoyed by the traces; lots of jokes are based in fear, writing our names timidly near the entrances, never going much deeper. Rin was here.

Years later, on the street in the rain, Mad told me I was reserved, not quiet. I realized later walking home how I emulated the landscape of my childhood. I think of the darkness of the bunkers and the fog meandering across that big expanse of whatever you call gray when it’s blue, the city across the way and then the bowing horizon, and always a ship going out to the Pacific. Sometimes, I notice things really quickly, and other times, I’m so busy living inside of one thing, I don’t realize the illusion of the other. Like how those ships are so large, the city seemed closer than it was. What was in those containers? It did not matter then, we found the boat a kind of metronome. We’d be sure to see it, smoking somebody’s brother’s California medical marijuana out of an apple on that federal territory before going back to our cars to giggle, or if I was with a lover,² to touch each other until the sun was long gone and the great white lights of the federal police told us from their loud speakers to go home.

In a cafe, as a lark, I suggest to X—a curator who has invited me to do an exhibition in Shanghai—that I would like to cross the Pacific Ocean. I base this lark on the fact that yes, I will always be tied to the Atlantic for the accident of birth.³ However, in practicality, I feel far more tied to the Pacific, having grown up in it, around it, having visited family who had transplanted themselves to Hawai’i, and always, always swimming in it, even now, by chance, marrying a woman from the other side of it. That to cross the Pacific on the various highways of winds that flow across might provide an interesting exercise, one that might not be possible in the future. There were also things that made this act of crossing an American one, more specifically a colonial one. Obvious question: How much has my country irrevocably changed the nations of the Pacific? Besides that there was something about the fact that it matters how you get somewhere, and more in there too that I wasn’t quite sure about all of it; what is the point of this?⁴ It was something, though. In short, I talk myself into a knot and then look up at X. They smile, they think that’s the best idea I’ve presented and that I should indeed cross the Pacific. The Pacific grows in their mind too; it zigzags or maybe bogs up beside us both. So, I will cross. My next preoccupation: how?

Likely the last time I sailed was at age 13 off the coast of Pimu (Catalina Island). In the water I was focused, sharklike. I won my races; I got the gold star in sailing. The only phrase that has really stuck with me after these 20 years is “tacking into the wind,” that to go forward you’d have to do a dance in triangles to arrive at your destination, never being pushed backward, but never straight forward exactly either. This is around the time I think if I had been born a bit later, I would have come out as trans; I didn’t know what to call it then, even with trans adults floating near me in San Francisco. I was too afraid of them. On the water and in it, the changing of my form and its congruous incongruencies with myself were held at a remove. The sheltered bays of Pimu are not the open waters of the Pacific.

I settle on some sort of 40- to 50-foot boat, which I will rent or buy. I learn I’ll need to leave between January and April, and if I don’t stop, it will take me around 30 to 40 days, depending on how things go with the weather. I won’t go alone. I’ll need some companions. I search for them. Likely, we will go in a regatta, with some others who are crossing. This is safest. I begin to compile the tools I’ll need to properly sail. I spend hours on the internet, researching alone and chatting excessively with ChatGPT. I learn that, in addition to my boat and the various rations, I will need the following in both analog and digital forms:

1. A compass
2. GPS
3. Charts and maps
4. SSB radio and VHF radio
5. Weather-forecasting tools
6. GPS-enabled sextant
7. A logbook
8. Automatic identification system (AIS).

Each tool is familiar to me except for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is used for automatic tracking of large ships and passenger boats. It allows the operator of the vessel to receive and transmit information, such as the ship’s name, position, course, and speed, to other AIS-equipped vessels and shoreside traffic-control centers. Essentially, it transmits who you are to everybody and transmits who everybody says they are to you too. On the water, they say, see and be seen.⁵ Or that’s how it’s meant to be.

I increase my watching of sailing videos on YouTube, I focus on crossing. I watch other people cross in 15-20-30-60-minute bursts, families, solos, couples. I watch their tensions, boredom, the horizons, the fish they catch, their bodies writhing in pain, flipping, the humans grinning holding that transparent line, the flat eye of the fish narrowing in exhaustion,⁶ intermingled as if imbibed with hot sauce into the human, exhausted in the late hours, the sudden squalls, the choppy waves. I watch them stare at their digital charts, their compasses, and their AIS.

Every group I watch eventually struggles with readings on their devices and often on their AIS. Either there are ships that are spoofing—pretending to be larger or smaller than they actually are—or there are ships that have turned off their AIS altogether.

On their voyage to Uruguay, sailing couple Kate and Curtis of the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca, chronicle their run-in with an illegal fishing vessel.⁷ The episode begins, as most sailing vlogs do, with a teaser of the big event and then jumps right into their day-to-day. They explain how their dog, Roxy, uses the restroom on board the sailboat,⁸ breakfast is made, routes are planned, a day passes, things are fixed, wind is scarce until it isn’t. On the third night of their voyage, during heavy winds—and all the efforts it takes to move through those—the radar alarm⁹ goes off and they discover that there is something very close to them. Kate identifies it as a fishing boat, and it is less than a mile away. The drama of this moment is narrated and explained more than felt in a traditional dramatic sense. Visually, to a non-sailor; the moment feels somehow confusingly mellow. The fishing boat looks far away, just a white light splitting the darkness into horizon and sky. The stress level in Kate’s voice drives home a truism of sailing: distance on the water is very different from distance on land.

“Curtis has been battling him for at least the last half hour,” Kate explains. “He keeps changing direction every time we change direction, making a collision course with us, so finally we had to turn on the motor . . . and just try to get by him.” They try to radio the fishing boat, but there is no response. Kate turns the camera to reveal their view, the main sail, the ropes flexing, sailing in the dark, into nothingness, tool-dependent, tipped to the right, the wind is fast at 20 knots, there is spray coming over the bow, it’s wet.¹⁰ “What the **** is this guy,” Curtis says in calm frustration. He’s spotted another boat on the AIS and asks Kate to go down and take a closer look. It is a 91-foot fishing vessel going 3.5 knots. The boat’s AIS popped on and then off again, suddenly. While it is common enough for boats not to always leave their AIS on, in this circumstance, it is odd; in this weather, at night, usually you’d be in communication via radio with the other vessel, doing what you can to avoid one another. So now there are two boats. One directly behind the other. And suddenly, they’re closer. Still no response on the radio, the spray continues. Frustrated, Kate says, “We all have to respect each other, but I don’t know what this is, it’s just carelessness.” At this point, Kate and Curtis are going upwind using their motor and doing everything they can to avoid this second boat, which reads a mile away from them. It continues, their radar isn’t picking up the second boat’s location, and now Kate and Curtis must depend on their vision alone to figure out how to avoid them. They can see their lights and that’s it; they can’t tell which side of the boat they’re seeing, what direction the boat might be taking. These confusions have forced Kate and Curtis to continue to keep their motor on, going straight into waves that are beating their boat down.

Unbelievably, Curtis spots another vessel. Kate takes a look, “It’s almost like it’s two different AISs for the same vessel.” Curtis agrees, “He’s got a fake-out AIS. These guys are probably all illegal.” Kate gives us a further description: One AIS went off, another went on, they’re in the same position according to the charts. They’re spoofing. “God, it shows him pointing directly at us too, like he wants to hit us.” Kate and Curtis have all their lights on, they want to be visible, they are not trying to hide, they’re just trying to get through. Kate predicts that this will be a sleepless night for her and Curtis; the wind picks up. A week later, Curtis and Kate will find out that the Uruguayan navy caught a Chinese fishing vessel in the same location they had been sailing in.¹¹ Kate notes in her final narration that she and Curtis cannot say for sure if these boats were illegally fishing or not, but given their behavior, it seems quite possible.

The Uruguayan navy put footage of the capture of the fishing vessel on YouTube. The whining of a helicopter provides a heavy soundtrack as the large blue-hulled fishing vessel bobs in the water alongside the navy ship.¹² In another shot, two dinghies surround the fishing vessel. This dance from my view, the computer, seems static, like a painting; the charge is the matter.

Likely, when a boat does not come up on an AIS, that boat’s main job is to transship. I am trans, we must be related. (I’ve told this joke before.)

“Transshipment” is a term used to describe the transferring of cargo from one mode of transportation to another during its transit from point of origin to final destination. For example, this could mean transferring cargo from a ship to a train, or from one ship to another ship. In the Pacific Ocean, transshipment has a long history that isn’t worth relaying here. We can speculate that transshipment likely hit some sort of uptick with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.¹³ And that uptick at the Panama Canal then grew exponentially with the growth of the globalizing economy in the 1990s.¹⁴ In its innocent form, transshipment is used to optimize logistics and save on transportation costs. However, as obvious as this is to state, transshipment can also be used to bypass bottlenecks or trade barriers. 

Illegal transshipment can take many forms: smuggling, tax evasion, fraud. Transshipment is resorted to in order to avoid tariffs and quotas. To further avoid inspection, goods are mislabeled, paperwork is falsified, and certain circuitous shipping routes are taken. Transshipment can be used to smuggle goods like drugs and weapons, or live beings like rare wildlife and nolonger-living beings like fish and other dead sea creatures. These activities all live under the title of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU). IUU fishing vessels will engage in transshipment at sea, where the fish is caught by one vessel and then transferred to another (and sometimes even another) to then be brought to market.

To accomplish the first part of this IUU fishing, a ship will turn off their AIS to conceal their identity and location, or at the very least, confusing or, for lack of a better word, troubling it. This process of concealment is known as “dark shipping,” and it is this practice that Kate and Curtis found themselves caught in the middle of.

In Hakai Magazine’s article “Catch Me If You Can: The Global Pursuit of a Fugitive Ship,” writer Sarah Toy details the complex and intense process of catching the IUU fishing vessel STS-50 in 2018. The capture involved multiple governments and agencies all working together in tandem, often the effort coming down to one email or phone call. Before the vessel was caught, it operated for eight years under different names, with crew members coming and going, some knowing the legality of the ship’s activities, and others just passing through. STS-50, like many other IUU ships, sold its catch to many different middlemen.

As investigators began to close in on STS-50, Toy narrates:

“STS-50 tried to evade tracking by periodically switching off its AIS and using a generic Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a nine-digit code that is supposed to be unique to each vessel. With the generic identification number, the STS-50 was able to hide under other ships’ transmission signals, says Bergh, “a bit like everybody trying to talk on the same frequency on a radio.” Specialists at Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norwegian nonprofit that provides vessel tracking analysis to FISH-i Africa, were able to decipher the STS-50’s intermittent satellite signals and detect where the vessel really was. It was like playing a game of cat and mouse in an area larger than the Australian continent.”

STS-50 fled toward Indonesia, a nation whose task force to combat illegal fishing had blown up more than 400 illegal fishing boats since 2014. Since STS-50 only occasionally turned on its AIS, trackers found themselves predicting the ship’s location between each ping, assuming its course. Eventually it pinged in, likely to let the owner of the ship know its location, and the Indonesian navy was able to intercept it. The captain was fined and put in prison, but the owners cannot be prosecuted. “On the high seas, the bad guys have almost always gotten away—a frustrating reality of the seemingly Sisyphean task of policing lawbreakers in such a vast arena.”¹⁵

A vast arena, liquid and thus confusing, it can hold me yet—shipping, illegal fishing—whole ecosystems and beings we’ve never met and probably never will. Paradoxically, once something is nameable, it can be contained. Maybe it’s better to play the homophone and hear that it’s a parallax. The incongruities of trying to make an image when the lens is actually lower than where your eye composes the picture. Transshipment—in its evasion of being known by continuing to go across—sounds familiar. In the case of the shipment, an exploited group of beings taken and going from one state to the next.

What is a definition but an act mired in its traces? We know that transshipment is happening because we see the boats, the boats are caught, the fish are gone, but are we literally seeing the fish brought up onto the decks? Not often. Fragmentation by way of commodification. Confusingly, we have a lot in common—that is me, the act of transshipping, and the very things that are being transshipped. We are reliant on others to exist on multiple levels. We are full of legal and illegal missions and substrates. In IUU transshipment, there is the plundering of the oceans, and in transness, there is a liberation for the person bearing the label.

The self is a troubling political object. Its maintenance is a pawn to be trifled with, exchanged for a different person’s will, whether that is being in the world or what one ingests in order to live. Containment means not just the possibility to be incorporated into capital accumulation but the possibility to be obliterated because of lack of access to things that are basic to one’s survival. My lines of logic have me running toward myself as a commodity. Is that what I share with the shipment? Commodities are to be traded. I won’t be going to Tennessee or Kentucky any time soon. What does the marine life say? Let’s all trade places in this merry-go-round of exploitation.

Vexing statement: Trans is whatever the group needs it to be. In certain instances, nobody needs it to be much of anything; in others, it is the very structure upon which the entire artifice of social interaction is built; and still in others, it is the perfect scapegoat for the uncomfortable god-level truth, change. Trans is the demon, the liberator, the cocoon, the bear, the cave, the ship, the fisherman, the sailor, and me.

There is a phenomenon called “group random dance.” What happens is groups of people get together and play clips of K-pop songs, and if you know the dance, you go to the center and do it. These groups are large, young, queer, trans. Their vibe is good, diverse; there is an air of excitement, encouragement. They are showing off together. These random dances happen all over the world and are very popular. My five-year-old daughter and I watch these random dances while we draw in my studio. In one random dance in Frankfurt, we stop drawing for a long time to witness this group energy. As is custom, each clip is followed by a computerized voice counting down to the next clip, 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . There’s a collective pause as each song comes on; usually there’s a few squeals, a shout, a scream, and then always a mad dash for the center. Places! Then my daughter and I wait for the moment when they all, together, really do perfectly sync up. A lift of a leg, a hip pop, a head shake, a raised hand in a circular motion.

We also watch for a phenomenon we haven’t fully named yet, something like the confusion of the mirror. What happens is that some of the people dancing know the dance from one perspective, and others know the dance from another. So that means they’re doing the same moves, but one is going right while the other goes left. Elbows knock and concentrations are broken.¹⁶ Implied in these public random dances is that they all kind of know what’s going on, not enough to be the “real” thing, but they’ll try all together, kind of knowing the dance is enough; the point is to be dancing, to be giving it a go, to all be trying. Or at least that’s the point I’m seeing from it (we can only read so much of another person’s reasoning through the filter of our own logic). Trying is worth it at least.

Night in our corner of Berlin is quiet, mostly just footsteps and the occasional shout, and still I am unable to sleep. I give in, walk myself to my computer, I begin looking for 40-foot sailboats; there’s one in Providence that could be promising. My ears burn when I am afraid but I kind of like the feeling. I imagine myself reading charts at the shining table on this particular vessel. Poring over the lines, the weather. I bid on the boat; it will be my most expensive artistic endeavor. Anything to cross over. I walk to the window to hear the morning birds. I wait.

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Rottenness is a presence, presentification, and manifestation of other-than-human beings (such as fungi, bacteria, larvae, insects…) in an organic body. In the rotting process, their presence is revealed by semantic and semiotic transformations; for example, fresh food – which can symbolize craving, nutrition, and stimulation – turns into the opposite when rotten – disgust, repulsion, and abjection. Rot emerges on a continuum between life and death, occupying two sides of the same coin; and yet, temporality is a possible way to differentiate between them. When rotten, the physical and visible existence of other beings—others living in the present—is activated.

Once an organism begins to rot as a result of the presence of these ‘others’, what becomes visible is an exponential acceleration of time, as matter shifts and emits odors, as decomposition transpires and aesthetics are altered. These changes can also be elevated by the process of decomposition itself—abjection draws attention. When it is lifeless, a body becomes an object; when it is decomposing, an object becomes abject. The properties of the relationship we create between these three bodily stages are produced by the social construction of the End and of Dying. To abject is to debase something: a relation of value is imbricated in processes related to death.

A body that is fresh strives to maintain its stability and durability, just as a rotting body strives to multiply its processes of material transmutation. However, both processes are contained in one another in an infinite loop. At the time of my death, the digestive bacteria in my stomach will extend its action and digest my own flesh; one day, the fly that lays its eggs in the abjection of my decay will also rot; a cluster of leaves, grass, and branches piled in heaps and decomposing for a long time provide ideal conditions for the development of plant growth: Post-Rotten.

When I observe the passage of time as fruit ripens, I witness the moment when freshness is interrupted, I witness the fruit getting past its prime.

When it comes to the temporality of ripening, the word Past extends to Overripening; One relationship between the meanings of “rot” and “inedible,” then, is Past. In a linear understanding of time, is that which is past, a rotten time?

Yet, if we take account of this effect from a chronological perspective, the future is rotten, since within a linear framework, past, present and future, Rottenness is the last stage of the fruit – the future takes place in front of us, as that which is yet to come – underripe, ripe, rot.

Past and future take place in the present of rot.

I seek temporal disruption and anachronism as possibilities for breaking the binarity of Death and Life.

Dife and Leath.

What is decomposing?

What is spoiled?

What is decaying?

What is putrefied?

Underripe, ripe, rot

Past its prime, Forwards, Backwards

Decay, Decline, Arise

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