Image credits: Aimeé Suárez Nezahualcóyotl

La Nao
Mexico City 
2021

Proyecto Caimán
Guadalajara
2022

Artists:
Eunice Adorno
Sandra Calvo
Virginia Colwell
Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Ana Hernández
Teresa Margolles
Marge Monko
Nuria Montiel
Chantal Peñalosa
Rafaela Tellaeche

Catalog
Gallery texts and labels 
Press:
Reforma

Onda MX
MSSA


El universo se encogió en madejas fantasmales


The universe shrank into ghostly skeins is inspired by the vast number of cultural products created throughout the late twentieth and twenty-first century in which artists, activists, and citizens alike have turned to weaving, stitching, embroidering, sewing and other textile-related practices to evidence the painful collapse of the political, economic, and social systems that dominate the current circumstances of the world. Given their common association to female or indigenous expressions, these practices have often been branded as primal, pre-linguistic, and even infantile forms of engaging with reality — hence, they are denied the possibility to participate in the larger configuration of the world. Concerned by said matter, this exhibition gathers artworks in different media and documentation derived from social movements, where the practices mentioned above are conceived as vehicles for the political and historical enunciation of subaltern subjects.

Some of the most poignant examples of this stance may be found in South America during the 1970s and 1980s, at the time of the military dictatorships’ rule. Following the disappearance of thousands of people, women recurred to their domestic role as mothers, wives, and sisters and became a pivotal force of resistance against the regime’s brutality. In Argentina, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a self-organized group of mothers, devised different creative strategies that allowed them to protest while avoiding being taken captive themselves. For example, they embroidered the names of their missing relatives on white veils –along with their dates of disappearance and slogans such as “aparición con vida” (appearance with life)– and wore them publicly. During years, they gathered in court, outside of tribunals, and in public plazas wearing those veils as a reminder of the spectral existence of their children. In Chile, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet produced an even more intense climate of repression, and women recurred in turn to activities that could happen within the private realm. As small parishes offered a secure space, working-class women who gathered in them were able to talk to someone and cook together. Also, they alleviated their pain by sewing scenes in appliqué that could not be told otherwise: famine, assassinations, disappearances, torture. If first a therapeutical outlet, these clothes, arpilleras, became tools for international public denunciation when discovered abroad, as they were smuggled into other countries to be sold as folk art.

These examples bring to the fore the concept of mētis, which largely informs the exhibition. A mythical form of wisdom or craft in ancient greek culture, as reinterpreted by anthropologist James C. Scott, mētis is the use of empirical, practical and local knowledges, along with folk skills, to solve problems that, in Scott’s view, are rapidly destroyed by bureaucratic capitalism and replaced by standardized processes. The term is chiefly applied to State operations (v.g. urban design) that often fail to achieve their purposes. In this exhibition, most of the works have been created disregarding originality and artistic mastery. In contrast, following the State’s neglect and indifference, their existence is triggered by the urge to take matters into their own hands. The universe shrank into ghostly skeins offers then a fragmented and selective geopolitical itinerary in which various modes of counter-production are assembled. Drawing from the term counterculture and its mission to challenge the status-quo, counter-production posits that cultural production can oppose both industrial production and the forms and principles under which value is assigned to artistic production. Cultural objects can certainly undermine historical narratives upheld by oppressive entities, however, it is necessary to rethink their role in constructing said structures and the artists’ assigned function within this ecosystem.

The attempts enacted by these works to destabilize the cultural hegemony imposed by dominant narratives are influenced to a certain degree by the rise of new research disciplines and methodologies: post-colonial studies, queer theory, feminist theory, the critique of ethnography, amongst others. However, the exhibition is at several removes from practices that posit themselves as activist ones (for example, craftivism) and instead seeks to propitiate new ways to think about how history is produced. By highlighting the durational nature of ordinary and domestic activities like weaving, stitching and embroidering, it avows for the socialization of historical events rather than proposing isolated and immediate experiences. 

In the hands of the featured artists, the potentiality of these practices to become vessels of emancipatory politics is inquired as they are transformed into powerful allies to imagine, trace, project, and demand a different world. By taking the viewer along several coordinates, The universe shrank into ghostly skeins tackles issues related to labour, housing, women’s rights, and political violence from the lens of those who have traditionally been considered subaltern subjects. Hopefully, an incomplete archive where politics and poetics converge will be unraveled, a fragmented and selective compendium of the neoliberal condition’s collapse.