arrayanos

Charo Oquet

We wish to thank: The Gaga of San Luis, Santo Domingo, R.D., the Gaga of La Ceja, the Gaga of Los Chicharrones, Tango de San Luis, Johan Mijail, Samuel Ibarra, Enrique Lowe, Estudio Privado Arte. This project is made possible in part by the The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital, primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional funds come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, by the Performing Américas Program of the National Performance Network. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Performing Americas Program. Lead funding of the National Performance Network Performing Americas Program is provided by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. It is also made possible by by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs.

A semantic search: Looking at the work of the artist Charo Oquet

Johan Mijail*

You are now, mulatta, all the sea and the land of my islands, fruity symphony whose scales break furiously on your catinga.

The first time I read cups was in a very nice neighborhood of Padre Las Casas, back in the Dominican island, but now, being so far, being in such a long country I can not read cups because here they don’t drink much coffee, here they drink a lot of tea. What I do is wait for the mountain range to filled with smoke and I go for a walk and make a hole in the ground, there: I sink my feet (barefoot, of course) and with several almond seeds I divine what will happen and do a sip and I cure myself from all of the things that are left by the evil meaning tongues, I see how the color black starts to leave the walls when I returned home and the water runs red down rivers that emanate from the Andes, until it turns into the Mapocho. As I could not bring a photo of Saint Michael, I take one of Johnny Ventura that I found on the Internet and use it as if he were a saint, as if he were Obatala, as if he were Eleggua, as if he were Chango, as if he was Oggún, as if he were Orunla, as if he were Yemaya, as if he were Oshun, as if he were a spirit, as if he were responsible for all the gifts in the world: water, air, fire, earth, as if at any moment his Dominican merengue orchestra will become the orchestra that sounds when you go into a trance and sees colors, and more colors and black chickens and all those things that have to do with what is now part of the one’s identity.

*Dominicanwriterandperformanceartist.LivesandworksinSantiago,Chile.

II.

The work of the Dominican artist Charo Oquet is commitment to invoking images that establishes connections to the Afro-Caribbean memorial currents. By that I mean of predominantly black ancestry. She delves into a tradition that enhances the radicalness of insisting on a history decommissioned by hegemonic discourses that attempt to silence the heterogeneity of Caribbean cultures and their constitution constructed by its mix. She establishes an energetic dialogue between the historical and contemporary tensions in the polemic border relations and the Diasporas by crisscrossing sounds, text and images. In this way she moves through the cracks which involved and involves the killing of the indigenous population (60 million people) and the transfer of enslaved Africans in to that area in order to build a critical cartography that propose from the point of contemporary art, a mapping / registration of the damage caused by colonial violence.

The artist returns, constantly, to this area to invite us to imagine other things, imagine a Caribbean beyond the comfort of the all inclusive resorts. Taking care to semantically re-signify today’s Caribbean images and its fiber made of a systematic annihilation. She envisions an (new) Antillean memory that draws a curved line in the verticality where AfroCaribbean cultures have been and still continue to be framed, emphasizing the Dominican, her birthplace. She stops in their celebrations, colors and rituals seeking to decentralize the massive speech and obliterating meanness, building her own metropolis, more similar to its inhabitants.

Charo Oquet stresses the symbolic weight of a historically subordinate context that has created itself from a platform of oblivion and collective despair. Of an amnesia. She induces strategic shifts that allow those without voices to speak, appealing to a commitment to show the local and its shifting desire. It is perhaps why Oquet distances herself from the classic art materiality and bets on the uncertainty of the body -through performance- and the instability of installation art. Uncertainty and instability that do not represented but present, precisely that which is not expected.

Her works propose to detainment, providing contributions to a selfconscious thought, to a Caribbean panhandler that emancipates herself by allowing self- experience, allowing herself to be affected by the crosslinking of color, language, social class, popular culture and genres that define their difference made of miscegenation and relationship.

It is this way that the artist, who also resides in Miami (rescued here the power of a transnational work) gives a visceral conceptual experience and while altering the easily decibel and detectable rhythms when speaking of a specific geography.