Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art

Marcela Guerrero: My name is Marcela Guerrero. I curated this exhibition.

Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art is a group exhibition of seven young, emerging Latinx artists who are inspired by notions and concepts of space and architecture coming from indigenous cultures in the Americas.

The cultures that these artists are looking towards are not pre-Columbian, in the strict sense of the word, in terms that they're not frozen in time. They're not dead cultures, they're still very much alive. With this exhibition, I wanted to make a nod to the conversation, especially in the U.S., that we're a very varied, heterogeneous group, which also includes indigenous populations that are still very much alive, and with their own languages, and cultures, and traditions in countries throughout the Americas, but also in the U.S.

Clarissa Tossin: Hi, my name is Clarissa Tossin.
 
This series of sculptures, The Mayan, is based on the interior design of the Mayan Theater, in Downtown Los Angeles.
 
I rubbed layers of silicon on sections of the walls and doors, and some other interior design details of the Mayan Theater and then peeled it out. I combined them with some hand gestures and feet positions that are based on ancient Mayan pottery and murals where dancers, or performers, or ceremonies are being depicted.
 
The Mayan Theater is a building that is really rich, in the way it used specific archaeological sites and mythological figures into its interior design. Part of my work was to find the original sources. Because it's really the combination of three archaeological sites, but made into a Theater.
 
In this series of sculptures I wanted to make the building dance, or to make the building embody some physical bodily qualities. That's why the imprints of the building are made out of silicon. It’s this really soft and drape-y material that speaks more to the body than the rigidity of walls and architectural structure.
 
It was an interest in architecture and the relationship with Mesoamerican and Mayan templar structure, and how it was recreated, reformulated, and how it became a historical movie theater in a city that today has big part of the population who is Mayan. I'm not sure how aware they are of these buildings. My question was, what does it mean to have these spaces as landmarks and historical buildings, and how they relate to the cultural fabric of that city today? It was interesting to do this archaeology of the present.
 
The work doesn't try to make a claim that it's closer to the Mayan culture than the building ever was—that it's acknowledging that the history of The Hollyhock House needs to be revisited and acknowledged.

Ronny Quevedo: My name is Ronny Quevedo.

My interest in games started through going to indoor soccer leagues in New York City. The majority of them were coordinated and held by migrant workers here in the city from South America and Central America.

Narrator: Mixing materials like contact paper and gold leaf, Quevedo creates overlays of modern and ancient gaming fields.

Ronny Quevedo: Over the years, I've become interested on how the field becomes a place of communal exchange, a place of competition, but also a place of cultural pride. I've been looking at fields of play in the pre-Columbian era.

A lot of the information behind them is deduced, a lot of it is taken from other manuscripts or different things that exist, because a lot of that information is lost. My interest in that space, in the space that I came across as a child, is really about looking for your point of origin, really thinking about heritage in this very malleable way, and looking at ancestry in this really abstract way that is not fixated on one sole position of generation, or one sole position of tradition or even worship.

Narrator: In the sculpture Ulama, Ule, Olé, Quevedo repurposes milk crates.

Ronny Quevedo: My use of milk crates stems from looking at an urban landscape and materials that have been appropriated for multiple uses.

I use the milk crate, in this case, as a hoop the way it would be used in a basketball game by incorporating it into a hoop that would be used for pre-Columbian game. So, the conflation of time is really interesting to me, in which something very, very modern, plastic, can also work well with something that's pre-Columbian. For me, I'm really interested in how both landscapes of an urban space and a ruin can exist at one time.

Guadalupe Maravilla: I recently changed my name to Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly Irving Morazan, to show solidarity to my undocumented father, who uses Maravilla in his last name in his fake identity. As a child, I migrated alone into the United States from El Salvador escaping the civil war, and was undocumented until I became a U.S. citizen as an adult.

The foundation of my drawings are maps from the sixteenth century manuscript Historia Tolteca Chichimeca, originally written in Nahuatl, in Mexico. What interests me in the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca manuscript was that I started marking my original migration route when I crossed the U.S.-Mexico border as a child.

The manuscripts map an area that I crossed in my two-month journey to the United States.

The original manuscripts are drawn by a Catholic priest in the indigenous style of drawing of that time.

Those drawings illustrate crossing routes, rivers, rituals, their connection to plant medicine and the colonization, among many things associated with the indigenous daily life of that time. My process consists of altering actual symbols and motifs of the original maps to compose new maps digitally. The next step is to play the childhood game tripa chuca with pencil or marker on top of the newly printed maps with someone who is undocumented to create abstract immigration routes.

Tripa chuca is a number and lines game that I used to play as a child in El Salvador. The result resembles an abstract fingerprint or a line map, shapes made by two people that share similar experiences of crossing to the lands to become undocumented immigrants in the United States. The participants who play tripa chuca in the drawing are all undocumented. My father participated, a student facing deportation, and a seventy-two-year-old mariachi singer.

Livia Corona Benjamin: The buildings that we see in the photographs are conical shaped, as you can see. They were meant to be grain storage silos. There were 4,500 of them, approximately, all built from a single architectural plan, designed by late modernist architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

Narrator: The silos were built across Mexico to be used by collectives of independent farmers. After the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, industrial agriculture practices from the North devastated these small farming communities. The majority of the silos fell into disuse—and to date stand empty. They are located in once-thriving rural areas now abandoned by laborers who’ve migrated north in search of work. Take a look at the diagrams underneath the large black-and-white photographs. These consider the challenges of reanimating infrastructure and architecture when there is very little community or economy to support it. The photographs also suggest the passage of time and shifts in power.

Livia Corona Benjamin: The photos allude to the aesthetic choice of printing in black and white silver gelatin prints, using techniques that are no longer common—it's a stubborn choice at this point. There's something about the way in which they appear that deliberately accentuates an era that has gone by. It plays too with the early twentieth century way of documenting pre-Hispanic ruins in situ.

It brings one to imagine these buildings to be of a bygone era, where the governmental support for these communities was eliminated to make way for a new type of colonization—in this case, colonization from north to south, rather than from Europe to the Americas.

Jorge González:  I’m Jorge González, a Puerto Rican artist.

For the exhibition, there's a main attention on a specific fiber, which is cattail. We call it enea. I have been drawn to this material given to artisanal practices in the island, by two different families.

Narrator: One of these families, weaves mats from the enea. The other uses the cattails to make furniture.

Jorge González: Both are traditions that are close to a hundred years of being transmitted from different families, from different generations within the families. I've worked with both families in attaining the knowledge.

There are other recognitions among the work that I am conscious of. How this mat, also, organizes itself within design proposals in Puerto Rico by modernist architects that arrive to the island with a conscious of working with our climatic context.

Narrator: In this installation, González explores the ways Puerto Rico’s craft traditions connect the island to its indigenous past. He has also included prints of petroglyphs left by the Taíno, and other pre-Columbian objects.

Jorge González: I am grateful for the people who have paved the way in claiming our being indigenous or the indigenous groups that are in the Antilles. That's how the bridge between modernity and the indigenous has happened in my work, dealing with artisanal traditions and working within the landscape.

Claudia Peña Salinas: Hi, my name is Claudia Peña Salinas.

For maybe about four, five years now, I've been working with these two water deities that come from the Aztec, and it's Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue. They're almost like drawings in space too and the colors that I'm using, they're these yarns that are dyed with colors that associated with the deities. In this case, they would be a bunch of greens and blues.

My way of coming into sculpture is through installation, so everything is always part of each other. So, the main sculpture would be the deity and then from there, all these other things branch off.

Narrator: Today, the sculptures that Salinas based these works on can be found at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Claudia Peña Salinas: I discovered that he'd been brought from a small town two hours away from Mexico City, so I went to the town. All this later became two photographs that will be in the show. One that shows the Tlaloc in the original site, the one that's in front of the Anthropology Museum, and then the other one that's in the town of Coatlinchan which is the replica. I traveled to those places and just used one photograph to be placed in front of the original stone, and then the other ones to inverse that, kind of bring back the original back to the town, if it is only in this way through a photograph.

Marcela Guerrero: When our guests come out to the Whitney terrace, they're going to see a great monumental installation by Peruvian artist william cordova. william was born in Peru but has actually lived in Miami and in the United States for many, many years.

The structure’s titled Huaca Sacred Geometries. The structure is inspired by an Ichma Temple.The Ichma people were a pre-Inca group of people that lived in Peru before the Spanish came.The Huaca is a name for a temple. So, Huaca Huantille is a temple that is located actually nearby were william grew up in the Magdalena del Mar district in Lima.

This temple, for many years it was in disarray and disuse before the government came in and took over it and made it very nice and pretty, and made it a national historic archeological site. But before that, many homeless people took over the Huaca and made it their home. And basically, they created their shelters out of scaffolds. And so, this is kind of paying a tribute to the people who lived there before the government came in and took over.

There are two other elements that are part of the installation. People will see gourds placed in what might seem sporadic or kind of random, but it's actually a reference to maybe an orbit or a constellation of stars.

Narrator: For slaves escaping the southern part of the United States on the Underground Railroad, the “drinking gourd” was code for the Big Dipper—and the path to the North.

Marcela Guerrero: We can see through the gourds and also the stainless steel gate, which is kind of evoking the confluence of many different cultures that are actually also part of the foundation of Peru, incorporating not just indigenous and obviously the Spanish, but also the Afro-Peruvian communities that make-up what Peru is today.