Carolina Caycedo's Cosmotarrayas and the Spirit of the River, An Art Review by Max Gruber
Carolina Caycedo's Cosmotarrayas and the Spirit of the River
Max Gruber
Corralled into a small gallery at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, ominous, netted figures hover in place. Each hang gracefully from the high ceiling giving off a uniform air of quiet contemplation. And yet, features such as fins, eyes, earrings, and gnarled branches approximating the forms of webbed feet distinguish each piece from the next. While some feature a stark gradient between dyed black and white netting, others feature a polyphony of intertwined reds and yellows, blues and greens. Still others are draped in ornate fabrics while a slender, brown net with an avian silhouette is punctuated by yellow and blue ribbons. Visually, they are compelling and robust, inviting viewers to look closer and dissect their various components. But because they were conceived as part of a socially-engaged art project, these sculptures should be evaluated equally in terms of how these components contribute to the project’s narrative and issue area. More than just conveying a message, however, the successful artwork should allow viewers to view these issues through new conceptual frameworks.
At first glance, the sculptures form an eclectic array of discrete objects. Instead, they perform nine variations on a single story: that of humankind’s arrogant conquest of rivers and of life itself. These are not sculptures but a form of fishing net known as an atarraya. Carolina Caycedo’s Cosmotarrayas embody the struggle of river communities against the construction of hydroelectric dams. Within the artist’s ongoing project Be Damned, each Cosmotarraya represents a people locked in a push and pull between a supposed progress and their own annihilation. More than just a people, however, the Cosmotarraya embodies the spirit of the river itself. With some of these spirits sporting mirrors or anthropomorphic features such as eyes bored into the bottom of an oar, Caycedo creates an environment in which the viewer cannot help but feel watched, confronted with the uncomfortable scrutiny of something far older and bigger than themselves. And yet, for all their collective pain, Caycedo demonstrates the power of dialogical and socially-engaged art to articulate a form of radical joy, one that dares to revel in life and tradition despite the ominous drumbeat sounded by neoliberal extractivism and its march of progress.
To create a Cosmotarraya, Caycedo must first blend into the background. On visits to river communities in the United States and Latin America, Caycedo creates friendships and learns from those living and working under the specter of the ecological devastation which accompanies the construction of dams (1). After collecting stories, objects, and notes from each location, the artist works with members of the community to create an atarraya that speaks to their experiences. While the degree of collaboration may vary with each piece, the tenor of the Cosmotarraya strikes a melancholic balance between an acknowledgement of loss and anger and an enunciation of hope and joy.
Upon entering, viewers are met with Cosmotarrafa Ver-o-peso, created after the artist’s trip to Belém, Brazil. The atarraya takes the shape of two spinning tops stacked on each other, the widest part of each containing a piece of embroidery from a woman named Iris who lost her home to the destruction of the Mariana dam disaster. In 2015, the collapse of Fundão tailings dam led to the contamination of Brazilian Doce River basin through toxic mudflow (2). The bottom of the atarraya references this through a bunched-up rope dyed in a sinister gradient leading downwards from black to crimson. Above the rope, the embroidery reads, “My eyes cry… tears? Of dirt.” And yet, the piece begins to unburden itself from the physical, almost overwhelming pain conveyed in the bottom with the top-most embroidery’s firm declaration: “I want to transform my pain into a flower garden… my sorrow into joy and beauty.” (Fig. 1)
Figure 1. Carolina Caycedo, Cosmotarrafa Ver-o-peso (detail), 2016.
Each Cosmotarraya is an attempted transformation of this pain into a sort of flower garden. Both Nuestro Tiempo/Our Time and Limen include flower arrangements maintained and replaced by gallery attendants. In Limen, the tricolor flower arrangement is mirrored in its canopy of three conical nets, each appearing to cascade over the next. The visual dissonance of this overlapping is heightened by the superimposition of differently dyed nets as well as an optical illusion where the third net is fastened to the base of the second. Just as the atarraya withholds colors and forms at first glance, the rivers they represent invisibly bind each facet of the ecosystem together in a delicate equilibrium.
Despite the fragility of the Cosmotarraya and the ecological relationships it represents, Caycedo positions her sculptures as a combative presence against the forces of extractivism. The most confrontational of these is To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura, 2017. Here, the atarraya forms a wide umbrella which viewers may duck under, navigating through the sculpture itself in order to get a view of a string of sauce containers, jugs, medicines, and bottles of liquor. This macabre sequence of “potions” created by Caycedo sees a series of banknotes from nations across the globe mingling with dark liquids, black beans, paper, chili papers, and even human hair. The presence of imperialism is as palpable in the selection of the banknotes (bills from United States, Portugal, and Australia juxtapose those of Congo, the Philippines, and Vietnam) as it is in the title itself, as each of the historically charged elements of the atarraya is engaged in this warding off the “whiteness” which signals both racial and ethnic imperialism as well as the homogeneity and erasure which accompany it. (Fig. 2)
Figure 2. Carolina Caycedo, To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura (detail), 2017.
Caycedo’s global address in To Drive Away Whiteness stands in contrast to the geographic specificity of most of the atarrayas. Many aspects of Caycedo’s Be Damned project are focused on the neoliberal policies which have led to the contemporary struggle for water and land rights in Latin America. However, the sculptures Undammed/Desbloqueada and Flying Massachusett incorporate objects from North America as well. Undammed/Desbloqueada plays with the language and scale associated with dams. While elements such as a gold pan and navajo sandstone invoke the American West, Caycedo’s incorporation of her former intrauterine device adds an arrestingly personal component to the piece. Caycedo understands this action as a decolonization of her own body; an indictment not of women who use IUDs, but of the monopolization of birth control by western biomedicine at the expense of traditional forms of knowledge and community care (3). Flying Massachusett, on the other hand, dialogues with the violent, colonial history of Boston itself. By taking shells and stones from Boston Harbor, the Blue Hills Reservation, and the Neponset River, Caycedo removes the viewer from any veuristic notion of this destruction as an exclusively Latin American phenomenon (4). Instead, Flying Massachusett is an acknowledgement of indigenous land, customs, and environmental stewardship and a grim reminder of a violence perceived as so far removed from the lives and experience of most Americans as to make it practically invisible. (Fig. 3)
Figure 3. Carolina Caycedo, Flying Massachusett (detail), 2020.
The atarraya itself is a tragic object. The fishing communities which traditionally wielded these ancestral tools now find themselves unable to sustain themselves. As dams obliterate the surrounding landscape, the atarraya has become a symbol more than a functional tool, a symbol of resistance in the face of state-sponsored cultural annihilation. Be Damned has seen Caycedo and collaborators from Colombian activist group “Ríos Vivos” perform a number of interventions in the gallery space and in river communities, many of which incorporate thrown atarrayas along with spoken word poetry, manifestos, and the enumeration of activists, indigenous leaders, and rural workers who have been killed or gone missing as a result of their opposition (5). While today’s reality prevents similar actions from taking place at the ICA, Caycedo’s Cosmotarrayas carry with them the weight, the pain, and even the radical joy which may accompany these performances.
This duality of human potential, of nature and destruction, of joy and despair, is most present in Osún. A representation and offering to the titular Yoruba river deity, Caycedo’s Cosmotarraya invites viewers to consider both sides of their humanity. Osún herself is depicted holding two tails, an indicator of two separate bodies of water alongside a declaration reading, “Living Rivers, Free People” (Ríos Vivos, the same name as the Colombian activist group). Caycedo suggests that our freedom lies not in the extraction of resources and dominion over the elements, but rather in our acknowledgement of the life which we coexist with in these spaces. The most overt statement in Osún, however, is not a piece of writing or cultural symbolism, but the mirror located in the center of the piece. A typical accessory for the deity, its presence in Caycedo’s sculpture is a powerful reminder that the battle over the earth is one which rages on in ourselves too. The mirror’s size and location make our own image inescapable. For Caycedo, this is an important statement about individual agency. While so many of her sculptures and performances level sharp criticism at neoliberal extractivist policies, corruption, and the armed conflict surrounding these bodies of water, the mirror in Osún reminds the viewer of their role in a tableau which may appear too abstract, complex, or distant to take part in. Here, Caycedo creates a space in which both systems and individual actors are accountable to the Cosmotarrayas. (Fig. 4)
Figure 4. Carolina Caycedo, Osún (detail), 2018.
The most successful, socially-engaged art instills viewers with a new and more expansive understanding of the issues of our day. Through interventions or creative visual techniques, artists may form connections between the public and their issue areas by creating new and richly imagined possibilities for the future. With her exhibition Cosmotarrayas, Carolina Caycedo accomplishes both of these objectives. Her sculptures draw viewers in with their vibrant color and form. Then, they keep them rooted in the gallery as a history of exploitation and resistance, pain and joy play out in front of them. Caycedo takes a panoramic aim at specific stories of extraction and historical motifs of imperialism without getting bogged down in academicism or losing sight of her objectives. Each Cosmotarraya tells a story of pain and loss, but also of potential renewal. Each is a chapter in an unfolding story, a story in which trauma and loss do not preclude the possibility of a triumphant future.
1. Caycedo, Carolina and Jeffrey De Blois. “The River as a Common Good: Carolina Caycedo’s Cosmotarrayas.” Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. https://www.icaboston.org/publications/river-common-good-carolina-caycedos-cosmotarrayas
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
Max Gruber is a recent graduate of Swarthmore College where he focused on global contemporary and Latin American contemporary art. His published writings have included pieces on contemporary art criticism, history and visual culture, and socially-engaged art.