Claudia Casarino & Claudia Coca

Mala Hierba / Yerba Mala

Two proposals converge to disrupt categories, rescue memories and release glances

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The space of this exhibition has two sections: one occupied with the works of Claudia Casarino; the other, with montages by Claudia Coca. They are linked by their names and other coincidences; their works cross at intersections framed by decolonial thinking and, therefore, the critique of patriarchal and racializing logocentrism. However briefly and intensely, they do coincide in the American botanical iconography of the chroniclers of the 18th and 19th centuries and assumed as the starting point leading to the cited political, micropolitical position. 

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Claudia Casarino brings two ideas. The first confronts cotton shirts with silkscreen images of yerba mate plants. The shirts are made using the ao po’i technique, the lightweight cotton fabric that has crossed the textile culture of Paraguay since pre-colonial times. The shirts and prints are stained, marked, with red earth from the Alto Paraná dissolved in water. An indelible painting. Ancient Guaranis said that the red of that soil comes from the indigenous blood shed during the violent conquest of their territories. But that color could also come, and this is what Claudia suggests, could be poured by the mensú, the yerba mate collectors who, in the same region, gathered yerba mate leaves under extreme conditions of exploitation. Conditions typical of a slave regime that caused bodily harm and, often, death.

The artist is based on a case exposed by Rafael Barret, El dolor paraguayo (the Paraguayan pain). The mensú did not have any goods other than their own shirts: they treasured them so much that, rather than destroying them, they sometimes preferred to expose their backs and leave them on to be worn out, as they would be ripped anyways by the enormous load they carried. Mensú shirts were worn backwards, so as to cover the chest and leave open the back. The garments exhibited by Claudia Casarino bear earthy, bloody traces of other shirts that seek to replace the part left open in the back. They intend to reverse the tragedy of the doomed spine.

Art has the possibility of bringing an unfortunate event from memory back to the present in order to face it in the future by assigning it new purposes; it comes back to a nightly moment that has already happened to imagine what could have happened or what could happen if that moment had had another sign. This dimension possibility opens the space of memory to desire and keeps it available for political action and ethical commitment. This the idea of "redemption" of the past in Benjamin that allows us to detect new powers of creation in a time that has already elapsed. Casarino invokes memory seeking to twist the fate of Paraguayan pain, to neutralize the torment of yerba mate. She knows that art can go back over time and imaginatively alter its darkest figures, but she also knows that any act of historical redemption cannot avoid the indelible vestige of trauma. Even replaced on their back with the image of other clothes and even exposed to different gazes, the shirts retain the stigma or the insignia of the red earth.

The second work presented by the artist, a video, loops a sheet shredding device. In this case, the shredded papers bear reproductions of engravings referring to French and English gardens, the iconic models of European gardening nourished by colonial dominions. The plants from exotic landscapes were forced to adapt to cold climates: they were tamed; submitted to a greenhouse discipline, collections and artificial scenes; reduced to scientific categories that changed their names and forgot their features.

The artist makes out of this transplant a metaphor for the uprooting of conquered peoples: of the violent practice that uproots men and women from their environments and landscapes and turn them into exploited and persecuted illegal immigrants, forced to adapt to hostile worlds or to be expelled again now from the same countries that had took their original lands. Even in their own territories, the mensú were also separated from their way of inhabiting them. 

Crushing the representation of spurious landscapes marks a magical propitiatory gesture: the image turns on itself to reorder the memory. Through this event, she cannot change what happened, but she can intensely desire and imagine other regimes of coexistence, other ways of inhabiting our tired planet.

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Claudia Coca also works on the image of botanical gardens; it reveals them inasmuch as they replicate the predatory and discriminatory mechanism of colonial domination and insofar as they activate classifying regimes that allow fixed places to be assigned. Botanical collections, as well as those of archaeological, ethnographic and anthropolitical museums, conceived in a western key, mobilize large systems to collect, classify and display fragments of remote natures and cultures, conquered and dominated, first, hegemonized later; maybe again dominated today.

Claudia searches for traces of her own writing, reversing the sense of naturalistic drawing to draw specimens of South American plants in pencil in an operation that mocks the naturalistic record of scientific taxonomies. The native plants of the “New Continent” are re-recorded in other registries, in other climates; cultivated in different soils and atmospheres, aestheticized and removed from a context not only natural, but also sociocultural, historical, political. They are disinfected from history (from dust, dirt, blood) like as it occurs with the pieces exhibited with elaborate innocence in natural science or anthropology museums where the interesting, beautiful, exotic object is detached from the violence entailed in every act of looting.

The colonial system continues renewing its profiles and strategies: the contemporary capitalism, under its neoliberal and financial modality, arrogates, through new technologies and arguments, both the natural resources and the workforce as well as the subjectivities, the creative drive, the desire and other-knowledges aimed at the accumulation of capital (economic, artistic, scientific, cognitive). The seizure of natural resources and the exploitation of the labor force are today increased by the capture of the vital force that, in Suely Rolnik's terms, constricts the scope of subjectivity, diverts the ethical destiny of the drive and prevents the emergence of virtual worlds.

Far from being based on literal denunciation, Claudia Coca's decolonial critique acts in the art field: the regime of representation. It alters the beautiful and meticulous image of the botanical specimens; she fragments paintings of traveling chroniclers from the West, copying and separating them into small, veristic, pretentiously academicist segments: fruit miniatures of the exotic land. This segmentation, linked at some point with the crushing of landscapes raised with the proceeds of looting (work by Claudia Casarino), discusses the "scientific" cataloging systems of plants and people based on logical-metaphysical criteria and, therefore, in inviolable taxonomies. The replicas of paintings are sectioned and reduced in the form of a cabinet of curiosities; but they are also arranged in installations that reaccommodates the parts into new, unstable, off-center, topologically arranged sets. This gesture has a strong political sense: it seeks to dislocate the system of logocentric representation and subvert its hierarchical scales and its authoritarian sense. In the chroniclers' paintings, the images of indigenous people are equated with those of plants, and not as biodiverse components of the same living complex, but as natural resources ready for profitable extraction and exploitation.

Claudia Coca's installations intent to upset the destiny of a commodity, of service, attributed to organic forces to open them up to the impulses of desire and creation: to the affirmation drives of vital power. Art raises scenes imaginatively rearranging the pieces of the established order. This task implies contingent but open positions to suggest other ways, always provisional, of perceiving, organizing and narrating the diversity of the world.

The video Carabela links, in a deliberately obscure way, images and texts from different fields. The work focuses on the haunting figure of the ‘aguaviva’, a false jellyfish or caravel, a colony formed by five associates whose interaction keeps it alive. Its appearance is similar to the boat that keeps its name; its poisonous touch makes it fearsome in sea waters.

The properties of this strange hybrid undoubtedly intervene in the connotations caused by the work: the caravel is a colonial, predatory organism whose appearance and name are associated with the European conquest. But it is also an unclassifiable entity, slippery with schemes, halfway between different natural kingdoms. These notes correspond in part to the features of the image, always restless between opposite shores, avoiding being pigeonholed. The images of the sea and the caravel are framed by texts in this work; fragments of Columbus's diary. In Carabela this document, by others spread and idealized, is disarmed and rearmed (disassembled and reassembled, in the words of Didi-Huberman). Columbus had begun by admiring the wonders of the New World and pondering the virtues of its inhabitants, and as he detected the pecuniary potential of both, he changed his perception until he ended up considering them pure sources of profit. And that change in the look made the gifts of the earth become extractable resources and the inhabitants, subjugated beings: enemies, despicable subjects better to be exploited. 

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Art is a fabricator device of associations: it can draw diagrams between one figure and any other: between disparate points associated by fortune and cravings. A complete form is one that, in specific space and time, even temporarily, makes these hazards necessary and holds firm lines between the connected terms: contingent, but secure. For this reason, an exhibition does not need to account for the reasons that lead to drawing a scheme, justifiable only after its own stroke. An ephemeral, topological layout, scattered in its references and plural by its directions. 

Once Claudia Casarino and Claudia Coca decide to cross their images, the unstable truth of the cross is built in a unique situation, in a specific space and through a tight concept. Concept deferred in relation to the moment of the act; anticipated as soon as it can announce possible times against the dark background of a history so many times unfortunate.

Ticio Escobar

Asunción, October 2020.