Vital Knowledges (2023-2024)

Video (6 min.) and drawing offering.

Drawing to convoke certain forms of life, to trace the roots that make me / us.

As an offering to awake communalities. 

I draw knowing the evoked forms will only live for nine days. 

At the same time following my intentions and letting the corporealities of wood and 

carbon graphite, dance and move like rivers on the wall.

Tratado material IV: Narcissus’ echo

Audio Piece 15 min.

A reflection on the relations still in force between empire and colony, between the West and America, in the space of a colonial convent in Lima. As an active listening to the call that the poet and thinker Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz made in 1689 when she wrote the play “Divino Narciso”, in which she compares Jesus to Narcissus, Narcissus to the West, Echo to America. What remains of Narcissus’ dialogue with Echo in the structures of our world? How many cracks can we look for to break the material cacophonies of exploitation? What traces of Narcissus are palpable in the quests of contemporary art? How many calls to the ripples of that water of Narcissus’ lake? —Text by Curators Tratado Material (Oscar Cueto, Frida Robles, Ramiro Wong).

My work seeks to point out the impact of the colonial proposal of life that confronts nature in an extractive way, in its perpetual search for progress and development. Also suggesting that our relationships with other earth-beings (De la Cadena) activate alternatives for transformative action. Revisiting the myth of Narcissus I realize that it is implied that he has never done the exercise of “seeing” himself. Narcissus’ encounter with water causes him to become obsessed with the projection of his image, to the point of losing his life. Besides the critique of vanity, one could also read a warning. Could the myth also be an ecological warning about the power of water and the persistence of life? Narcissus dies but in the same place a flower of the same name is born.

Museo Convento San Francisco y Las Catacumbas de Lima.

They live, eat, gather, cooperate, laugh, dance, hug, precognize, dream (2023)

Installation (mural, clay pieces on textil, and video "Vital Knowledges").
Exhibition view at La Virreina Museum, Barcelona.

Originally: "Se juntan, viven, cooperan, comen, ríen, bailan, se abrazan, preconizan, sueñan" (2023)

Part of "El Futuro Ya Fue: Antifuturismo Cimarrón" (2021-2023)
Curated by Yuderkys Espinoza and Katia Sepúlveda.

Stories of Endarkment (2022)

Sudden climatic disaster brings a group of migrants to live in subterranean environments of caves as a way to escape extreme solar temperatures. In the underground, they learn to live in the dark and to pay attention to the survival skills of other species. They learn to observe the changes in soil, and a new relation to roots, both physically and symbolically, develops when they learn from roots to locate water. Impacted by deceleration and channeling the time of stones, they learn to enjoy the vibrancy of stillness. Through these experiences their relation to time, and thus to space, is redrawn anew.
In the stillness of the dark they plant histories with others that counter the histories of excess of light, of speed and of production. Eventually, a tension between old meanings and new woven communities builds up, as we come to understand that the group of migrants had not meant to be human.

This story is woven around the notion that we are set to enter into deeper crises and thus we could be anytime thrown into utterly unknown conditions, such that our sense of self and of reality would no longer be recognizable to us or would mean the wreckage of our species. Having grown up in Peru in the 80s, in the absence of basic covered needs, and in the dark of frequent blackouts, we dug on these lived memories to extrapolate the learnings that generation made then. The story hints to how a disconnection from productivity and efficacy, creates an opportunity for trans-species ancestral knowledges to come to the fore. As a chance to introduce ourselves to the rhythm of other songs beyond accumulation and progress.

A project by Imayna Caceres and Eliana Otta.

Writing and dramaturgy: Imayna Caceres.

Film and video editing: Eliana Otta.

Made for the exhibition After Progress (2023).

The plant that is conscious in me

On the links between life forms, common origins and interaction across species and times. Done in a collaboration with plants and animals of my neighborhood. The complete title of the work is: "The plant that is conscious in me. A continuous thread from the first forms of life, and the learnings of all the species that precede us and are present in every part of ourselves. Personal-collective diasporic learnings that manifest in dreams, visions, and in our collective political doings, contributing to maintain a sense of connectedness and of belonging amidst the unrootedness of non-citizenship and migration. Learning from the neighbor bodies of water, plants, lichen, soils that make us, and tuning to a consciousness beyond the structures of accumulation and exploitation, 2019-2022" Aquarelle and acrylic on paper. 21 x 14,5 cm

Photo: Rotor Centre for Contemporary Art Graz.

Cosmic, Planetary, Communal: Learning from Neighbor Earthbeings

In Cosmic, Planetary, Communal: Learning from Neighbor Earthbeings, I shared works that were created at an intuitive intersection of ecological, communal, and planetary concerns, where various kinship communities (human and more than human) activate sedimentary layers of life wisdom. 

What we feel-think about the beings that we name as nature and how we relate to them is at the core of issues around accumulation. Several works are brought up to dialogue with one another in order to pay attention to these entanglements. Some of my works exhibited include: 

====Communal Technologies: Ritual Offering (2022).

====Underground Blossomings (2019-2020). Drawings.

====Movements and languages in which life manifests itself (2022).

====Stories of Endarkment (2021) Video 17 min. With Eliana Otta

====Making meaning with more than human worlds (2020) Video 6 min.

====Learning from plants (2021) Video 3 min.

====Thunderstorms (2020), Flowerings (2019), Master Tree (2019), Dream Mountain (2015).

Movements and languages in which life manifests itself (2022)

In this work I evoke several constants that are part of the reproduction of life. I employ drawing, painting and shaping clay as methods to feel-think, speculate, and activate reflections about the consequences of said constants. The recognition of our interexistence with the cosmos has at times connotations of a return to a system in balance. And yet, a constant in the reproduction of life is the coexistence of structure and openness, as well as of chaos and destruction. In painting and forming clay, I experience a recognition of the decisions and movements that had to be made by our most distant ancestors millions of years ago that ultimately gave rise to the biotic diversity of which we are a part. Movements in which organisms structured their matter in a system of mirror partitions, both in cell division and in their formal appearance (f.e. the halves of a leaf being similar to each other). Shoots, sprouts, bilateral simmetries, asymmetries, folds. Dancing matter in decisive movements, and that gave way to all forms of bacterial, archaea, and eukaryotic life.

En este trabajo evoco varias constantes que son parte de la reproducción de la vida y que dibujándolas activo reflexiones sobre sus posibles consecuencias. El reconocimiento de nuestra interexistencia con el cosmos tiene por momentos connotaciones de regreso a un sistema en balance. Y sin embargo, una constante en la reproducción de la vida es la coexistencia de estructura y de caos, así como de apertura y de destrucción. Al dibujar y al manipular la arcilla, experimento un reconocimiento de las decisiones y movimientos que tuvieron que ser tomadas por nuestros mas lejanos ancestros hace millones de años y que dieron lugar a la diversidad biótica de la que formamos parte. Decisiones, movimientos, y danzas que dieron paso a todas las formas de vida bacteriales, arqueas, eucariotas. Entre estos movimientos está la forma en la que los organismos estructuran su masa en un sistema de particiones en espejo, tanto en la división celular como en la apariencia de los organismos (mitades de un organismo que son similares entre sí).

Water, pigments, paper, and clay. Photo: Marisel Orellana Bongola.

Ancient Losses: Manifestations of mourning over the loss of life as it was once known (2022)

Bifurcating life forms, growing with and without base structures, with and without stems, with and without extended family, in arid, rocky, swampy spaces, developing different protection mechanisms, with diverse forms of limbs, being a source of energy and care for other species.

“Tree-Seed-Flower” Steady roots, thick stem, petal leaves. Experiences of beings downloading themselves into the red page.

These series came out of the time I writing “Threads that intertwine, break, and remake tissues: Practices of connection and care of life” (June 2022). After writing during the day, at night I drew less as a conscious decision and more as a physical need to 'release' an uncomfortable feeling. Something I eventually realized was related to the pain felt by ancient forms of life, after surviving cataclysmic events that destroyed 70% to 95% of all life around them. The difficulty of being survivors of a traumatic event, the witnessing of massive loss, and the need for mourning, as well as the realization of the resilience of life that flows through them.

They say that about 444 million years ago, Ordovician-Silurian extinctions wiped out about 85% of all Ordovician species. That at the time of the extinction, most of the 'complex' multicellular organisms lived in the sea, and the only evidence of life on land are rare spores of small, early land plants.
That the extinction event abruptly affected all major taxonomic groups and resulted in the disappearance of one-third of all brachiopod and bryozoan families, as well as numerous groups of conodonts, trilobites, echinoderms, corals, bivalves, and graptolites. Losses along the continental shelves resulted in a great loss of biodiversity.

The drastic decrease in competition and the vacant niches left by the organisms that perished in the catastrophe made it possible for sponges to thrive and even dominate some marine ecosystems in the aftermath of this biotic crisis. They also say that sponges may have contributed to the recovery of other clades (groupings of species related to a common ancestor), helping to stabilize sediment surfaces, which allowed suspension-feeding bryozoans, brachiopods, corals and other sessile organisms to recolonize the seafloor.

One of the first signs of the approaching crisis is thought to have been the incremental die-off of graptolites (colonial animals) followed by a rapid decline. In this, one reads a parallel with contemporary changes in global biodiversity that may eventually be followed by a rapid decline.

I look at a drawing of something that resembles a caterpillar, and I am not sure who wanted to manifest themselves. A tardigrade? A myriapod? Or is it really a caterpillar? I search for images about the various forms of these three, and this leads me to the caterpillars of the emperor moth, or Saturnia pavonia, named after Saturn, the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, and I notice the ancients connections between the knowledge of interexisting soil life and wealth. I read that moths were present in the Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago, and began to diversify largely in synchrony with angiosperms. The wings of moths and winged insects in general evolved from a protrusion of the legs of an ancestral crustacean. The "caterpillar" stage, part of the metamorphosis process, is an adaptive value whereby different stages require different types of food and habitat, which reduces competition between the different stages through which the individual passes. Moths and plants interacted some 50 million years before the first dinosaur moved across the Earth, and those interactions helped give rise to the diversity we see on our planet today.

Series of 30/100 drawings. Color pencil and pastel on red paper (21x29,7cm).

References:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907847116

https://noticiasdelaciencia.com/art/48501/las-mayores-extinciones-masivas-en-la-tierra
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-first-mass-extinction-event-explained-end-ordovician

Feeding Practices for Plural Knowledges and Beings

Unearthing Memories, Feeding Practices for Plural Knowledges and Beings, 2021. How can transdisciplinary approaches to art help us to reimagine human and more-than-human relationalities to respond to the current socio-ecological crisis? How might collaborative forms of art-making create fertile vocabularies and ways of storytelling to transform anthro-eurocentric paradigms that are shaped through oppositional dichotomies and excluding frontiers? How to cultivate plural value-ecologies of living with others on Earth? These were some of the questions we asked together with Eliana Otta, Nuno Cassola and Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki in the six months Junctions program of Pact Zollverein. The final outcome was exhibited at Impact: Urgent Translations in Essen through photos, videos and warm tea amidst one week of fruitful exchange. Photo: Dirk Rose

Virus and bacteria peoples redrawing ideas on life (2020)

 

The  scheme of modernity with its promise of opening the way to "civilized" worlds could cover up the poverty of its proposal and the negative consequences of the paradigms of progress and development. The self-ascription of humans as dominant beings of the earth who decide over the lives of other species ended up creating the conditions to give way to beings that put human existence at risk. Viruses and bacteria manifested themselves as agents of change that rewrote the prevailing narratives. The very awareness of their existence and the need to understand what they are and how they live, led many to rethink the way in which life is interconnected.

La trama de la modernidad con su promesa de abrir paso a mundos "civilizados" no pudo tapar la pobreza de su propuesta y las consecuencias negativas de los paradigmas de progreso y desarrollo. La autoadscripción de los humanos como seres dominantes de la tierra que deciden sobre las vidas de las otras especies terminó creando las condiciones para dar paso a seres que ponen en riesgo la existencia humana. Viruses y bacterias se manifestaron como agentes de cambio que reescribieron las narrativas imperantes. La misma consciencia de su existencia y la necesidad de entender qué son y cómo viven, llevó a repensar a muchos la manera en la que la vida está interconectada.

Photo: Marisel Orellana Bongola

Postcards for Healers

Digital print. Original: Colored pencil and pastel on paper. 50 x 70 cm.

How to access artistic practices in the middle of the pandemic? This project consisted of sending postal cards to a group of people that were asked to continue working amidst the pandemic. I chose hospital workers and farmers to highlight two works related to the care of the soil and of the body as necessary for our well-being as a community. I meant to evoke the pandemic as a rupture and ‘awakening’ to our interconnectedness and as aggravation of social and ecological crises, guided by what earth-beings themselves show and teach. ‘Kleine Post’ was curated by public art Lower Austria (Kunst im Öffentlichem Raum Niederösterreich). July 2020.

Kinship

 

Chalk, pastel and crayon drawings on paper, along a ritual offering of coffee beans, grains and coca leaves. 2019. Publication Guerrilla of Enlightenment (2020) Edited by Margarethe Makovec and Anton Lederer.

Geographies of Selves, Florecimientos Subterráneos

Solo exhibition planned as a gathering at an underground gallery. In the opening I invited people to sit on the floor and proceeded to tell them about the meanings and histories behind the works I was sharing in the space. Curated by Eliana Otta with whom we planned an exchanging of visions, reverberations, alternative epistemologies and mestizas artistic practices. A group of artists (Luis Ortiz, Sophie Utikal, Ruthie Jernbekova, and Eliana Otta) were invited to enter in dialogue with the works, and in particular with what I wrote for the final thesis of my visual arts studies: http://abschlussarbeiten.akbild.ac.at. 
The open format resulted in a horizontal exchange with a generous group of people who shared their histories and what resonated with them. Works: Geographies of the Self / Roots in the Dark, (2019) Series of 13 drawings. 50 x 70 cm, 70 x 140 cm. Condor Puma Serpiente, (2018). Serie of 4 drawings. 50 x 70 cm. Anticolonial Fantasies / Territory, 2015. 50 x 70 cm. At event possible through my affective connection to Eliana Otta, who curated the exhibition, and to Alfredo Ledesma, who supported me with/in the Blutengasse off-space. June, 2019.

Making meaning in more than human worlds

Making meaning in more than human worlds, 2020 (6 min).

In a dream, a toad appeared surfacing on a very dark night illuminated by an intense moon. The toad emerged filling almost entirely the river pond and stayed there quietly. Without speaking, the toad said that danger was coming and that "she" needed to be protected. When I dreamt about this it made sense with the ongoing conversation about climate change and what is happening to the planet. After the Amazon fires I realized that that was what the toad might have been warning about. I wanted to do a work that spoke of the toad's political call to activate ourselves.
Produced in collaboration with plant-neighbors and animals that appeared in dreams bringing specific messages. With plants that took care of me and that I took care of. With beings that were present while I was sewing this work. With the support of loved ones. Several ideas are threaded with the reflections of racialized, gender-dissident thinkers, contributions of the south, scientific findings and the teachings of a myriad of earth-beings.

Condor, Puma, Serpiente

Condor Puma Serpiente, 2018. I draw portraits of myself and the women of my family along handwritten stories that ground my individual and collective history. I draw my mother and my great grandmother as tissues that compose me. I approach remembering through drawing, as a task of reciprocity and of universal sustainability. Drawing as a memory device against the absence of photos or documents that can tell me the history of my past.
I place an offering below the portraits for which I enlist four grains I knew were important for my mother’s biography: quinua (quinoa), kiwicha (amaranth), lentils, and trigo amarillo (yellow wheat). Grains which I knew she had recollected working the land in the fields of Uchumarca in the Amazonian Andes 3000 meters above sea level. Photos: kunst-dokumentation. 2018.

Soil Cosmopolitics: Bio/grafías of the Coca Plant

Soil Cosmopolitics: Bio/grafías of the Coca Plant (2018). In the midst of a pandemic that largely affects indigenous, racialized, poor and dissident bodies, and considering the histories of destruction that intertwine our worlds, my aim is to invoke visions of worlds in which we interexist with terrestrial and cosmic beings, that carry agency and subjectivity, and to invoke ourselves as ecosystemic beings able to construct a political relationship with other forms of life. Published in Malmoe magazine. 2020.

Khipu / Nudo: Memory (and world) making knots

Khipu or Tying Woven Strands In Order To Remember Everything We’ve Ever Lived, 2019. Inspired by a Khipu physically located in the Museum of World Cultures in Göteborg, Sweden.


Khipus are growing beings with a visual structure that would seem to be inspired by the stems and roots of plants, or the veins traversing our bodies. Alive as they are, they grow by bifurcating and tying experienced life to them. Khipu literally means “knot” and is a technology that has been used by several cultures in the Americas, as it is attested by the findings in Caral, at least since 5000 BCE. The khipu tells a history of practices that were developed to organize life but also to pass on myths and valuable information. It is this meaning of information, memory and bridge between eras and spaces which I explore in this drawing.

Extract from a longer text written for the exhibition Underground Blossomings, 2019.

Offering Stations

Ritual offering in collaboration between Imayna Caceres, Pêdra Costa, Marissa Lobo, Luisa Lobo and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. 2015

Three offering stations is a collective work produced for the exhibition "Who is Afraid of the Museum?" at Weltmuseum. The stations were a way to pay respects for the bodies that are present in the Museum. Placed in-between rooms, they thematized the political economies of migration, dissident affects, and the power of ancestors and guides. Produced in a dialogue between Afro-Brazilian and Andean-Amazonian traditions . Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com.

Plant Ancestors, Coca Relatives

Plant Ancestors, Coca Relatives, 2018. Digital drawings, variable dimensions.


Coca in Quechua means "plant" or "tree". To enter the universe of the coca plant, I produce an extensive bio/graphía that narrates the life of the plant in Andean history. Woven in the survival of the traditions and beliefs of a people experienced in survival, and who have understood the coca leaf as a sacred being. From archaeological findings of its use, botanical records, its representation in precolonial art, its indigenous names, its colonial history in the mines, its demonization by the church, its praise as magic cure-it-all, it's illegalization, to current chemical and botanical studies. The history of the coca plant is a story of the entanglements between capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, but also an inherited record of wisdom and strength.

More on Coca: surversion-cocaista

Trenzamientos / Braiding Bondings

Trenzamientos / Braiding Bondings, 2017. In these series I imagine the sculptural possibilities that dark, thick and straight hair offers as a way to explore the politics of racialized hair in the mestizo-indigenous spaces in which I grew up. I draw partitions for multilayered braidings, hairs that easily stand up and that are pulled in different directions. One of the threads in this work is how in the context I grew up, thick, straight hair was seen as as difficult, voluminous hair that took a life of its own. Such hair when cut becomes "trinchudo", a hair that sticks out and stands defiantly. In order to avoid this, people modified their hair removing volume and curling it, not as a styling alternative, but as a way to "fix" it. Drawing hair in this way, I revisit the memories of sitting as a child on a chair as my mother curled my hair. I depict within a plural aesthetics, an exploration of what hair like mine can do and cherish it for what it is. As a way of tying the lessons I have long acquired in dealing with the aesthetic politics of racialized hair..