Carolina Caycedo Interview - Labor + a(r)t + orio: Latinx Art as Research

CAROLINA CAYCEDO Interviewed by Laura E Pérez Interview with Carolina Caycedo, a visual artist based in Los Angeles, California. In this episode, Carolina discusses the importance of community building, connection, pluriversality, and sentipensar in art production.

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Laura 0:00 Greetings, saludos from the Latinx Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. I'm Laura Pérez, Chair of the Latinx Research Center, and Director of the Labor+a(r)t+orio: Latinx Art as Research project, funded by Alianza UCMX. This is a research project, which aims to produce globally accessible interview scripts and podcasts introducing mid-career US and hemispheric Latinx artists. It is Wednesday, August 17, 2022, and we are with multimedia artist, Carolina Caycedo. Carolina, muy bienvenida and thank you for joining us today. We're so excited about talking to you today about your work.

Carolina 0:47 Hola Hola muchas gracias por la invitación, thank you for the invite. And I'm excited to start this conversation.

Laura 0:54 Wonderful. Thank you. So Carolina, we're going to start with just some general questions so that our listeners can learn a little bit more about you. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about where you grew up, where you've lived, how some of those experiences have appeared, how their traces appear in your work, and what some of the key themes in your artworks are?

Carolina 1:20 So my name is Carolina Caycedo. I am a visual artist based in Los Angeles, California. I'm sitting in my studio in Chinatown. I live in East Los Angeles. But I was born in London to Colombian parents in the late 70s. I lived in London till I was six years old. And then my family moved back to Colombia. We lived in Bogotá for a few years and then we moved to a smaller town along the Magdalena River called Girardot. I went to art school in Bogotá in the early 90s. Sorry, in the mid 90s, from 1995 to 99. I went to art school at the Los Andes University in Bogotá. And, you know, Bogotá in the late 90s was a crowded city,

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it still is. Lots of things happening in the public space. I really felt like I was entitled, and you know, and that has continued to inspire thinking about public space, the use of public space, the way we inhabit public space, but you know, growing up in Bogotá definitely was a mayor kind of drive to what I do in public space and with collectivities.

And thinking about other publics and other spaces where art can be done and that art can inhabit. In the year 2000, I returned to London as a young woman to work. And I started my career as an artist, I started exhibiting around Europe met some influential people with whom I still work on today. As you know, through my art career, and 2005 and 2004, I had a residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was a series of projects that were organized by a group of artists. I had already been in one in the year 2000, they made another one in 2002. And then the 2004 one, I had a chance to stay there as a in a residency for a few months. And I was really attracted and having very fruitful conversations and practices and collaborations with the local artists who had similar interests than me in terms of socially committed art, producing work with communities in the public space. And then kind of opening up to what it is to be a colonial subject and witnessing that for the very first time in my life or at least with an intention, no? With an awareness of that colonial aspect and colonial kind of reality in Puerto Rico, and I decided I wanted to, to move to Puerto Rico. I was fed up of the European winters. And, and, you know, and kind of the hardship of being, though I'm an English woman, still, you know, still treated as an immigrant, in a way.

Laura 4:24 Yes. Nos decías que habías escogido vivir en Puerto Rico después de a ver regresado a Londres y me preguntaba, cómo fue esa experiencia después de Londres y luego cómo fue llegar a Los Angeles, you know, cómo es que that you experienced that? You know, you're truly not just a hemispheric person, hemispheric Latina, but one who's lived, you know, in different parts of the globe además.

Carolina 4:51 So just you know, I was kind of fed up of the European winters and decided I wanted to move in Puerto Rico. I also with someone, you know, who I got romantically involved, and

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then I moved to Puerto Rico in 2005 and stayed there for seven years. I had my first child in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And, and I lived both in San Juan and on the west coast in a town called Isabela. And, and that was, you know, kind of a real political learning for me, again, in terms of what it is to be a colonial subject. Meeting also people who claimed Indigenous ancestry in Puerto Rico so also the first time I kind of, you know, work, and collaborate and establish a conversation with Indigenous folks too, so a lot of firsts for me in Puerto Rico, no? All the time, backed by this group of artists that continue to be good friends, and continue to be soundboards in a lot of ideas and practices. Then, in 2011, I came to LA to pursue a master's degree at USC, I did my master's degree in three years, because when I started after the first year, I got offered the DADE grant in Berlin, so I put the master’s on hold, and did that grant in Berlin for a year and then came back and finished it. And that's when the whole body of work with environmental perspective and issues started to happen. So and then, since then, I've been here in Southern California since that since 2011. And, you know, what inspires me and, you know, the themes that crossed my, my work, you know, throughout this, more than 20 years of professional practice, are things that touched me as a woman, as a woman of color, as an immigrant, as a mother, as a colonial subject. Things that, you know, from immigration injustice, to the, you know, to the woes that you find when you're living in another country, to the coloniality, that reality of coloniality, and then more recently, environmental injustice, right? So I had my second child here in California a couple of years ago. So that, to look into the future, it's kind of impossible not to do and you're a mother, right? So you know, I guess the work with racialized subjects and Indigenous subjects and women and feminists have also taught me that in order to project to the future we have to look towards our past and learn about our past and learn about, you know, a different knowledges that have been buried, right? So I guess, you know, those are kind of the subjects that run through my work. Collaboration is a big aspect of my work, research in different ways, collecting information both in in a very archival and rigorous way, but also in what I call spiritual fieldwork, which is, you know, sharing and building relationships with folks and individuals and communities and collectives on the ground. So, that's a little bit about me.

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Laura 8:22 Yeah, no, that's terrific. You summarized many of the different kinds of things that, that we definitely wanted to hear more about. One of the things that as you were speaking that I was thinking about was how I think we have seen understandably, like a rise in global environmental artwork, and philosophy for that matter in scholarship and, and movements, right? And I think what I was wondering about is, you know, what the difference of making environmental work as a woman of color, as a Latina, as a woman who's working with Indigenous, and even Afro-diasporic, right, your references to Eshun, right, worldviews. I mean, how do you feel like your work is conversing right now with environmental art in the rest of the world, the kind of difference of your own difference, you know?

Carolina 9:21 I, maybe I like to refer to a concept that the Colombian sociologist, Arturo Escobar, proposes and it's the idea of the pluriverse. So that has been very grounding and another kind of concept he proposes, which is the sentipensar, and I'm not sure if Arturo is the original proponent, but at least he's written extensively about both concepts the sentipensar and the pluriverse. And I think those are key to understanding some of my work or a lot of my work. You know, doing environmental art for me is not only about presenting statistics, or even presenting solutions, because I totally, you know, definitely don't feel in the capacity of presenting any solutions.

I think it's more about opening conversations at levels that perhaps other environmental practices don't do. Like, how do you feel when the river, you know, is taken from you and that relationship is ripped apart and severed? Can we, can we build empathy towards folks who have been ripped apart of their river? How can we think about what we call natural resources as collective and common goods, instead of this resource that is there for humanity to exploit? And that we have to keep, you know, healthy, just for productive reasons, right? What are the other things that attaches to these common goods? It attaches to our past, it attaches to our ancestors, and to our ancestors to come, right? To our kids and for generations to come. You know, how can we perceive a river not from a universal truth and a single perspective?

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But can we actually open ourselves to multiple perspectives and be empathic with the different perspectives that exist over a particular, you know, common good, call it a forest, a mountain, even a mineral, right? What are the spiritual possibilities of those common goods, in terms of ritual and magic, and dreaming? So, you know, my approach to environmental issues, considers all these things not only kind of the positivistic, if you call it that way of positive and productive issues of the need to, you know, keep healthy our planet, the need to continue to produce food, so we can keep exporting or whatnot, but I think it goes a little bit further than that, and wants to look at, you know, the deeper relationships that have existed between humanity and other natural entities. You know, other subjects, of course, movements of rights for nature, that are, you know, that Latin America and different countries in Latin American communities and Latin America are pioneers of Arabic influence also. So you know, really being respectful, and attentive and intentional to listen and to learn from those in the frontlines. And not just keeping the information that comes through mass media, or academic research as the main fountain of knowledge, but understanding that people in the background whose knowledge has been constantly stigmatized and ignored, actually has, you know, a better sense of what's going on and of possible solutions on the ground with these problematics.

Laura 12:49 Carolina, is this very last thing that you just said, right, now learning from the community learning from, you know, those who have survived, you know, for for millennia and centuries is, is that where you add the word spiritual to the word fieldwork, because you talk about, you've mentioned spiritual fieldwork and I think what's really cool, right, is that unexpected, like, connection of those two words and so is this where's the spiritual component for you in that idea of, you know, I'm gonna go do some fieldwork?

Carolina 13:25 It's precisely in in kind of ripping out the supposed neutrality and objectivity of fieldwork that may be more traditional ethnographic or scientific practices imbue fieldwork with, and still be very rigorous about how you collect work, how you present it, how you process it, but then allowing for subjectivity to actually inform that collection of work.

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And instead of trying to maintain a distance with your subject or object of study, or the contrary, you know, I do fieldwork to actually get closer to the river to the people who relate to the river, to the animals and to the plants that conform that ecosystem.

Fieldwork is a way to build relationships, to strengthen relationships. Spiritual fieldwork means not only physical relationships or information exchange, but spiritual relationships. So, you know, we do pagamentos when we go to the river, it's not just the visit, but you pay and you offer, and you support the agendas in place, right?

So kind of your aesthetic intentions or academic or research intentions have to go to a second, you know, place in the list of to-dos and first you have to honor what the agenda is happening in place if there's something that we need to prioritize and what are the skills that I can bring to that agenda as an artist is someone who creates images and and who, who deconstructs them too, right? So, um, so that's a little bit about what, you know, I call it spiritual fieldwork, because the subjectivity is what really kind of what defines the kind of fieldwork and the possibilities of of that fieldwork. You know, if there's no empathy between the community and myself, if there's distrust of my presence there, then we cannot go ahead, right, I need to respect that distrust, I need to, you know, kind of follow intuition. And so, you know, spirituality is kind of tricky in the academy and artmaking but using the word spirituality and allowing spirit and subjectivity to guide me, is done with a very political intention too.

Laura 15:36 I hear, I hear that part of what you're saying is a taking very seriously the communities, whichever communities they may be, taking very seriously what they understand to be spirituality and, and respecting their own practices, which is very different, of course, then anthropological research, right, with, you know, that history of assuming that Western and Western trained investigators or researchers somehow that their cultures and their religions, right, were, were and are like the, you know, the apex of progress and modernity. And that's, and that's one of the things that I that I actually one of the many, many things that that that I that we find so interesting about your work is like, taking seriously that the community, and that the non-Western, or rather non-European is

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actually a valuable source of knowledge, right?

So going back to Arturo Escobar and his idea of the pluriversal, that there are many universes--earlier you you said, you know to look at the river and to think of the river in a way that isn't through this lens of the so called universal—could you again, for our for our listeners, could you tell us a little bit more about how you understand the difference between universal or universalizing, approach frente a una acercamiento como el que propone Arturo Escobar, that I think I think that'd be wonderful to hear a little more about that.

Carolina 17:09 Yeah, maybe I can, I can explain that or like, go further in that direction with a simple example of how it unfolds in my work. And, like if you think about the main formats that we are trained in as artists, we have two main formats. We have a portrait format, which is a vertical format and then we have a landscape format, which tends to be a more horizontal format. And we use landscape for traditionally to to refer to different representations of nature, right? Oh, this is a photocopy of a landscape. This is a landscape painting. But if you think about how landscape functions, it is a window, right?

It's this horizontal window, through which you look at nature, right? Through which you traditionally look at nature, but you're kind of outside of that nature, you're just an observer, right? So thinking about this has made me realize that as artists, we have been complicit with processes of colonization of the gaze, and we have been complicit also in processes of separating nature and culture, which is at the root of our ecological collapse really, right? The fact that humans consider ourselves above nature, consider nature as this bag of resources for us to exploit scientifically and physically, right? So in a process of unlearning landscape as a format, and unlearning, you know, my given training as an artist in the academy, this idea of actually portraying a river has surfaced in my work. And this practice of poetry in a body of water has become more useful to me in terms of looking in a pluriversal way, right? Because when you portrait a river or portrait a body of water, or you portrait another natural entity instead of trying to represent it through the landscape portrait, we're actually talking about a relationship, right? And, you know, I

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don't know if you have sisters or brothers or siblings, the relationship of each sibling with the mother is different, though you’re part of the same family, right? So you know, pluriverality is like, even in family relationships is there, right? Some some relationships may be more complicated, some may be more easygoing, some more confrontational, the same happens with the river. Not everyone has the same relationship with a river or builds the same relationship, right? So it's about. portraiting a river is also about listening and looking at that river and learning what it has to say to us, to you, to me, right, letting that entity speak, letting that entity engage in a process of representation itself, which I know, it's complicated to think that actually nonhumans have the possibility of developing processes of representation. But I think they do, right? Because like, even when you take medicine, sometimes these medicines, give you images, you know, they have your head, you know, they give images to you, they give messages to you too. So, so I think it has to do a little bit about that, like the pluriversality is also manifested in my work when you know, when, and these these portraits or these series that I called water portraits take shape and imprints on fabric, or they take shape in cinematographic language and film, where I'm actually unlearning the traditional way of how we're supposed to represent water, right, which is a little bit like writing, right? There's like a writing code in cinematic language. Like if you're filming a river, it should go from one side to the other side of the frame, if you're filming a cascade, it should go from the top to the bottom. So you know that the water is falling. But what if a river flows upwards? Like, because it does in those individual relationships, and a river that flows upwards cannot be dammed either, you know what I mean? So, what are the possibilities of mining this single view of things, and instead offering a pluriversal view where this river breaks into a kaleidoscope, flows in different ways that we're not trained to see, but they happen, right?

And so that's a little bit of how I kind of explore that, that practice of or that, you know, that the pluriversality in the work by building a relationship with what you're portraiting to by offering myriad ways of viewing the river underwater takes too, right? And by then, thinking about the different epistemologies that develop in an ecosystem, because there's other nonhuman epistemologies that develop in an ecosystem.

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Carolina 22:47 Absolutely, yeah, it's been a big despertar and awakening of, you know, some of the most pressing issues of our society today in terms of our future in this planet, and the way we treat the planet and the way we treat our mother and our sibling. So, so yeah, it’s been very humbling and it's been a tremendous learning process, and very inspiring too and very, very sad to know to see also those folks that I, you know, I consider myself somebody that's not on the frontline, but actually two or three rows behind perhaps not even in the second row, but you know, pushing, pushing and trying to hold and help are helping to hold that frontline, strong, right?

Accompany and processes on the ground with the production of images, and maybe some visual keys for other audiences to be able to build empathy and solidarity with these movements. So also, it's been a learning process of how, as an artist, you can participate from these movements, at the capacity you're able to, right, to also learn to not claim things that you're not doing, right, in any way I don’t claim that I'm there on the frontline changing stuff. But again, accompanying maybe folks who actually are doing the hard work, right, and understanding that that's enough, and that as artists, we are able to contribute in that way too or as thinkers, right, or as you know, the battle is in, in the realm of the ideas and of the image-making. And those are important battles, too.

Laura 24:33 I really appreciate that. Because I think sometimes when we look at you know, different parts of our society or our world and we admire something, you know, we might think I should be doing that, you know, and maybe we should, maybe we can, but I think part of what I hear you saying is that as an artist, you know that part of what you you do is think about, as an artist how can I be a source of support here? You know, and so that all of us in our different places and positions can find ways to have solidarity, to learn in alternative ways. To share. When we think about… so here's like a more art focused question when we think about art making and being trained to make art and to think and write about art, decolonization in the gaze, as you, you know, explained and shared with us pluriversalizing our perception, you know, and some of the ways in it. How as an

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artist who's working in a decolonial vein, how do you think about the many media that you work with? As an artist what is your thinking around today, I'm going to work with performance, do choreographies perhaps in, you know, in my next project that I've just been asked to think about, I might work with a book, I might work with the net sculptures, I might work with clothing, right, with the names of women who I admire and who are a part of who I am. I mean, I'd love to just hear more about the way you think about the media that you work with, and the kind of permission process that you go through with yourself, giving yourself permission to make your choices and create the kind of work that makes sense to you that but that might not make sense to, let's say to you know, the art world or you know, let alone art schools, right?

Carolina 26:37 Yeah, well, I, I guess it has, it has many kinds of reasons. One is that I'm not a particular proficient maker in terms of like, what I can do with my hands. So you know, like those artists that are so good at sculpting with their bare hands, or painting, or even drawing though I do my drawings, do some of my drawings and, I mean, I do drawings, you know, there's just kind of my language, but I don't feel I, you know, particularly excel in the technique, let's say that I don't excel particularly in any technique so I think that's kind of a starting point that allows me to explore just different materials that are everyday materials that are at hand, and then intentionally, you know, with it with a… and then that's kind of at the beginning of my art process and my art career, kind of more intuitively drawn to these objects that are every day and that are not considered, you know, the kind of this more elitist mediums, right, like oil painting, or sculpture like, but instead things that allow for other entry points. And then being much more intentional with the paths of yours about the selection of those mediums, right, because I want to create art that is, that offers multiple entry points and that is not only there for someone who has a particular training in art or art history to be able to understand. But I want fishing folk to be able to connect to the fishing nets, because they've held those fishing nets in their hands before, or they went fishing with a family member at some point of their lives. Or maybe it's just the color and the reticence that these fishing nets produce.

Or maybe it's the curiosity or maybe it's some of the objects that are hanging, or maybe

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they see themselves reflected in some of the images of that book. Performance, of course, you know, is a way to break social barriers, because there's a like body contact, happening in most of my performances that then just like speeds up the process of, of offering a message, right?

I think performance is one of those mediums that just speeds up processes, you know, they are so immediate, and that's what I like about it. So when I feel that I need to transmit something in a very urgent way, I resort to performance. So it has to do also with what I want to say, the process of research and doing spiritual fieldwork also shows you paths of, of mediums to use. So for example, the whole scene is done with artisanal fishing nets, that is called cosmotarrayas, which is a combination of the words cosmos and atarrayas, which in Colombia is a cask net. It has different names in different parts of Latin America. But was precisely of, you know, of just sharing time and spending time going fishing with fishing folk and then becoming fascinated by this object and finally bringing one of the atarrayas to my studio and just fooling around with it until the sculptures came to be, right? So, you know, the use of each medium is it's kind of, you know, comes to be in a very unique way, the idea of working with a public, with a publication, with a book, also. It's a book that it's this concertina fold or accordion fold, which is on the top is very visual, almost no text and on the bottom, then you can kind of read through the different texts that we compiled, thinking about that I wanted people in the communities that I have worked with to, you know, have these books, but not be not, you know, not not be kind of left out of it. So very visual, because a lot of these people don't know how to read. They have tons of other knowledge and skills, maybe not the reading one. But that doesn't mean they cannot access the book. Right? So, so also thinking about the audience, the message and, you know, guides the use, and the context too, right, the context to so, so, kind of, through the years learning that maybe a biannual demands certain languages and the audience that's going to access a biannual, you know, has maybe certain codes with that they can use to access these pieces. But when we're doing work in the community, like performance, direct action strategies, social cartography, other methodologies are at hand and make more sense.

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Laura 31:32 I see. One of the things that's also startling and simultaneously, like really cool is because sometimes startling is like, you know, like, oh, I don't know what I think, you know, like you don't yet know how to think or how to feel, because you're in that space of like, I've got to recalibrate or move this way and then move that way. But, but in this case, one of the things that I, that I immediately just found, like really wonderful and startling was looking at some of the photographs of your work with the community, not only with their, like spelling out words, working with you to spell out things like: I was viva, so agua y vida, but also, in fact, looking at, as you say about the book, looking at the serpentine river book, and people looking at it, and, and people holding it and marching around with it, and people like on the floor with the book on top of them. That was really, really cool to see that that was one of the questions that I wanted to ask you about, yes, in sharing, whether it's the book, or your other books with the community, or whether it's developing pieces that involve them, how is the community, rural, some of them, I think, traditional Indigenous communities, how have they responded to you, and to co-creating with you and in the process, and then maybe when they see the final products with you, or the final objects or happenings or, offerings, right, because they're not necessarily products?

Carolina 33:17 Mmm... And I think that again, just to go back to this idea of sentipensar, no? That we talked a little bit before and tune in into that sentipensar of the collectives and communities you work with, it's so important to be able to tune to that, and they love the example you gave about the book kind of, you know, wrapping around the bodies that are rolling on the floor. So I think, you know, when you acknowledge that the body is a source of knowledge that anybody is a source of knowledge, and I'm talking about the body, as you know, as a body that incorporates knowledge that embodies knowledge, right? And that through gestures of care, sustenance, is embodying that knowledge, right? When you throw a cast net, when you plant a seed, when you start a fire, when you gather the crop that is embodied knowledge, meant you've learned that through accumulated knowledge, it was given and passed to you through generations. It's related

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to your memory muscle. It's related to the relationship you have with a particular environment, call it the river, the forest, the land that you're tilling, whatnot. So when you tune into that embodied knowledge and you are appealing to that then you know, normally you're well received, right? Well received because, because you're not coming as a, you know, the bearer of knowledge, but you're saying, I have this and I know you have this knowledge, how we can how can we put these two together?

How can we weave something new out of these two knowledges that we're bringing to the table? So again, like, you know, if you respect the agendas in place, if you're very transparent about what you're able to bring in terms of resources and skills to the, to the table, right, that's that's something I am very transparent about. I'm just, I'm just an artist, I cannot change things. I can only support this way and you know, and then and then you're well received, and it's been such a joyful and, you know, the communities are the ones that maintain me and check too with the feet on the ground to those there's been also tough moments, right? When folks are like, aren't isn't this kind of leaning into some sort of extractivism here, academic or artistic extractivism? And to be checked by the community and, and to be humble enough to receive that checking, I think it's very important as an artist or any cultural practitioner, right? But it's been very joyful, because then you know, when when when the pieces are well received, when the book is received with joy, when people see themselves represented in the book, you know, in terms of, because their photograph is there because their story is told in there. There is, there's a lot of you know, that's when that's that's kind of the highlights of my practice. I think, you know, I feel very happy when my pieces are well received in museums worldwide. But when the community gets the work, or perceives the work or sees you know, even sometimes just documentation because it's impossible to travel the work and they're happy about it, and they, they feel they feel happy, and they feel that, you know, we did a good job that's that's that's when I feel more satisfied, right, and I think about some sort of success is going on.

Laura 36:50 That's wonderful. I was I was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and I was able to see a show

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at the LACMA, which was was very interestingly made in collaboration with the Kogi no...

Carolina 37:07 Yeah, I haven't seen that show yet! I want to see it.

Laura 37:10 It’s really lovely because it had apparently the curators had spoken, you know, had had had access finally to the Kogi who had been walled off. They did not want to have access with, you know, to mestizos and, you know, Europeans and Euro-Americans. But so, I was startled that there was a project that had been done in collaboration with the Kogi that I've been able to see in a beautiful video that had been made, I don't know the 80s or the 90s and, and so the idea was that they wanted to let the Kogi know that the museum had these ancient objects, and how could they display them in a way that was ethical.

And the Kogi elder, who is the same elder that you mention in your interviews, sat for a year with this, I think it was a photocopy of an object that that LACMA had in its collection. And after a year, the elder said that this object was meant to bring them together to together think about how, you know, how the world is connected, and how this object has brought them together, and how they might continue to work and show objects in an ethical way. You know, and so I thought this was so so fascinating, this beautiful project of reaching out to, to the Indigenous community for their own perspectives on how do we curate a show, right? What does it mean when we show objects? What would be an ethical way to show objects that who knows how they came into the hands of the, of a museum whose colonial history is often hidden, right? And so I thought that was incredibly beautiful, this idea of where are we now? There's a colonial Imperial past, and where are we now? And how do we collaborate? And how do we also transform the museum and when I looked at images of some of your work, and how you had chosen to to to print images on fabric of water, and then you had spilled them down the walls? And you also had them like undulating, right, on the ceiling? I was I was thinking about this kind of question that had to do with, we have museums, we have galleries that are western style and these are some of the public spaces that we have for shared viewing, shared thinking, shared collaborating.

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at the LACMA, which was was very interestingly made in collaboration with the Kogi no...

Carolina 37:07 Yeah, I haven't seen that show yet! I want to see it.

Laura 37:10 It’s really lovely because it had apparently the curators had spoken, you know, had had had access finally to the Kogi who had been walled off. They did not want to have access with, you know, to mestizos and, you know, Europeans and Euro-Americans. But so, I was startled that there was a project that had been done in collaboration with the Kogi that I've been able to see in a beautiful video that had been made, I don't know the 80s or the 90s and, and so the idea was that they wanted to let the Kogi know that the museum had these ancient objects, and how could they display them in a way that was ethical.

And the Kogi elder, who is the same elder that you mention in your interviews, sat for a year with this, I think it was a photocopy of an object that that LACMA had in its collection. And after a year, the elder said that this object was meant to bring them together to together think about how, you know, how the world is connected, and how this object has brought them together, and how they might continue to work and show objects in an ethical way. You know, and so I thought this was so so fascinating, this beautiful project of reaching out to, to the Indigenous community for their own perspectives on how do we curate a show, right? What does it mean when we show objects? What would be an ethical way to show objects that who knows how they came into the hands of the, of a museum whose colonial history is often hidden, right? And so I thought that was incredibly beautiful, this idea of where are we now? There's a colonial Imperial past, and where are we now? And how do we collaborate? And how do we also transform the museum and when I looked at images of some of your work, and how you had chosen to to to print images on fabric of water, and then you had spilled them down the walls? And you also had them like undulating, right, on the ceiling? I was I was thinking about this kind of question that had to do with, we have museums, we have galleries that are western style and these are some of the public spaces that we have for shared viewing, shared thinking, shared collaborating.

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at the LACMA, which was was very interestingly made in collaboration with the Kogi no...

Carolina 37:07 Yeah, I haven't seen that show yet! I want to see it.

Laura 37:10 It’s really lovely because it had apparently the curators had spoken, you know, had had had access finally to the Kogi who had been walled off. They did not want to have access with, you know, to mestizos and, you know, Europeans and Euro-Americans. But so, I was startled that there was a project that had been done in collaboration with the Kogi that I've been able to see in a beautiful video that had been made, I don't know the 80s or the 90s and, and so the idea was that they wanted to let the Kogi know that the museum had these ancient objects, and how could they display them in a way that was ethical.

And the Kogi elder, who is the same elder that you mention in your interviews, sat for a year with this, I think it was a photocopy of an object that that LACMA had in its collection. And after a year, the elder said that this object was meant to bring them together to together think about how, you know, how the world is connected, and how this object has brought them together, and how they might continue to work and show objects in an ethical way. You know, and so I thought this was so so fascinating, this beautiful project of reaching out to, to the Indigenous community for their own perspectives on how do we curate a show, right? What does it mean when we show objects? What would be an ethical way to show objects that who knows how they came into the hands of the, of a museum whose colonial history is often hidden, right? And so I thought that was incredibly beautiful, this idea of where are we now? There's a colonial Imperial past, and where are we now? And how do we collaborate? And how do we also transform the museum and when I looked at images of some of your work, and how you had chosen to to to print images on fabric of water, and then you had spilled them down the walls? And you also had them like undulating, right, on the ceiling? I was I was thinking about this kind of question that had to do with, we have museums, we have galleries that are western style and these are some of the public spaces that we have for shared viewing, shared thinking, shared collaborating.

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And, and I was wondering how you how you're thinking right now about the possibilities of museums? How having worked in different places, including outdoors, including in rural, you know, settings, how this informs your thinking about sharing work, exhibitions, museums spaces? Because we're in this moment, especially with Black Lives Matter of really, really being able to think in creative ways about exhibition. So any thoughts about that? About how we might rethink, reshape our ideas of sharing art?

Carolina 40:24 I'm not sure if I can respond in a very general way. I think I have to go to the particular in terms of what I'm thinking for an upcoming exhibition of my work and how I am imagining it. So the Getty Foundation has this initiative called Pacific Standard Time and the upcoming one is slated to be in the year 2024. The open call was art and science. And together with the Vincent Price Art Museum, which was the Museum at the East LA College here in LA, or in East Los Angeles, we proposed an exhibition of my work, you know, an individual exhibition, and I'm in the process of research and building up the exhibition towards 2024. And after doing research with different communities across the America who are thinking and doing processes of transition in a very broad way, right, so cultural, environmental, energy transition through transition in a very broad way. And well, not that broad actually, kind of kind of kind of weaved in this idea of water, food, and energy sovereignty, let's say, and, you know, I think that I don't, I don't want my work to be on its own in the museum. I want it to be in conversation with the artistic expressions of the communities that have been generous enough to establish a conversation and a collaboration with me. And to respect the, you know, the aesthetics of those expressions, even if they don't enter the, you know, contemporary art code or, or the, you know, the fine arts kind of language. But, you know, I feel that my work will enrich and will have a multi, even more multi-dimensional aspect to it if there's a conversation. And if the, you know, my work is punctuated by these expressions too. So I don't know, if this really answers your question, but I think now, you know, opening these spaces to, to people who are, you know, in, in, in kind of the, the art world, not experts about art is something that, it's needed right now, like, right, because then we continue to build elitist, you know, exhibitions and continue to have elitist museums. So how can

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we open up to those non-expert knowledges? How can art really be in conversation with other disciplines, and not be just this like self-referring curl that keeps curling into itself, right? Which we see a lot of snobbery of that kind in the art world. So that's, that's something I, you know, I thrive, and I work hard to do, to uncurl that, and to open it up and split it up to other conversations and other people and just to do a more, you know, kind of kind of conciliatory, but you know, what the mamo has said, you know, these objects are meant are meant to bring us together. So, that's key. How can we make exhibitions that bring us together, that can still be critical, but that could bring us together? Even if we think we have nothing in common.

Laura 44:00 Yeah, I love that, where that us, bringing us together, right? Where we're, where we're more of us are at the table, right, back to the idea of the pluriversal. There are a lot of us’es, and we can all be in whatever spaces they are. I was also thinking about how one of the challenges that we have in the US maybe in other parts of Europe, but I don't know.

But in the US, we have this challenge that COVID exacerbated, which was basically alienation, right? This challenge of individualism, you know, this myth that all we have to do is, is become self-sufficient, as if we could without the rest of community, it's like diametrically opposed to the kinds of things you've been working with, the kinds of things you're sharing about, about learning and community, supporting community, being part of community of humans, let alone with the nonhuman, right, natural world.

So I think this, this invitation for people in the US, who aren't familiar with these ideas of a more, a more public, public space, you know, a more public social world, I think it's going to it's incredibly medicinal, it's incredibly important. I think, for us to reconnect to our communal self, and to understanding better how the individual is a myth, you know, that there really is a discrete…

Carolina 45:33 This, this takes me to this idea of constructing the collective body, right, that's something that that I, you know, intentionally looked for in some of the work specifically the geochoreographies, for example, that you've mentioned, you know. The geo-choreographies

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are, are, they have like, a range of, of meanings. But one of those meanings and the most like, for me important is, it points to that embodied knowledge that I was talking about.

So, you know, when you cast a fishnet into a river, you know, you take the afternoon to go fish, your, your dinner, to the river and you cast the net, you don't cast it one or two times you cast it over 100 times, right? There's like this process of casting the net over and over again until you catch your dinner, right? More in ecosystems that have been deprived and dammed and extracted where you know, fish are not as abundant as it used to be, so that that gesture has to be repeated over and over again. But that gesture, you know, when, you know, it's the definition of a choreography, it's the repetition of a gesture, right? Of a gesture that you've trained yourself until sophistication, right? There's a sophistication of the gesture, and when this gesture is intrinsically related to a particular geography, or hydrography, to a river, or to land or to a mountain, and that's what we call the geochoreography, right? This instead of gestures of embodied knowledge, that is intrinsically related to the land, you know, and call the land, oil, terretorio, you know, as the place where political, spiritual, cultural, family, economic, and you know, all kinds of relationships unfold, right, and weave and weaving together a reality. That's a geochoreography, but I've kind of taken the liberty to also define geo-choreographies as those not only the everyday gestures, you know, that are these everyday, you know, choreographies, of sustenance and of care of embodied knowledge, but also the extraordinary gestures that communities have had to embody in order to survive from, you know, direct action of stopping and blocking the construction of a dam, to legal action. You know, or even these more cultural direct actions that you mentioned, where we kind of spelling with our body's different messages over the land, and hacking that view from above, right? Hacking that drone militaristic view and sending a message that imprints a living message on the land, right? We're here. Waters are alive. These are our waters and our bodies of water and our bodies and the bodies of water are interconnected. So that's why, you know, in my work, I also call it geo-choreography, like a set of gestures over the land that which aims to reinforce the collective body and the construction of it, even if it's temporary, a temporary collective body, right, where all these bodies come as a collective body, the construction of the collective body. So I think through artwork and art making and cultural, you know, making, we can support the

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reinforcement and the construction of these collective bodies, for sure, through performance but through other ways.

Laura 49:11 That's very powerful. Very inspiring. Carolina as we as we wind up the interview, one of the I think one of the last things I'd like to ask you is, many youth right now are really scared, you know? They feel a lot of anxiety, a lot of youth in their 20s, you know, ask themselves, whether they even want to have children because of the environmental crises, primarily. So we are in a world where the social crises, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, you know, are those things are coming to a head with I think people saying enough with a lack of democracy, enough with patriarchal you know, a predatory behavior on women and feminized bodies, you know? So that, that I feel like there's a lot of hope, in that kind of social crises, so long as we can be supportive of it. But you talk a lot about hope, you know, in your work, and even as you're an artist who is is constantly focusing, right, on the environmental crises, its toxic effects, right, in communities, its destructive effects. I just would love to ask you, if you could share more about where you see points of hope, you know, how we might think in an empowering way as we face the future?

Carolina 50:47 I think maybe we can tap into into what we refer to as la digna rabia in this answer, and la digna rabia is a a something that was offered to us by the Zapatistas back in the early 90s.

One of the motors of the Zapatista movement is la digna rabia. So when when you face injustice, you feel all sorts of things, right? You you feel fear, you feel anger, indignation sparks in your in your soul. You are confused and startled also, right? But fear and anger are very important motors of creativity, right? And I would say fear to, sorry, anger, right?

Anger. Anger tends to mobilize us and like, to make us boil. Our hearts boil and that energy, you know, if we're able to, you know, put it in the palm of our hands and, and take care of it. And then, you know, with a lot of care you know, weave it together with indignation, I think there's a strong motor for creativity, and, and, you know, different forms of struggle against injustice, you know, that can be fueled through anger and fear.

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So, so it's not about—It's like, how can we transform these kinds of more negative feelings into positive action and into action, really. So I always say, the best way to start as youth is to see what affects you more and what produces you more anger and indignation. Is it the environmental crisis? Is it the housing crisis because your family is being evicted? Is it racism that you're experiencing in your academic setting, or in your everyday life? Or in your job? Is it if you're a woman or you know, or a transgender person are you suffering, you know, discrimination, because of that? Kind of pinpoint what is giving us the worst anxieties and fears, and work and find other people who are feeling the same. They’re probably already organized and join that organization, and start supporting that organization in the means you can. Maybe it's just showing up at the beginning of the meetings and that will show you a way to participate. Maybe you are a bilingual person, and you can offer interpretation and translation services at the capacity you have. Maybe it's housing someone who is coming to visit that organization to provide information and knowledge from another setting, and you can house them, or maybe it's cooking a meal, or bringing cookies for the meeting and taking care of that, you know, nutritional need. I don't know, there's so many ways of supporting, and once you get involved in that, it's like a never ending, right? Because, because it just starts unfolding and organizing, you know, it's kind of this journey of just little by little, taking more and more commitment. But you know, it's understanding that this fear and this anger, this digna rabia that injustice makes us feel and makes our hearts and so forth boil is an amazing motor for creative output and for political organizing. It's what really has fueled all sorts of movements in the history of humanity, really. So So I think, you know, if you're angry that means, you know, that, that already gives me hope. If you are angry, that'll already gives me hope, if you and I think another way too is is embodiment of knowledge too because like if we think what fear does to our bodies, it you know, it makes us bow our heads physically, it makes us like hunch. It makes us like put our arms up you know, uh, you know, in front of us to protect ourselves from the common blow so, physical movement is very important too. Because you know, fear has this kind of encroaching gesture, but when you open your arms and when you go biking and when you go for a walk when you kind of swim in the river, connect to those natural entities there are your ancestors again, there is a healing in that movement, right? So understanding that the sources of healing are not somewhere outside but they're inside us actually.

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Laura 55:47 How beautiful and how powerful. Thank you, Carolina. Fabulous. I love I love all of that connecting these big things with what we can do within our own bodies and in our lives around us. Thank you, Carolina. Finally, I'll just say, are there any other thoughts that you wanted to share or quisieras, you know, comunicar cualquier otra cosa antes de cerrar la entrevista?

Carolina 56:16 There was a question that you in the original list that says the experience of the hemispheric transnational Latina. Maybe I want to say that I think what you're doing is very important because I think that there's still a large disconnection between Latinx communities and Latin American communities. There's some very strong bonds of course, but there's still a lot of desconocimiento like not knowing from either side what's happening on the other side, but our struggles are so similar. You know, they're the same struggle, they are very similar. And so all the efforts to bring and to bridge these walls together I think are great. So thank you for doing this.

Laura 57:03 Yeah, gracias a ti también Carolina, we tenemos at the Latinx Research Center uno de los grupos de investigación se llama decolonial knowledges, y la la universidad pluriversal. Y estamos tratando de aprovechar y extender puentes y es interdisciplinario entonces algunos de nosotros trabajamos con arte, otros con educación y pedagogía, otros con antropología y filosofia entonces we're really excited and we've actually had the opportunity to bring Arturo Escobar to to share with us more of his thinking around the pluriversal. So tenemos la esperanza de seguir, you know, teniendo puentes para comunicarnos y entender y you know, ensanchar la idea de lo que es la experiencia Latina. Well, Carolina, gracias it's been such a pleasure. I hope that we are able to do something together in the future maybe bring you and you know, just remain in contact and incredibly grateful to you. So voy a cerrar with our little official closure:

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This has been a podcast of the Labor+(art)+orio Latinx as Art Research Project. My name is Laura Peréz at the Latinx Research Center, University of California, Berkeley. We want to thank Carolina Caycedo for speaking with us today and Lupita Limón Corollas, Carolina’s studio manager. This multipronged and multisite project was funded by Alianza UCMX, in partnership with María Ester Fernández, Artistic Director of the Cheech Museum of Art and Culture at the Riverside Museum California, and artist and Professor Carlos Francisco Jackson of UC Davis. A very special thanks to Dr. Isabel Studer at Alianza UCMX, and the research and podcast team at the Latinx Research Center, Daniel Márquez, Diana Hernandez and Paulo Orosco. Thank you, everyone. Gracias.