The Landscapes of desire and Oblivion

2021

Reflecting on the repeated colonial strategy of perpetuating ourselves as "barbarians" has been a constant concern for me. Through the image and the word, I have subverted imaginary related to the wild, the ugly, the stained. Reconciliation with our representations, with the body and our geography, as well as the abandonment of colonial thought are the objectives of my work.

The body and memory are conquered territories. Drawing geographies and bodies without limits are a betting for their (re) conquest.

The series Cuentos Bárbaros continues this time from the conquered territories and turned into abject geographies, where the American savage inhabits. A territory won in the imaginary of our societies, where the colonial invention of the Other, the savage, the Indian, keeps installed in Latin American thought.

The idea of ​​the wild takes many forms. Coloniality is re-presented in language, from the narrative to the poetic. A narrative to create abject stories and poetics that sublimates it, become tools with great symbolic power. The image and the ‘seeing’ are also taken; the body, the landscape, the geography, the nature, are assumed as positive concepts, although the idea of ​​the "exotic", the "primitive" is embedded in them, that is, the idea of ​​the savage, the "good savage".

Mala Yerba /Yerba Mala

2020

“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.”

Fragment from the text Claudia Casarino & Claudia Coca of Ticio Escobar, from the exposition Mala Hierba / Yerba Mala in Del Paseo Gallery, Lima.

“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.”

Fragment from the text Claudia Casarino & Claudia Coca of Ticio Escobar, from the exposition Mala Hierba / Yerba Mala in Del Paseo Gallery, Lima.

“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.”

Fragment from the text Claudia Casarino & Claudia Coca of Ticio Escobar, from the exposition Mala Hierba / Yerba Mala in Del Paseo Gallery, Lima.

The Storm

2019

Since 2015, I have been working on the series of drawings Tempestades (Storms), drawings that simulate covers of National Geographic magazine. The magazine, originally edited in North American, approaches scientific, cultural and historical issues; in it, a discourse of the exotic, the wild, the native and the distant is continually constructed and represented in contrast to the West. Although there is much valuable content in his publications, it is undeniable that the images that the magazine disseminates, perpetuate the idea of ​​the marginal and the peripheral; the Other. An anthropological view of that Other as distant, exotic and barbarian.

In order to build modernity, it is necessary to show everything that identifies the barbarian. Exposing that archaic and primitive culture, within the reach of the conquerors and the conquered, is a strategy for hegemonic domination. A kind of modern collection, and by fascicles, of the wild.

In the April 2018 issue, National Geographic admits having a racist discourse for the past 50 years, and its editor in chief, Susan Goldberg, acknowledges in that issue, that the magazine showed representations of the non-white were associated with the exotic and wild.

 The Tempestades series begins with images of seas, bodies, forests, trees and skies, which alter the idea of ​​nature; these are forests that disturb; seas that question; a nature that subverts the western concepts attributed to "the Others" as "barbarian bodies". Images of South America.

The reflective gaze of the first drawings in the series changes its place of enunciation in the 2019 series. We, the Others, are no longer the object of study, observation and representation that revolts. Now, the Others from the West become the object of study.

I traveled to the Iberian coast, visited the enclaves of the Indian trade. I lived a few days with Andalusians; I collected stories and images; I listened and observed everything I could; I wrote and drew. In Madrid I visited its museums; those museums that tell stories of us and them.

Route (text under construction):

My path began with landscapes of the Route of the Trade of the Indies, where I saw the Cadiz sea and the Guadalquivir river. I also visited the General Archive of the Indies where I found guard dogs at the entrance. Following the route, I found the Giralda in Seville; the reflection of a horseman on the shores of the ​​Sanlucar de Barrameda sea, from where Pizarro and Cortes departed to conquer America. In another drawing, I worked with the rest of a watchtower in Matalascanas, the rest of a set of 16th century towers. The towers were built to defend the coasts from the pirate attacks that raided the ships that came with the riches of America.

All these pieces surround the pieces with the three women who today are part of the sculptural representations of Madrid’s Museum of Anthropology. These sculptures are based on a predominantly human anatomical interest. However, the collection "The kingdoms of nature" does not include Iberian representations, except that of the "giant from Extremadura". Africa, Asia and America representing the "Other", the native, the indigenous, the barbarian. Naked women who tell the history of the colonies.

Others Storms

2017

What does it mean to turn your back on your land?

Dorota Biczel

2017

You: I imagine you reading this in the Luis Miro Quesada Garland Room, a few blocks away and with a fast track through the Pacific Ocean. I imagine you identify as Peruvian. I also imagine that you learned all about your land and its unique composition. Probably, this "unique composition" that was taught from school, signified as three different geographical areas that, supposedly, define your country: the coastal desert; the Andes’ Sierra; and, the Amazon rainforest. In this construction of the national imaginary, the borders delimit an internally fragmented Peru, in the shape of a jaguar without a tail. They also delineate an empty terrain around that Peru.

Claudia Coca's recent work fills a void in the Peruvian pictorial imaginary - the imaginary from which the Pacific has historically been absent. Her work replaces that absence with presence and, at the same time, refutes the familiar symbols created for the observers, external and internal, of the Peruvian territory. To this end, Coca exploits a dual phenomenon: on the one hand, landscapes linked to territorial, national or imperial borders; on the other, landscapes that transcend those borders, mediating the transnational circulation of capital, goods and people. She insists on the inversion of three different looks; three different positions; and, three different and historical modes of the construction and deployment of the territory in the Andean region of Latin America: one, that of a Spanish conqueror; the second, that of an enlightened imperial scientific explorer; and, the third, that of a coastal woman in search of her roots. Unlike those three observers, whose gazes are firmly fixed on the land, Coca turns his back on the desert, the mountains and the jungle beyond them. She faces the ocean. Watch with her; come down from the boardwalk; cross the Costa Verde highway; touch the water.

Hers are unprecedented images: the ocean seen and experienced as a shimmering, undulating surface; the play of light on the peaks of the waves; the ebb and flow of the tide; endless expansion. Her ocean is devoid of buoys, piers, or lighthouses; boats, birds or flying fish. To put it in different terms, Coca refuses to show you any marker associated with a territory, mature and ready, for extraction and exploitation.

The back-turning on the earth suggests a possibility of destabilizing the terrestrial social order. Turning to the ocean offers a possibility of rejecting the established myth of origin, of rootedness in the land; the same myths that have perpetuated racial and ethnic asymmetry in Peru since independence, that is, the image of the impenetrable sierra that has been coined in the name of capitalist modernization and "progress": the mountains that will be conquered and Indians and mestizos who will be turned into docile subjects, who will work to increase the GDP and thus satisfy metrics established elsewhere.

Instead, Coca puts you on the shore. The ocean invades you, over and over again. The distinction between land and water is fluid and porous. Coca takes you to the liminal space where the notions of "there" and "here", "forward" and "back", disappear; where the notion of the Other disappears. The ocean encompasses both you and me (the "me" writing from a great distance) - much greater power, much more sovereign than that established by geopolitical divisions.

The "barbarian" imagined by colonial powers turns his gaze - both defiantly and as a whole.

East winds, West winds.

Projection video in HD

11:30 minutes

In the Pacific piece there is a coastline with two facing seas, east / west, north / south. Peaceful and divided seas, observed from an “outside”, about to set foot on land. The "outside" is aware of the confrontation. New conquests emerge.

The image is from the Punta Huaro isthmus in Casma, Ancash in Peru. The Ancash Region is commonly associated with the Andes and not with the coast. Casma is located north of Lima. Knowing Punta Huaro was a discovery, a finding, a photographic delight that allowed me to put together new ideas regarding the sea. A kind of poetics of nature. Pacific versus Pacific; Pacific contemplating the Pacific. The Pacific looking to the Andes.

Pacific

Charcoal and pastels drawing

Triptych

2 m x 4.50

Storms

Charcoal drawing on canvas

12-piece installation

0.50 m x 4.50 m approx.

In the Storms series, I confront the idea of ​​a "scientific voice" from National Geographic, a voice to which we give legitimacy, without questioning it. In opposition we will see seas, forests, skies and bodies, which alter the idea of ​​nature; they are forests that disturb, seas that question, a nature that subverts the western concepts attributed to "the Others" as "barbarian bodies". Images of the lands of Abya Yala.

Canibal

Drawing and video installation

Charcoal drawing on canvas

10 m x 2.15 m aprox.

HD video en TV

4:45 minutes

https://vimeo.com/241628486

Cannibal

The Cannibal installation starts the series. The beautifully raging Pacific Ocean meets a serene shore; a calm that hides the wild, the rebel. The cannibal is not on the new shores; the cannibal comes to them. The otorongo skin is a dignified skin, a living skin, a skin that moves towards an “inside”, moving away from the periphery to recognize itself in a common interior, where we can reflect ourselves. The sea is ours, its turbulence questions us, moves us away and brings us closer to, later, to recover it. The skin walks towards you; we are that skin that must conquer in order to leave behind the internalized idea of ​​the "wild evil", of the cannibal. The otorongo (jaguar) skin is beautiful, powerful and original. 

Recognizing the beauty in the mestizo and native will continue to be my work’s purpose.

Museums

Charcoal drawing on canvas

Diptic

2.20 m x 3.30 m

In order to build modernity, it is necessary to show everything that identifies the barbarian. Exposing that ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’ culture, within the reach of the conquerors and the conquered. Anthropology museums collect Indian origins; pride and shame in the same place. Museums as dichotomous spaces is the basis of the diptych Museums: the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico and the National Museum of Archeology, Anthropology and History of Peru.

Close Territories

2017

The otorongo is a wild animal that crosses Peru from the coast to the jungle; it also travels throughout South America. It is a sovereign and free species that cannot be dominated. A representation of rebellion in times of insubordination.

Peru is popularly related to the Andes (sierra) and to certain "exotic" and "tourist" representations that reinforce the idea of ​​only one Andean territory. These representations exercise a domain, a kind of fence that limits the possibilities of re-knowledge. I am interested in opening the vision of the perception of the Peruvian territory, as a country crossed by the coast, the mountains and the Amazon. 

Juan Javier Salazar raised the idea of ​​having the country in our hands. The map of Peru in an otorongo skin; a synthetic fur, filled with foam, a kind of cushion or stuffed animal to caress. A Peru with an anatomy, to study.

 Close territories series is linked to the Other storms series, both from 2017. Exhibition in Del Paseo Gallery, Lima.

Territories

Black pencil drawing on paper

Poliptic

0.33 m x 2.30 m

Anatomical Study

Black pencil drawing on paper

Triptic

0.36 m x 0.98 m

Paradise

Charcoal drawing on canvas

0.70 m x 1.00 m

Intervals

2015-2018

Barbarian Tales

2015

Barbarian Tales No.1

Charcoal drawing on canvas

1.25 m x 1.80 m

Barbarian Tales No.2

Charcoal drawing on canvas

1.20 m x 1.95 m

Barbarian Tales No.3

Charcoal drawing on canvas

1.20 m x 1.70 m

Barbarian Tales No.4

Charcoal drawing on canvas

1.70 m x 1.10 m

Other Storms

Charcoal drawing on canvas

Poliptic

0.35 m x 0.50 m (each piece)

Horizons

Charcoal drawing on canvas

Diptic

0.50 m x 0.35 m (each piece)

Table

Texts, drawings, notebooks y notes.

Installation

Variable measures