ART BASEL MIAMI 2021 ANINAT GALLERY

COCHA

Hand woven paper investiture piece made from selected cutted pieces from Latin American maritime sea front atlases and maps.

1,30 mt W X 1,50 mt H x 45 depth cm
Unique
2021

Water is of existential importance for human life and now object of a global enviromental crisis unprecedented in human history. Water is not only a natural resource, but also an object of politcal empowerment & social meaning.

COCHA is a hand woven paper investiture piece of 1,30 X 1,50 cm created from hundreds of selected cutted and selected pieces from Latin American maritime sea front atlases and maps. Referring to the suyu whipala structure each module will be cutted in 7×7 cm and join together manually. Designed with a stepped pattern inspired from the sacred ruins and old scaffold textiles used in the Andean cultures; this work seeks to rescue an ancestral ritual of gratitude to water as a vital element for humanity.

Working with the geopolitical concept of displacement, Swinburn weaves pages of historical archives, aiming to strengthen the integration between various communities from the Global South in making reference to female resilience.

Having operated as both cloak or armour – depending on the viewer’s interpretation – this piece also contains dual significance in its final form, given the piece was previously worn by the artist in a performance and later boxed and displayed as a sculpture. The artwork is therefore activated by the artist’s position as both fabricator and performer of the sculpture. This could be seen as a metaphor for resistance, where woven narratives are portrayed as a substitute for the silence of women throughout history.

Lastly, it is important to remember that Swinburn’s sensational sculptures are produced by intricately weaving pages of texts together into constructed robust structures. Through this labour intensive approach, the material transforms from delicate pages of books to garment-like arrangements that the artist then wears as a cloak to perform in, as such her works undergo an important process of transformation and recycling.

The recycling aspect in this work happens through many dimensions: content, form and process. Following her performances, the works become sculptures with a history of their own and result in an amalgamation of history and memory. Regenerating these narratives articulates for the artist both a sense of urgency and a mode of resistance.

Latin America and the Caribbean is a region with great marine heritage. Twenty-three of the 33 LAC nations have more marine than terrestrial territory. Of these, for 18 the maritime area of its economic exclusive zone exceeds 75% of total territory.

The importance of oceans to livelihoods and food security of Latin America and the Caribbean people must catalyse our action towards blue sustainable development with oceans playing a source of potential solutions and innovation.
Our coasts, seas and oceans have generally been invisible in many critical areas. A significant data gap exists between land and ocean based natural processes and economic impacts.

Over 3 billion people worldwide depend on coastal and marine ecosystems for making a living, recognizing that oceans are home of more than one million known species and acknowledging that oceans are our planet’s life support and regulate the global climate system.

The LAC region is considered one of the most important productive areas of the world, with a unique marine biodiversity, home of the second largest barrier reef of the world. LAC has a uniquely productive marine area and represents a significant portion of global marine biodiversity.

QUILLA

Woven paper investiture, made out of vintage music scores of the national hymns of Latin America. The woven piece is accompanied with music piece and headphones with selected strophes from Latin American Hymns.

150 cm w x 150 cm h x 40 cm depth
Unique
2021

Catalina’s work translate into key messages and universal concerns such as: sustainability, identity, gender equality and globalisation underlining the connections of the Global South throughout history. The use of weave and vintage documents are used by her as a vital and dynamic language for raising awareness both physically and conceptually while aiming to strengthen the integration between various communities from the Global South in making reference to female resilience.

QUILLA belong to a series of new works on paper alluded to emblematic women from the mythological Inca world and their archaic contingency.Mama Quilla was the Inca goddess of the moon and the defender of women. She was also an important goddess to the Inca calendar, which used both lunar and solar calculations.

Textiles are eloquent expressions of women´s concern with cultural tradition and transmutation, and are recognized as fundamental to studies of gender, social identity, status, exchange and modernization. Weave, tends to demarcate a suspension of ordinary existance and are among the most visible signs of sacred space and sacred roles. Textiles have played a prominent role in exchanges between the West and indigeous peoples throuhout the world. There is also an essential correspondence between the realms of agriculture and weaving, an isomorphic relationship. There are profund, conceptual, linguistic and religious connections between them two.

There is a commonly held belief that national anthems have a unique power over people. They are examples of unisonance, which is a situation where people, wholly unknown to one another, utter the same verses to the same melody. This unisonance effectively and efficiently allows “each” person to sing the music of the “whole” nation with “all” other citizens. National anthems are now a single – but powerful – part of national iconography that many of us inherit and which we come to regard as both normal and normative. Music often acts as a unifying factor in social contexts and is often flaunted as being a universalizing phenomenon, it also often serves as a rallying point for expressing personal and group identities.

This work represents the correspondence in symbolic concepts of the sun and moon in cultures of the Central and Southern Andes, such as the Inca, Aymara and Mapuche. The existence of linguistic homologies in the voices designating celestial bodies, and a concordance in social representations of these entities as members of a divine family. The correlation of these semiotic constellations expresses cotraditional traits underpinned by historic cultural relations.

This weaving technique used by the artist allows the delicate material of paper to acquire durability and becomes a robust structure. The weaving is designed with a stepped pattern inspired from the sacred ruins and old scaffold textiles used in the Andean cultures. Referring to the suyu whipala structure each module its cutted and join together manually. This connects the ancestral knowledge and scientific thinking relieving a new poetic line with the ecological movement. Quilla opens a dialogue between conservation and innovation, continuity and transmutation; by combining the local crafts with the global trends; and showing how selected geographies share universal and mutual creative affinities.