Carolina Aranibar–Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores

Carolina Aranibar–Fernández El desplazamiento y las flores

CALA ALLIANCE PRESENTS

Carolina Aranibar–Fernández El desplazamiento y las flores January 31–March 31, 2022 CALA Alliance Organized by Alana Hernandez Essay by Matthew Villar Miranda

Artist Statement Carolina Aranibar-Fernández

Carolina Aranibar-Fernández (b. 1990 La Paz, Bolivia) currently lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. Her practice addresses geopolitical concerns of exploitation related to natural resource control and the invisible labor that supplies global trade. Aranibar-Fernández often interrogates the flows of resources—human, natural, and capital—across bodies of water. The artist exposes the insidious nature of the market, unearthing historical accounts of oppression from imperialism and colonialism while revealing continuing injustices through neocolonialism. Drawing references from myths and oral storytelling, Aranibar-Fernández interweaves textiles, video, prints, and pottery to create multimedia installations that explore historical and contemporary forms of labor, extractivism, and the destruction of the environment.

Aranibar-Fernández received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has exhibited at the ASU Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona; the National Museum of Art, La Paz, Bolivia; The Albright Knox, Buffalo, New York; Praxis Gallery, New York; and the 2017 Kathmandu Triennale, Nepal. Aranibar-Fernández was the 2020–2021 Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow at the Center of Study of Race, Arts, and Democracy at Arizona State University. Past fellowships and residencies include the 2019–2020 Binational Arts Residency, the 2018–2019 Projecting All Voices Fellowship at the Herberger Institute for Design, Arizona State University, and the 2016–2017 Fellowship at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.

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Water Labor , 2019–21 Fabric, embroidery, and sequins 49 x 37 in. (124.4 x 93.9 cm)

Introduction Alana Hernandez

El desplazamiento y las flores showcases new work produced by Phoenixbased Carolina Aranibar-Fernández as CALA Alliance’s first regional artist in residence. Over three months, the artist created a cohesive body of work, encompassing prints, mixed-media works, and copper plates, that weave together themes of labor, extractivism, feminism, capitalism, and colonialism.

A focal point of the exhibition is the large-scale map, El desplazamiento y las flores (2021). Featuring floral textiles that reference Indigenous women from the artist’s native Bolivia, Aranibar-Fernández’s layered project highlights the global south as a borderless terrain. Draped behind the cartographic rendering, the artist traces trading routes through strings of beads, a reference to power and currency. Both the hand-sewn map on opaque tulle and black beaded routes on fishing line hang from copper pipes.

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Copper serves as an essential material for Aranibar-Fernández. She employs the material in different forms, both as a structural device to hang her work and a medium to render aerial views of active mines. Through its various uses, the artist connects the natural material for which Arizona is best known and the destructive history of mining in this state and around the world.

The title of the exhibition, translating to “the displacement and the flowers,” echoes the movement and migrations of both bodies and natural materials. Referencing the merciless mining and extraction of the earth, Aranibar-Fernández highlights the ongoing threat of colonization, genocide, and displacement faced by Indigenous populations in Bolivia. The works created in residence chart these various displacements, mapping a global web of interconnection and responsibility.

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Previous page Cobre II , 2021–22 Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Right

Cicatriz I, 2021–22

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet

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Installation view of Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores. CALA Alliance, Phoenix, Arizona, January 31–March 31, 2022.

Photography by Glover.

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Tracing Colonial Intimacies: Femme and Material Displacements in Carolina Aranibar-Fernández’s El

desplazamiento y las flores

Matthew Villar Miranda

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In El desplazamiento y las flores, the titular work of Carolina AranibarFernández’s exhibition at CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas), flowers amassed into the profiles of South America, Africa, and Europe float on a gleaming sea of tulle (Figure 1). Light refracts through glass beads and the machine-cut facets of plastic sequins. The flowers protrude like stamens of hibiscuses, cluster like peristomes of sampaguitas, pucker like petals of roses, and flute like pistils of kantutas. The extremities of the map dissipate at the borders of Central America at the work’s leftmost edge and at the archipelagos of Southeast Asia at the work’s rightmost edge. A buoyant, black-beaded thread migrates to and from the proximities of colonial maritime ports. It meanders through Jakarta and Colombo to Mumbai. It then swoops around Cape Town up to the coasts of Sierra Leone. It loops around Dakar to Abidjan and ascends towards North America, which the artist leaves intentionally unmapped. On the other end, the line arches into limbo east of the Asian ‘mainland,’ a place that I imagine as Manila—the city where my lola raised my mother, a place I have never inhabited but have known through family photos, genre paintings of bucolic barangays, war photographs, and impossibly picturesque travel postcards. Aranibar-Fernández’s map of mass-produced glamour shimmers like near memories, yet these flowered continents track more turbulent histories. These curious flowers, alluring as they are, unsettle me.

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To produce El desplazamiento y las flores, Aranibar-Fernández has painstakingly cut, exhumed, and stitched flowers from factory-produced ‘Manila Shawls.’ I have seen these same flowers sewn onto the surfaces of my mother’s mantón de Manila, a formal accessory that my titas wore to weddings, birthdays, and debuts–coming-of-age ceremonies for Filipinas.

These embroidered flowers populate the busts and hems of quinceañera dresses, the garment that celebrates the transition of a girl into a woman.

The Manila Shawl has even become a principal prop of Flamenco, the ‘national’ dance of Spain as declared by Francisco Franco.1 In 18th and 19th-century Manila, women learned floral embroidery from Spanish-run schools, convents, and orphanages where needlework had been lauded as a labor that made a lady “more attractive to prospective suitors.”2 The native alampay garment follows the tradition of wrapping intricately woven textiles, tapis, around the shoulder. After Spanish conquest of Manila, the alampay morphed into the translucent and lacy pañuelo. Philippine weavers used piña, fibers derived from pineapple, or abacá, fibers derived from banana, to produce an ultra-sheer and luminous fabric. Half-Spanish, half-Philippine mestizas historically wore pañuelos to display wealth, class, and patriotism even as pañuelo weavers increasingly adopted European imitations of Chinese floral motifs.3 Though unpopular in their own sartorial customs at the time, Chinese artisans produced floral festooned shawls to meet the Spanish appetite for New World material luxuries in the 18th and 19thcenturies during which the mantón de Manila had gained wide prominence and distribution.4 The Manila Shawl is both a product, and in itself, an index of the colonial enmeshments along the Manila Galleon routes.

Right Detail of El desplazamiento y las flores , 2021 Tulle, fabric, copper, and glass beads 120 x 60 in. (304.8 x 152.4 cm) Following page Figure 1

El desplazamiento y las flores , 2021

Tulle, fabric, copper, and glass beads 120 x 60 in. (304.8 x 152.4 cm) 19

The Filipiniana dress shares parallel pathways with that of the Indigenous Aymara and Quechua women of Bolivia, Aranibar-Fernández’s native country. These groups of women have been disempowered since Spanish rule (1521–1898 in the Philippines, 1524–1825 in Bolivia). In both places, they have absorbed the accoutrements of their colonial rulers to display wealth and access to upward social mobility.5 Aymara and Quechua women have adopted a distinct national dress composed of a bowler hat, a long-layered skirt (pollera), and intricately woven textiles

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worn around the shoulders colloquially referred to as a manta de Cholita. ‘Cholita’ like the word ‘mestiza,’ derives from the word ‘chola,’ a term from a Spanish racial caste system indicating the mixed heritage of Spanish and Indigenous descent.6 The manta de Cholita combines the floral decadence of the mantón de Manila with the intricately woven Indigenous shoulder wrap called the ahuayo in Aymara, or lliklla in Quechua. Its history follows a similar ‘mantonization’ of the Tagalog alampay. The very introduction of flowers into the alampay and ahuayo,

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which in their pre-contact iterations had non-floral formalisms, indicates a kind of colonial arrival into the Tagalog, Aymara, and Quechua sociopolitical realms. Adorned with flowers that often do not grow in their native soils, both the mantón de Manila and the manta de Cholita result from the syncretizing of indigenous and invading cultures. They act as signifiers of customary nationalism and re-perform learned classism from the Old World.

These entangled colonialities converge in El desplazamiento y las flores which metonymically and materially renders the flowers as nation-states, complicating the gendered languages of body, ritual, and land. The alampay-cum-pañuelo-cummantón collapses Eastern and Western imperial decorations and superimposes them onto Indigenous dress.

Aranibar-Fernández’s effloresced map hangs enframed by two copper rods while three copper plates glint on a pedestal nearby, in the center of the room. The etched faces of Cobre I (Figure 2), Cobre II, and Cobre III feature deep-set concentric lines like the earth’s metallic fingerprints. The copper plates outline the ridges and holes of El Abra mine, among the largest copper mines at the northern tip of Chile (Figure 3). The mine is half-owned by the state-run Codelco (Corporación Nacional del Cobre Chile) and Freeport-McMoran Inc, in Phoenix, Arizona—where the gallery space and artist both reside. Their mingled presences make visible the hidden colonial entanglements between sites of extraction–Chile–and sites of supervision–Phoenix. A 2018 study reports that while Chile leads in copper production globally, its mining is linked to human-caused increases of contaminating elements in the air quality that are associated with debilitating respiratory diseases.7

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Previous Page Figure 2 Cobre I, 2021–22 Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) Left Figure 3 Google Maps, 2021. El Abra mine . Google Maps [Online] <https://www.google. com/maps/place/El+Abra+mine> [Accessed 24 February 2022]

Right Figure 4

Cicatriz III, 2021–22

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet Following page Cobre III, 2021–22 Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)

In a tied gesture, Cicatriz III renders the aerial image of the mine in and paper and copper powder (Figure 4). The print appears as a ghostly abstraction of a map, and as the title Cicatriz suggests—Spanish for “scar”—as an action and its aftereffect on the landscape. Together, the print and plates intimate that the very creation of the mine inflicts a wound upon the land. The artist deploys this mirrored rhetoric in her representational and material ontologies. Like plates and prints, copper pervasively exists as a mineral excavated and industrially extruded into a useable coin currency.

El desplazamiento y las flores blooms with both private history and

administrative memory, as flowers equivocate as harmless adornments yet accrete into imperious nation-states. Martin Manalansan uses the term “intimate geographies” to describe the precarities of Filipinx gay men navigating the postcolonial subjectivities and the desires for romance as feats of transnational survivance, that colonial melancholias manifest, “...not just by the here and now, but by remembered spaces and time fragments of one’s biography and history.” 8 The term articulates the source of my own unsettling evoked by the mantón map. The delicate embroideries of flowers that I recall so sentimentally contravene the aesthetics-of-governmentality. Flowers as womanhood or motherland, have dictated a compulsorily heterosexual semiotics of patria and the feminine body. The work stands as an image, object, and schema that dazzles while also charting capital flow. The sheen of femme opulence produces the alluring image of totalizing coloniality. The twinkling beads evoke both sartorial appliqué yet remind of the earliest forms of externalized and traded currency. El desplazamiento y las flores articulates the garbled dissonance of capital and sensuality; how one’s many and conflictual nationalisms, internally defined and socially prescribed, pollinate in all their tensed and glistening contradictions. ***

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Endnotes 1 2

3 4 5

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Theresa Goldbach, “Fascism, Flamenco, and Ballet Español: Nacionalflamenquismo,” (MA thesis, University of New Mexico, 2014), 69–71.

Marlene Flores Ramos, “The Filipina Bordadoras and the Emergence of Fine European-Style Embroidery Tradition in Colonial Philippines, 19th to early-20th Centuries,” (MA thesis, Mount Saint Vincent University, 2016), 39; Eloisa May P. Hernandez, Homebound: Women Visual Artists in Nineteenth Century Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2004), 70.

Lourdes R. Montinola, “Embroidery,” in Piña (Manila: AMON Foundation, 1991), 95.

Natalia Arbues-Fandos, Sofia Vicente-Palomino, Dolores Julia Yusá-Marc, Maria Angeles Bonet Aracil, and Pablo Monllor Pérez, “The Manila Shawl Route,” Arché, no. 3 (2008): 142.

Sara Shahriari, “Cholitas paceñas: Bolivia’s indigenous women flaunt their ethnic pride,” The Guardian, April 22, 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/bolivia-indigenouswomen-fashion-clothing.

Robert Albro, “The Populist Chola: Cultural Mediation and the Political Imagination in Quillacollo, Bolvia,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 5, no. 2 (2000): 31–32.

Joseline S. Tapia, Jorge Valdés, Rodrigo Orrego, Andrei Tchernitchin, Cristina Dorador, Aliro Bolados, and Chris Harrod, “Geologic and anthropogenic sources of contamination in settled dust of a historic mining port city in northern Chile: health risk implications,” PeerJ 6 (April 24, 2018): e4699, https:// doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4699.

Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 155.

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Previous page

El desplazamiento y las flores , 2021

Tulle, fabric, copper, and glass beads 120 x 60 in. (304.8 x 152.4 cm) Left

Cicatriz II, 2021–22

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet

Silver Labor, 2019–21 Embroidered fabric 48 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (123.1 x 92.7 cm)

Checklist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores CALA Alliance January 31–March 31, 2021 All works are by Carolina Aranibar-Fernández

Works in the Exhibition

El Desplazamiento y Las Flores, 2021

Cicatriz III, 2021–22

Tulle, fabric, copper, and glass beads 120 x 60 in. (304.8 x 152.4 cm)

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet

Water Labor, 2019–21

Cobre I, 2021–22

Silver Labor, 2019–21

Cobre II, 2021–22

Cicatriz I, 2021–22

Cobre III, 2021–22

Fabric, embroidery, and sequins 49 x 37 in. (124.4 x 93.9 cm)

Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)

Embroidered fabric 48 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (123.1 x 92.7 cm)

Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet

Etched copper plates 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)

Cicatriz II, 2021–22

Linocut with copper powder, Ed. 1/2 21 x 17 in. (53.3 x 43.1 cm), sheet

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CALA Alliance Established in 2010, CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas) is a multidisciplinary Latinx arts organization based in Phoenix that collaborates with artists and arts organizations to connect Arizona, Mexico, and Latin America. CALA Alliance advances its mission through innovative public programming, artist commissions, international residencies, and cultural exchanges that reimagine Arizona’s place in the Americas.

Staff Alana Hernandez, Executive Director & Curator Giovana Aviles, Operations & Programs Manager Khloé Crimando, Development Associate 2022 Board of Directors Ruben Alvarez, Chair Maria Camila Englert, Vice Chair José A. Cárdenas, Secretary Myra Millinger, Treasurer Camila Alarcon Carmen Armstrong

Laura Franco French Mariko Miller Vanessa Ruiz Alexander Soto Veronica Williams

CALA Alliance’s programs are made possible by the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals including: The Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation

National Endowment for the Arts

Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust

Arizona Commission on the Arts

J. W. Kieckhefer Foundation

Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Margaret T. Morris Foundation

Arizona Humanities

CALA Alliance’s Residencias Artísticas residency program is supported in part by an award by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Carolina Aranibar–Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores at CALA Alliance January 31–March 31, 2022 Organized by Alana Hernandez, Executive Director & Curator

Introduction: Alana Hernandez Essay: Matthew Villar Miranda Photography: Shaunté Glover Catalogue Design: Alana Hernandez Copy Editor: Anthony Graham Printer: Cesar Graphics

First printing, Edition of 100

CALA Alliance 316 W McDowell Rd., Suite 203 Phoenix, AZ 85003 calaalliance.org Publication copyright © 2022 CALA Alliance All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic means without prior written consent from the publisher.

All artwork © 2022 Carolina Aranibar–Fernández All texts © their respective authors Printed in Phoenix, Arizona

Edition:

/ 100

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