My work is a subjective investigation of a constant transit through the real and symbolic frontiers that create memories. By considering the different cultural and social dimensions of my life as a Latin American, I am interested in the relationship with a time that is vital, personal but also shared. Through my research, a constant interaction with the materiality of the print process informs the creation of strategies of auto-recognition that are both personal and collective and introduces me to the acceptance of the affective world, thus of my body and my own temporality. My graphic interventions through different print processes represent layered and fragmentary traces of an incomplete cartography of my transnational traveling. They are subjective approaches of a personal narrative that is at the same time collective. This visual narrative reflects on my forced displacement and cultural periphery conscious and the unconscious desire for an unmapped world.
Fragmentos: Narrativas de la Memoria
Metáforas Fragmentadas_Reparación
Fragmented Metaphors/Reparation Isabel Barbuzza-Patricia León-Gonzalo Pinilla
Fragmented Metaphors/Reparation is a three persons exhibition by Isabel Barbuzza (Argentina), Patricia León (Colombia) and Gonzalo Pinilla (Colombia), the three residing in the United States.
While León and Pinilla examine the relationships between the photographic language and that of graphics via prints and photographs, Barbuzza re-contextualizes and reshapes the narratives that the legacy of colonization has left in countries of the Global South, even after independence and detachment from its colonizers.
León and Pinilla’s records of the visual presence of places, characters, and events that populate Latin American countries including Argentina, Chile, and Colombia orchestrate a visual dynamic dialogue. On one hand, because of their indexical nature, the images suggest direct references to the particular social and cultural landscape in Latin America and make visible the moment and circumstances of the photographic encounter. On the other hand, the graphic works brings us closer to the sound and the acoustic sensations that surround our daily lives. The graphic sign materializes the voices, words, and symbol from those that are not, from those that have been, from what was, and that sometimes mixes with what we can hear and what we can see. And finally, the fusion of the two artistic expressions merge into the informative function that represents man confronting the plain infertile, determined to deny some values, adverse to his way of life.
Barbuzza is very interested in the history of European colonization and conquest that has continued in the world through atlases, geography, movies, and history books. In the works presented for this exhibition, she has used discarded World Book Encyclopedias and some dictionaries that she has collected or people have gifted her. Using those discarded books she reconstructs information that is wrong and with a prevalent self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over the non-Western world. In some of the pieces she uses the entire books: book covers, fabric, pages and the fabulous gold leaf edges. Cuellos/ Ruffs are made from the pages that she has manipulated using water and glue. As Barbuzza worked on those pieces, she spent long hours looking at paintings of the period, specifically Reina Isabel and Rey Ferdinando’s portraits to inform her works.
Destinos
Song of Sie
「シエの歌」展 スペイン語：Canción de Sie、英語：Song of Sie
Sakai Machi. Ibaraki, Japan, December 20, 2023-January 16, 2024
The exhibition features video, sound elements, projection mapping, prints, photographs, installation, and performance that explore the inter-relation between art and ecology. Through the different interlocking motifs and multidisciplinary elements Song of Sie triggers the viewer's ideas of the Andean highlands, mentally prompting them to compose in their own minds a journey through these magical places of seemingly endless water sources and unique biological species.
The exhibition is structured around the cartographic exploration, documentary photographic images, sound elements, and prints aimed at heralding a sensorial experience on fundamental natural resources, however, lesser-known territory in the Andes. Each individual element in the exhibition is connected and understood through the other, one of no more value than the other. Song of Sie is thus a journey of discovery– the art is the search for a form in which the sensorial and the experiential are uniquely joined.
The epicenter of the exhibition is Páramos, el País de las nieblas (2022) (Paramós, The Misty Land), a 60 minutes documentary and multimedia project that seeks to document Colombian Andean region highland’s current biological, social, and territorial situation. An exhibition visitor can watch the projects from beginning to end, or enter at any point, allowing the interactive components, imagery, and sound to capture her/his perceptual experience. The richness of visual and aural associations characterizing the Páramos, el Pais de las nieblas project promotes an alternative kind of language; not just a narrative-seeking storyline, but also of the vast cloud of sensations and feelings that these magical territories evoke.
Invisible Faces
The Latino community based project Invisible Faces: Identity Portraits began on September 2014 with a shared idea of community engagement and participation, providing at the same time a document that witnessed the integration of the Latino community into the social and cultural history of this region.
The project was a turning point in our artistic and pedagogical practices, demanding from us and from the participants a lot of extra time and effort be- yond family environment, and establishing a righteous routine that would go on to become an essential part of our life.
Our personal stories about coming to the U.S are bound by a common thread—our experience of being from Latin America. As artists, we saw the dis- connection and felt the need to preserve our cultures, our language, to not forget our roots. By doing so we were trying to dynamically articulate the experiences of migrant communities into Iowa’s cultural life. We found Iowa to be a quiet and unique location closely connected to the agricultural economy and the prac- tices associated with such a force, which is also a fea- ture that identifies Latino way of life.
Starting in October 2014 and continuing for eight months, the project focused on participatory workshops intended to build technical skills, critical thinking, collaboration and co-production. Through creating collaborative venues for means of expression, the project helped to revitalize the public role of art as a site of community building. In November of the same year the first workshop was held at St. Patrick Church of Iowa City, then at Public Space One, and St. Joseph Catholic Church of West Liberty in the latter part of the project. Though the locations were a bit clandestine at times the enthusiasm and joy created in these spaces was always palpable.
Photography and printmaking have a long his- tory of engaging with and supporting social and po- litical struggle in Latin America. Using this same tool augmented by other visual mediums, the project has reflected on the vibrant, but at times difficult, Latino life experience in the U.S. Time after time we saw and heard how projects and basic services are truly need- ed and valued amongst a community that is too of- ten marginalized. We set out to make connections and pass along our skills and ideas of art to our Latino com- munity, but the results after every workshop and exhi- bition were beyond our expectations. At the end, the resulted artworks were a model and a method of social integration through artistic endeavors.
In June and July 2015 the work created in the multimedia workshops was showcased at local galler- ies. The public exhibition of the resulting artworks pro- moted cross-cultural experiences in eastern Iowa and more strongly inserted the Latino experience into pub- lic consciousness.
Patricia León
Fidencio Martínez
Gonzalo Pinilla
Artists & Project Organizers
Mobile Museum, University of Iowa, Iowa city, IA
Project Description
The University of Iowa Mobile Museum, which takes some the University of Iowa’s most exciting research, one-of-a-kind artifacts, art works, and interactive digital media to Iowans across the state. Last year the 38-foot customized Winnebago RV visited 48 communities in 36 counties, welcoming more than 33,000 visitors.
As the art instructor I offered during each of the Museum stops a workshop in printmaking during the Spring 2015 semester. I used a sign press to print linocut and woodcuts produced by the workshops participants. The idea was to give the audiences the opportunity of hands-on experiences in print making and learn about the historical significance of the printmaking program at the University of Iowa.
I am convinced that museums need to be actively participants of the present moment, sharing not only important ideas and information but also constantly motivating inspiration about our near social and cultural environment, our communal life and about the world we live in.
My role: Art instructor and designer of the digital didactic content of the art related topics displayed at the Museum
Date: 2014-2015
Institution: University of Iowa
Target audience: central Iowa State area general audience
Collaborative: University of Iowa Museums, UI School of Art and Art History, UI Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, Iowa Print Group
Land Grant
The year 2017 marks the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the founding of the University of Illinois. Land Grant draws from libraries, archives, and collections across campus to propose an expanded field for considering the university—its founding and history, land use practices, and questions of indigeneity—all while assessing the current status of public higher education in the United States. Recognizing the ability of images to both legitimize and contest power, and experimenting with curatorial methods of evidence and inquiry, this exhibition takes stock of where we, as university students, stand today in relation to such questions. In addition to individual lenders, Land Grant works with materials from Krannert Art Museum, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, University Archives, the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, Ricker Library of Architecture and Art, the Geological Samples Library, the President’s Office, the College of Engineering, and the Champaign County Historical Archives at The Urbana Free Library. [Exhibition organized by graduate students of ARTH 546, a practicum in curatorial methods: Alyssa Bralower, Yue Dai, Evin Dubois, Maria Garth, Michael Hurley, Cory Imig, Lilah Leopold, Jenny Peruski, Luis Gonzalo Pinilla, and Allison Rowe. Practicum led by Terri Weissman, associate professor of Art History, and Amy L. Powell, curator of Modern and Contemporary art]
