Wanessa Cardoso de Sousa

Immigrant narratives

The collaboration between oral history and art practices can contribute to providing minority groups a free space to express themselves. The artists in this section give a platform to Latin (temporary or permanent) immigrants, such as themselves, to share their often silenced stories. By doing so, they document stories that otherwise would be made invisible in a globalized and intense-pace contemporary society. By transforming underprivileged narratives in visual art, they make sure to register these stories for a broader public and future examination while also promoting a sense of community among the participants of the projects.

Carlos Colín

Carlos Colín is a Mexican artist whose artistic and pedagogical approach draws from Latin American, Indigenous history, art, and interdisciplinary studies. His research aims to shed light on contemporary Mexican and Latin American societies through art, culture, and politics.

Little Mexico

In the exhibition entitled Little Mexico, Colín explores the sporadic diaspora of Mexican labourers working in Abbotsford, Canada, through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Canada initially created this program with Jamaica in 1966. It started after farmers from Ontario needed workers to fill the labour demand during the apple harvest season. In 1974, Mexico joined the program, becoming the largest provider of labourers through SAWP across Canada. After selection, the labourers can work in Canada for up to 8 months and then are obliged to return to Mexico. The project explores the Mexican workers' relationships and connections with their families in Mexico, communal life in Abbotsford, and the reality of their economic situation, including work opportunities in Canada and Mexico.

Fernanda Espinosa and Raúl Ayala

Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19)

CC 1/19 is a wandering art and oral history collaboration between Fernanda Espinosa and Raul Ayala. The artists are committed to generating spaces that document and circulate the voices at the margins of colonial grammar. They intervene in spaces through memories born orally and seldom make it to circulation beyond geopolitical, epistemic, ontological, and embodied borders.

Whose Streets

2019
Mixed-media mural
Variable Dimensions

In Whose Streets, Espinosa and Ayala collaborated with the Bushwick garden Know Waste Lands in New York to create a mixed-media mural project featuring community portraits. They gathered oral stories from the neighbourhood to create an installation on the fences that surround the garden. The artists used the knowledge already in the neighbourhood, by asking people living around the garden area – mainly immigrants – questions about how they see themselves in the context of their community. They used these conversations in the creative process for the final installation, with portraits addressing the garden as a community gathering space and focusing on issues such as racial justice, exploitation, displacement, and police violence within Black and brown communities.

(Un)written narratives

The collaboration between oral history and art practice can also be based on (or expressed through) different mediums. At the same time that historical documents can act as a source of discussion regarding social realities, the lack of them can provide proof of neglect – or even erasure of evidence – of important moments in history. The artists in this section discuss past narratives using physical documents with a unique approach. Jonathas de Andrade extracts information from a book published in the 50s to discuss in his artwork the race and social inequality in the past that still is current in the present. Meanwhile, María Verónica San Martín’s book gathers the several missing victims of the Chilean military dictatorship to shed light on their untold stories. Through these works, both artists intervene in historical narratives to open up the topics of relations of domination and racism to public discussion.

Jonathas De Andrade

Jonathas de Andrade is a Brazilian artist who works with installation, photography, and video to address cultural and identity issues by exploring collective memory and historical narratives. De Andrade explores documents, images, texts, and life stories to discuss the blind spots and narratives omitted by social, political, and ideological realities, especially in northeast Brazil. 

Eu, mestiço (Me, mestizo)

In Eu, mestiço (Me, mestizo), de Andrade used as inspiration the book Race and Class in Rural Brazil, published in 1952. The study uses photographs in its research methodology by presenting images of people of various racial backgrounds. The author invites the participants to analyze them according to six attributes: wealth, beauty, intelligence, religiosity, honesty, and aptitude for work. The study considers the participant's responses to establish racial typologies, identify recurrent racist manifestations, and search for possible structural genesis for Brazilian racism.

The book provides a violent picture of racism at that time that remains explicit and constant nowadays, with terms such as fear, cruelty, conflict, aggressive, criminal, and lazy still sometimes associated with people of colour. As the book does not include the original images the author used for this study, de Andrade produced contemporary photographs to approach the text from the 50s, drawing parallels to today. The project travelled to four Brazilian cities, inviting people to go to the studio to take on characters and represent reactions and feelings in front of the camera.

San Martín, María Verónica

María Verónica San Martín is a Chilean printmaker, bookmaker, and performer whose work examines the often silenced violence in Chilean collective memory. Through archival research, she makes public the stories hidden deep in declassified documents from the military dictatorship in Chile. Her books, made into installations, take the form of sculptural memorials, creating spaces of absence, reflection and resistance.

In Their Memory: Human Rights violation in Chile. 1973-1990

2020
Silkscreen, digital print. 
Binding Type: Hand sewn, accordion. 
12.25 in W × 7.5 H × 1.5 D, extend to 50 inches

In Their Memory is a book of resistance that carries forward the protest that families of the disappeared in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973-1990) began. More than forty thousand political prisoners were victims of torture, execution and exile, and 3,550 people remain disappeared. Nameless crosses are all that they have received by way of burial. It is to honour the missing and their families that this book-object seeks to bring to light human rights violations in Chile. By documenting the victims' identities, In Their Memory also invites reflection and puts forth a message of hope founded in truth.

Fictional narratives

Besides telling real-life stories, oral history can also narrate the stories of myths, legends and fictional characters that help to understand a society's culture and heritage. The artists in this section base their art production on collaboration with characters that are their alter egos. Although these artists are not indeed collaborating with others, they find in their practice a way to tell their story through a personal narrative masked by fictional representation. These artists work as a channel of expression for characters that otherwise would not have a voice. They also use these characters to discuss diverse subjects from different viewpoints, whether because these artists desire to address topics from contrasting realities or because of the urgency to express feelings and thoughts they cannot freely express as themselves.

Belkis Ayón Manso

Belkis Ayón Manso was a Cuban printmaker who specialized in collography, an engraving method involving the application of materials to a printing plate rather than engraving its surface. Ayón based her work mainly on Abakuà, an Afro-Cuban secret society with oral traditions restricted only to male initiates. In the foundation story of the Abakuà religion, Sikàn, its only female figure and the artist's alter ego, accidentally catch Tanze, an enchanted fish that conveys power to those who hear its voice. When she took the fish to her father, he warned her to remain silent and never speak of it again. Disobeying her father, Sikàn passes the information to her fiancé, the leader of an enemy tribe. The betrayal culminates in her death by her people. The imposed silence presented in this story, and represented by all of Ayón's mouthless characters, is a significant theme in her work. 

La Cena (Dinner) 

1992 
Collography on paper 
250 × 450 cm

By continuously representing Sikàn in her works, the artist provides a visual form to the Abakuà's oral tradition and a voice to the main antagonist of the Abakuà society. In La Cena (Dinner), which depicts a version of the Christian "Last Supper," Ayón rebels against the patriarchal Abakuà society by highlighting female empowerment with Sikàn replacing Jesus and other women figures taking the place of the apostles.

Fernando Rodriguez

Fernando Rodriguez is a Cuban artist who works with sculptures, drawings, short films, and posters. He considers himself a collaborative artist. His partner and muse is a fictional character he invented named Francisco de la Cal, after a project he did with a group of blind people in the province of Matanzas, Cuba. Francisco de la Cal is an elderly rural charcoal maker and self-taught artist. The labour with charcoal resulted in his going blind in the first years of the Cuban Revolution. De la Cal is Rodriguez's alter ego. While the artist acts as de la Cal's instrument to keep practising his art, Rodriguez also talks about human relations issues through the character. 

En el calor de la mano (In the warmth of my hand) 

1993 
Mixed media, polychrome wood 
300 × 30 cm

In In the warmth of my hand, Rodriguez reproduces de la Cal's speech precisely as the latter requests. This work introduces the other pieces of this art project in collaboration with de la Cal. In the speech bubble, it reads (en español abajo): 

We all look for a hand that protects us, gives us affection, warmth, tranquillity, and peace so we can live and offer ours to the one who gave us everything because to receive, you have to give. I found that warmth in the hands of the saints, and they received it from mine. Fernando, this idea, I want it carved in wood in the form of a series entitled "In the warmth of the hand."

Todos buscamos una mano que nos proteja, nos dé cariño, calor, tranquilidad y paz para poder vivir y ofrecerte la nuestra a ese que nos lo dio todo, porque para recibir, hay que dar. Yo encontré ese calor en las manos de los santos y ellos recibieron el de las mías. Fernando esta idea, yo quiero que se haga tallada en madera en forma de serie y que se titule 'En el calor de la mano'.

Fernando Rodriguez (in Spanish)

Collaboration narratives

In the aforementioned artworks, the artists developed their art practices after hearing narratives told directly or indirectly to them. In contrast to those artists, the ones in this section conceived their artworks by adopting their own experiences as inspiration. Although contact with the public comes only after the piece's creation, this direct interaction is vital for the existence of the art object as a whole.

Hélio Oiticia and Lygia Clark give the spectators interacting with their works of art a platform to express themselves. In this collaboration between art and people, the voice is not necessarily the medium through which the public – now protagonists and main agents in the artwork – chose to communicate. While in contact with these objects, the public/artist uses gestures, touch, movements, and dance as predominant ways to articulate their feelings, thoughts, and desires. After the contact, conversations initiate between the participants regarding their experiences. In this matter, the artwork sparks dialogues that will vary in content, conforming to each participant's life background, thus always culminating in a unique sharing of experience between art and the public.

Lygia Clark

Lygia Clark was a Brazilian artist who specialized in painting and installation works. From 1960, Clark discovered ways for viewers (participants) to interact with her artworks. Clark's work dealt with the relationship between inside and outside and, ultimately, between self and world.

Canibalismo (Cannibalism)

1973 
Participatory performance with Clark’s Students, Sorbonne

In Cannibalism, Clark creates a collective and embodied therapy art piece in which there is no division between viewer and participant, emphasizing nonverbal communication. Clark developed this work while teaching Gesture Communication at the Sorbonne. In this participatory performance, a person lies on the floor dressed in a fabric-lined overall with a pouch full of fruit over their stomach. The other participants, blindfolded and communicating through touch alone, sought to find and eat the fruit from the pouch.

References

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Rodrigues da Silva, Renato. “O Parangolé do Hélio Oiticica e a arte da transgressão.” Revista Concinnitas 1, no. 32 (Aug 2018): 287 - 320.

Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, painter, and performance artist. He is best known for what he later termed "environmental art," which included Parangolés (Capes). In 1964, Oiticica started to attend the Samba School Estação Primeira de Mangueira. From this experience, he deepened his reflections on aesthetic experiences beyond the fine arts, incorporating body and sensory elements, popular and vernacular, into his work, through dance, choreography, music, rhythm, and body. It was at this crucial moment that Oiticica began to produce the Parangolés.

Parangolé capa 11 - Incorporo a revolta (Cape 11 – I embody revolt)

1967

The origin of the word, parangolé comes from slang that means "language of evildoers, rogues, etc., with which they try not to be understood by other people" (Freire). The Parangolés are layers of fabric, plastic, and matting, sometimes with political or poetic phrases, intended to be worn like costumes but experienced as mobile sculptures. By dressing, running or dancing with a Parangolé, the person stops being a spectator and becomes a participant in creative activity. In this work, the artist ceases to be the creator of objects for passive contemplation and becomes a supporter of creation by the public.