Title: El Camino de las Trenzas
Curators: Lucia Warck Meister
Artists: Graciela Cassel, Julia Justo, Josefina Moran, Patricia Espinosa, Manuela Arnal, Lucia Warck Meister
Gallery: Abrazo Interno Gallery
Dates: April 8 th - May 14 th, 2022
Opening Reception: April 8th 5 - 8 pm
Braids are in Latin America a symbol of identity and resistance. In our cultures, the tradition of braiding hair is passed from mothers to daughters. The braiding moment is at the same time a space for oral narration.
In this project, the memories, stories, and tales of ancestral women who built the lives of so many others are intertwined. The curatorial line of this exhibition underlines the importance of building a collective memory without omissions that distort who we are and who we can become.
Through memory, the participating artists explore concepts of identity, gender, transmission, visibility, and migration.
Who we are is contingent in large part on what we remember and how we use those memories to formulate and build new narratives.
At a time when it is imperative to rethink the colonialist structures with which we have lived, The road of braids / El camino de las trenzas reveals the different routes of migration, not only physical but also social and emotional.
The objects, photographs, installations, and video in this exhibition do not tell just one single story. On the contrary, they can be made to talk about various issues. It is how we look at them and the questions we ask them that give them meaning.
About the artists:
Graciela Cassel resides in New York, but her identity is bound in the constant passage between her native country and the one in which she lives. The movement and the route of her migration are explored in her work – an authentic demonstration of a visual constellation acknowledged as a “hinged” identity, closing and opening to a cultural space that is her own and in which the artist finds inspiration.
Julia Justo uses strategies drawn from the fields of education, research and community activism, inviting participation and collective imagining. Her interdisciplinary work relies on history, biography and Indigenous knowledge exploring the intersection of memory, community and storytelling.
Josefina Fernandez Moran explores the transition that teenage girls go through. She aims to capture their identity, and in the time they spend together Josefina wants them to feel as comfortable and open as they can in front of the camera. Her subjects are photographed at home to create an intimate and complete portrait of who they are.
Manuela Arnal’s visual research on the theme of memory and identity began with the photographic record of bundles found on the streets of her hometown, La Paz - Bolivia. Her work is materially concentrated in tarp. Manuela uses tarp for its versatility. She undoes the
fabric, transforms it, knits it again, builds objects. She uses only the white cloth. White is like memory, a clean slate waiting to be written, with the possibility to contain everything and at the same time also lose all certainty in nothingness.
In her present work Patricia Espinosa uses Dandelions as a universal symbol of hope. Who hasn’t made a wish while blowing their puffy ball full of seeds? Whilst dandelions announce the return of life, the reborn and growth that come with Springtime, they are also regarded as rebellious and untamed flowers due to their natural way of wildly dispersing seeds. Fragile and beautiful, yet resilient and often called mala hierba, Spanish for bad weed.
Through porcelain magnolias, braids and knots, malleability and rigidity, Lucia Warck Meister leads us to reflect on what we remember and how we remember. Lucia explores the different instances of memory that make up the material with which we build a protective space that we call identity.