Celebrating 25 years of

the Essex Collection of

Art from Latin America

Cover image: Regina José Galindo,

Raíz (Root), 2015. Courtesy Prometeo
Gallery and the artist
FOREWORD
Professor Jules Pretty obe pfhra frsb frsa
Deputy Vice-Chancellor and
Professor of Environment & Society
University of Essex
2 3
This exhibition kicks off an exciting
programme of events that honours
the Essex spirit of interdisciplinary
conversations that our campuses
foster between our communities of
students and scholars. The University
is alive to urgent issues and the
artworks in this exhibition bring us
together to think creatively about
the contemporary environmental
challenges that we face today. Events
such as these epitomise the ethos of
research-led education that makes our
classrooms such exciting places. As we
collectively mark twenty-five years of
the Essex Collection of Art from Latin
America (ESCALA), we also celebrate
the central role that students have
played in curating this exhibition.
Through their texts published in this
catalogue, we can all gain insights and
approaches to help us all reflect on
the world around us and continue to
connect through ESCALA’s outstanding
collection of art from Latin America.
INTRODUCTION
Dr Sarah Demelo As the Essex Collection of Art from Latin
Curator America (ESCALA) marks its twenty-fifth
Essex Collection of Art year with this publication and the
from Latin America & University exhibition Gone to Ground at Art
Art Collections Exchange, we have with the opportunity
not only to reflect on the past but to
look to our future. The last twenty-five
years has seen many changes for the
Collection, most notably the opening of
its purpose-built Teaching and Research
Space at our Colchester Campus. The
Space has provided a permanent home
for ESCALA to cement the ongoing
interdisciplinary work, such as the
object-based learning we do with our
staff and students here at Essex. It is
also a place where the wider community
can benefit from first hand access to
our artworks. It is from this Teaching
and Research Space where ESCALA
looks to the future. It is a space where
ESCALA will continue to provide
unparalleled access to art from Latin
America giving our staff and students
transformative ways of learning.

GOING TO GROUND
CREATIVE ECOLOGIES IN
THE ANTHROPOCENE
Dr Lisa Blackmore
School of Philosophy and Art History
Nothing seems more humble than
the earth; when language wanted
to express humility it chose humus,
compost, the face of the landscape
that we never see when we pass by or
remain there, occupied as we are with
our passions and business. Grass,
hedges, forest and flowers hide the
earth’s face from the most perceptive,
and they who pay attention to deep
things remove it to reach the copper
or gold. It goes to ground under floral
phenomena, it melts into language,
underlying reality eliminates it. Our
greatest philosophies do not pay
humility its due.
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A
Philosophy of Mingled Bodies
4 5
Earth is anything but dormant, inert
matter. Host to a vibrant tangle of
vegetable, microbial and animal life,
it is literally the grounds for human and
non-human existence. Today, however,
these grounds are increasingly becoming
unstuck. Mudslides, flash floods, silt
build up, desertification and soil erosion:
these phenomena are increasingly
familiar amid the fall out of centuries of
industrial and extractive economies that
birthed the Anthropocene – a new
geological era in which human activity
has transformed the earth’s metabolism.1
This is a time, as the French ecological
thinker Michel Serres argues powerfully,
that compels attunement to the material
world, an opening of our senses to the
earth’s relentless, pulsing presence.
Serres asserts that we – the inhabitants
of late modernity – are so distracted that
we fail to see the “earth’s face,” while
extractive industry bores deep into it,
mining geology for profit. Yet, the notion
of “going to ground” that he posits is not
entirely catastrophic. While it recognises
the opacity of organic matter and
critiques rapacious extraction, it also
infers that human hubris might retrace
roots to humility, to the earth, if we find
ways of looking into the face of the
landscape and mingling our bodies
with its teeming matter.
Gone to Ground explores this challenge
through a series of artworks by artists
from Latin America drawn mainly from
ESCALA, the Essex Collection of Art
from Latin America. Probing indigenous
vitalism, technologies of botanical and
mineral extraction, and the mingling of
human and non-human bodies, these
works grapple with the historical
and material grounds on which life
unfolds and pose questions about the
conditions for our collective futures.
They help us think in the Anthropocene
about human impacts on the
environment, historical modes of
ordering nature and the way that
non-human lifeforms escape that
order. Thinking ecologically means
examining the transits of matter as
it is uprooted and mobilised within
circulatory networks that connect
elsewheres to heres. It also means
problematising the philosophical,
economic and aesthetic paradigms
that objectify nature and posit human
mastery of it, by exploring the liveliness
of organic matter as it also impacts
on us.
Vibrant interconnectivity is very much
the spirit of this exhibition, which
launches a programme of events that
celebrate ESCALA’s anniversary. These
events honour the commitment to art
from Latin America the Collection has
maintained over the past twenty-five
years of creative exchanges it has
fostered between artists, scholars and
students. It is fitting, then, that the
curatorial process for Gone to Ground
developed collaboratively through an
Art History undergraduate module run
at ESCALA’s Teaching and Research
Space in the Constable Building, where
students spent time with the artworks
and discussed them with artists. In this
collaborative context, the artworks
operate as “creative ecologies” –
dynamic artefacts composed of
aesthetic and physical relations
between matter, places and people
that lay grounds for exchange between
the local to the global.
This shifting scale of relations is
epitomised by Teresa Pereda’s
Territorio (Territory), which moves
between specific locales and planetary
concerns. While the soil samples
extracted from Argentine provinces
index exact territories, the etchings
evoke indeterminate cartographies
that might conjure land and ocean,
city and wilderness. The arid ground
that Pereda mines points as much to
the threat of desertification that
6 7
industrialised soy farming poses to
her native country as it does to the
desiccation affecting regions
worldwide. This dissolution of
boundaries is a characteristic
“texture” of the Anthropocene that
destabilises the very ideas of site and
place.2 Mudslides and floods – those
sudden lurches of the lithosphere and
hydrosphere – are at once localised
catastrophes and the effects of
transnational phenomena. Climate
instability knows no territorial bounds,
such that material fluctuations reorder
the environment in such ways that
“reference points seem lost. There is
no Cartesian grid per se that allows us
to hold onto and fix the entanglements
[1] The term has been around
since the 1980s, but its recent
popularisation has been attributed
to PJ Crutzen and EF Stoermer,
“The ‘Anthropocene,’” IGBP
Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18.
[2] The phrase is from the recent
four-volume book series Textures
of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor,
Ray, edited by Ashkan Sepahvand,
Christoph Rosol and Katrin Klingan.
[3] Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph
Rosol, Katrin Klingan, “MUD: All
worlds, all times!,” Textures of the
Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray.
Manual (Berlin and London: Haus
der Kulturen der Welt/The MIT
Press, 2014), 26.
of matter and matters.”3 And yet, the
Anthropocene cannot be understood
without critical revision of the legacy
of coloniality/modernity and its
mappings. Many see this new geological
era as the direct result of the “great
acceleration” that began with the
Industrial Revolution of the mid-
eighteenth century. Hence, the
asymmetries that manifest in the
Earth System attest to the ways that
intense industrialisation in the North
impacts indiscriminately, and often
most devastatingly, on the nations of
the South.
Arts of Extraction
Several works in the exhibition
reference the geopolitics of the
trafficking of human and non-human
lifeforms, tracking the migration of
organic matter across expansive
geographies and timeframes. While
rooted in the present, the plant
specimens presented in Cynthia Soto
and Alberto Baraya’s botanical works
dig into the eighteenth century
Linnaean tradition of surveying,
extracting and classifying plant (and
human) life that epitomised systematic
attempts to order the natural world.
Inserted into the circuitry of scientific
and cultural institutions, botanical
specimens narrate histories of
colonialism and discovery in Latin
America, as in other biodiverse
regions. The lush visual cultures
associated with botanical gardens
and illustrations of exotic flora in
metropolitan centres are haunted with
spectres of plantation landscapes and
economic botany that manifest the
“darker side of modernity” that plays
out elsewhere.4 As they conflate nature
and artifice, reality and representation,
Soto and Baraya’s works epitomise the
ironic gestures that typified late
twentieth century postmodernism’s
debunking of modernity’s master
narratives and its related aesthetic and
spatial regimes. The appropriation of
visual technologies of botanical capture
and display thus delivers postcolonial
critique, so that the colonisation of
nature speaks to manifold forms of
violence exerted on human and non-
human bodies.
From Columbus to the present, the
territories we now call Latin America
have been rendered in exotic imaginaries
rich in sensorial texture. In its
cartographic and pictorial idioms, the
landscape tradition exhibits a similar
ambivalence to botanical display, since
it too is borne of the coalescence of
[4] Walter Mignolo, The Darker
Side of Western Modernity: Global
Futures, Decolonial Options
(Durham: Duke University Press,
2011).
sublime aesthetics and extractivist
economics. Landscape painting is
fundamental to the construction of
Latin America as a treasury of
biodiversity and natural resources,
equally available for contemplation
and capitalism. As the genre emerged
in the wake of scientific voyages to
the Tropics, the effects and affects of
landscape remained bound up with the
thirst for discovery. Indeed, this word
is rich in resonance since it refers both
to imperial territorial expansion and to
the material processes of extractivism.
In mining terminology, the term
“discovery” describes “the pushing
back and then removal of the plant or
animal humus, the sand and rocks, the
more or less thick coat that lies on top
of the sand, stone, metal, diamond or
ore to be exploited.”5 In its nineteenth
century cartographic and Romantic
iterations, the visual economy of the
landscape connects mythologies of
discovery and extraction to post-
colonial contexts. The expeditions
that the Prussian mining expert and
naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
made through South America at the
start of the century fuelled a tradition
of landscape representation that was
both informative and sublime,
scientifically rigorous and aesthetically
idealised.6 After independence, the new
Latin American republics tapped into
the emotive power of the landscape,
commissioning atlases that served
8 9
pragmatic and patriotic functions. In
them, maps of independence battles
imbued the territory with post-colonial
sovereignty, demarcations of national
frontiers founded new “imagined
communities” of citizens, and surveys of
topography prospected rivers, soil and
subsoil as profit-making resources.7
Representations of nature that
dominate today’s visual economy are
heirs to this tradition that predicates
nation on nature. As extractive
industries and tourism serve as
economic motors for countries from
Colombia down to Chile, contemporary
nation branding campaigns present in
tandem scenes of pristine biodiversity
and extractive infrastructure. Such
[5] Michel Serres, The Five Senses:
A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies
(London: Routledge, 2016), 249.
[6] For this visual legacy, see
Katherine Manthorne (ed.),
Traveller Artists: Landscapes of
Latin America from the Patricia
Phelps de Cisneros Collection
(New York: Fundación Cisneros/
Colección Patricia Phelps de
Cisneros, 2015).
[7] This is exemplified in: Agustín
Codazzi’s Atlas físico y político de la
República de Venezuela, published
in 1840. Digital scans of the atlas
are available at: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/Agustin_
Codazzi_Atlas_de_Venezuela_1840
campaigns admit no incongruity in this
combination, implying that the latter
bears no impact on the former.
Nevertheless, the ecological damage
at sites of extraction – which encompass
agriculture, lumber, hydropower and
mining – is glaringly apparent and has
eco-ethical implications. Reflecting on
the ethics of image-making in the wake
of horror, the artist Robert Smithson –
a pioneer of Land Art and augur of
Anthropocene thinking – was attuned to
the scars borne by the land. “Deeper
than the ruins of concentration camps,
are worlds more frightening, worlds
more meaningless,” he wrote. “The hells
of geology remain to be discovered.”8
Smithson’s voice reverberates around
the voided cavity that Alejandro Jaime
captures in his photograph of
Chuquicamata, a vast open pit copper
mine in northern Chile. Using copper-
coloured oil paint to render the
mine’s extracted matter as a spectral
monument that hovers above the abyss,
Jaime creates an inverse stratigraphy.
This uncanny form is suggestive of the
scale and depth of manmade imprint on
the global environment as raw materials
are extracted, then processed into
materials fed into relentless cycles of
consumption. Voided geological strata
littered with processed materials
become trace fossils for archaeologists
of the future.
Mingled Bodies
The monumental scale of the
earthwork carved into the Chilean
copper mine might distract from the
constant movement that shapes it.
There, labouring humans shift matter
around, extracting, moving and
processing it. As machines pulverise
the earth into clouds of dust, the wind
then picks it up, implanting debris into
weather systems that then take it to
other horizons. These fluctuations of
bodies, matter, and meteorological
currents make up the unstinting
processes of world-formation that the
anthropologist Tim Ingold describes as
an environment of commingling: that
is, the “reciprocal interplay between
embodied persons and material things,
in which each acts upon the other.”9
Ingold insists that human and non-
human bodies live in the land not on
it. Hence, moving bodies are always
already subterranean and atmospheric.
Each step is a sinking into shifting
[8] Robert Smithson, “Art through
the Camera’s Eye,” Robert Smithson:
Collected Writings, ed. by Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), 375.
[9] Tim Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind,
and Weather,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 13, no. S1
(2007), S30.
Emphasis added.
grounds of muddy furrows and stony
crevasses. Each breath is an
intermingling with air and matter
as microscopic particles borne on
the wind enter the body. Such
interchanges and contact points
between body and matter are
precisely what give form to the
ceramic works featured in Gone to
Ground, each of which stands as an
index of the millenary process of
making whereby hands mould
terracotta extracted from the earth
into diverse forms.
Bodies mingled with the ground are
also what Regina José Galindo presents
in her performance works, training our
gazes onto the intimate touching of
skin and soil. In Raíz (Root), she lies on
the ground with her arms sunk into the
ground under a tree from her native
Guatemala that has been transplanted
to the Palermo Botanical Garden in
Sicily. What first looks like inertia is
nothing of the sort. Lungs inflate and
deflate, leaves move gently and the
undergrowth teems with life. These
subtle fluxes recall the philosopher
Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the
body’s incessant sensorial activity in its
constant process of becoming. “A body
can become speaking, thinking,
dreaming, imagining. It always senses
something. It senses everything
corporeal. It senses skins and stones,
metals, grasses, waters, and flames.
10
It doesn’t stop sensing.”10 Nancy
highlights human sensing, but the
bodies that rub up against each other
are non-human too. Through their
roots trees maintain an entire
communicational network in which
funghi (mykós) and root (riza) mingle to
create the “Wood Wide Web,” a system
of symbiosis where plants exchange
nutrients and warnings of potential
threats to survival.11
These bodily contacts also
interconnect bodies of knowledge,
fostering interdisciplinary fields of
exchange that entangle aesthetics,
ethics, philosophy and science in the
task of asking what it means to live in
the Anthropocene. “Coming up with
a new worldview means dealing with
how humans experience their place
in the world. Aesthetics thus performs
a crucial role, establishing ways of
[10] Jean-Luc Nancy, “58 Indices
on the Body,” Corpus (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008),
151. Emphasis added.
[11] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden
Life of Trees: What They Feel, How
They Communicate (Vancouver:
Greystone Books, 2016).
[12] Timothy Morton, Ecology
Without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics
(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
feeling and perceiving this place,” where their potential lies. As paths
asserts the cultural critic Timothy for exploration, works of art might
Morton.12 As they engage critically generate surprising encounters that
with colonialism and extractivism, the lead to the “enchantment” with our
artworks in Gone to Ground incite us messy world that the political
to imagine and think about “ecology philosopher Jane Bennett sees as
without nature,” to use Morton’s a prerequisite for eco-ethics.13
phrase. Viewed as creative ecologies –
hubs of material and aesthetic Enlivening us to the dense matter in
relations – these works evade which we are embedded, these works
simplistic solutions of returning to might also remind us that “everything
nature by rewinding the historical ends up making a body, down to the
clock. Modernity has already become very corpus of dust assembling and
a stratigraphic layer in geohistory. dancing a vibrant dance in the thin
What remains is the task of attending streak of light where the last day of
to the textures that shape the present. the world draws to a close.”14
Connecting local grounds to global
circuits of mobile bodies and matter,
the artworks presented here offer us
points of contact in uncertain times.
Going to ground, then, can attune us to
the interchanges between humans and
non-human bodies, opening horizons
of sensibility to our environmental
connectedness. The outcomes of these
aesthetic experiences are by no means
predictable. But it is there, precisely,
[13] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment
of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 29.
[14] Nancy, “58 Indices on the Body,”
156.
11

TERESA PEREDA
(Argentina, 1956)
Territorio / Territory, 2003
Etching with soil in wood and
glass box
The diptych Territorio (Territory) was
created by Teresa Pereda through her
exploration of her native territory in
Argentina. The artist collected soil
from different regions and placed it
in wood and glass boxes, on top of two
square etchings. The red soil came
from Obera in the Misiones province,
while the grey soil was from Arenaze in
Buenos Aires. While the small etchings
in the middle of the frame do not
represent real locations, they are
reminiscent of maps. The straight lines
in the etchings resemble the boundaries
between regions or countries, while
the curved lines look like rivers. When
the box is tilted, the soil passes
through the detailed grooves of each
area in the etchings. The uprooted soil
clings to the lines and markings
pressed into the surface of the paper
and is relocated to a new place.
Pereda’s work is also related to
anthropology and geology. Here,
earth elements are used to explore
aesthetically relationships between
humans and the land. This artwork
reflects upon the connections between
human power and nature. As an
element of the earth, soil provides the
necessary conditions for the lives that
reside on it. Plants rely on soil for
nutrients and animals create habitats
amid soil and plants. Soil is one of the
world’s most important resources to
sustain life. All terrestrial and marine
life living on earth is directly or
indirectly affected by soil. Food that
humans consume can be traced back
to the origins of soil, so while it may
not appear to be an important factor
to our daily life, soil serves as the basis
for survival. Following the growth of
civilization, farmers began to expand
into areas that were previously thought
unsuitable for the survival of human
beings. Extensive agriculture is
weakening the soil leaving it
susceptible to erosion, which reduces
water holding capacity and the ability
to retain nutrients. The effects of
eroded soil are limiting the ability for
crops to grow and leaving our lands
more vulnerable to floods or droughts.
The effects of extensive agriculture
may get even worse in the future.
Accelerated agricultural production is
causing degradation of soil quality on a
global scale. As the global population is
expected to reach nine billion by 2050,
food security is being threatened.
Territorio reflects the tense
relationship between man and nature.
The artwork itself is composed of few
elements. It is not representing a
landscape in a conventional way that
would provide us with a recognizable
scene to contemplate. It demands that
the viewer tries to imagine how the
elements influence each other. The
small etched “maps” are placed in
confrontation with the soil, which in
one of the works appears to be
covering the map perhaps suggesting
the potential for disaster. It recalls the
imagery of a world devastated by the
power of nature. In this way, Pereda’s
work suggests that people must respect
and follow the laws of nature. Human
beings must live in harmony with nature
and coordinate development to prevent
further devastation.
Yang Lyu

12 13

WARMI
(Peru, 1945)
Pachamama – wawa (Shell) Pachamama – wawa (Shell) is a fired
Mother – Child (Shell), 1998 clay sculpture. The sculptural artefact
Ceramic depicts a mother carrying her infant
child on her back. Pachamama
is a representation of indigenous
mythology from ancient Peru. The
narrative behind Pachamama is that
she is an embodiment of the earth,
encapsulating all that is natural in our
world. The presence of the mother
feels dominating, strong and protective
of her child. She stands tall, confronting
the viewer as her child pokes over her
shoulder. The form of Pachamama’s
body is mostly hidden by the blanket
which is wrapped around her and holds
her child. The viewer can only see her
hair and the base of the sculpture.
The blanket creates a protective
structure around Pachamama and
her child; she a strong figure but the
blanket suggests that Pachamama
herself also needs protection.
14 Gone to Ground
The mother figure’s face has no
identifying features, such as eyes,
lips or nose, which in turn can make
Pachamama seem more relatable
to the viewer, since she can be
representative of all women rather
than just one individual. However, the
artist has chosen to score into the clay
on the head, making lines that depict
her hair, as well as creating indented
carvings in the blanket to represent
stitch work and finally within the base
of the sculpture, where the scratches The sculpture can be viewed from
are more erratic. all angles, as it has no clear front or
back. Each part of the sculpture
The lower half, which was originally has an interesting engraving, detail,
a bowl, is broad and rounded with and addition created by the artist.
engravings in a variation of sizes and The sculpture is linked to a deep
lengths. The base resembles a tree narrative connected to indigenous
trunk, rooted firmly to where the cultures and beliefs and as a
artefact is placed, which in turn contemporary artist Warmi brings
connects back to Pachamama’s forward the ancient concern for
mythological status as an earth the safety of our earth.
goddess. The sculpture is composed
of an open bowl and a closed vase Edie Hughes
which form the body of Pachamama.
In her artist statement, Warmi
describes the connection between
ancient Peruvian culture and
memories with her own family and
particularly her mother.1 By using
terracotta, she connects these two
memories and creates something new.
[1] Warmi. “Artist Statement.”
Available at: http://escala.org.uk
15

WARMI
(Peru, 1945)
Chuwas / Bowls, 1995 Warmi makes chuwas: the woman
Ceramic makes pots. “Warmi” is the professional
name of Susie Goulder which marks her
simple, yet profound connection to the
place where she was born and raised:
the southern highlands of Peru.
“Warmi” is the generic term for woman
in the indigenous language of Quechua
and the choice of this rather than a
specific given name as her nom de
plume points to Warmi’s recurrent
interest in getting back to basics, and
in this case to the central importance
of women in traditional Andean culture
(as, indeed, in any culture). Similarly,
the Quechua word “chuwa” is a generic
name for an earthenware bowl, above
all a container for food, although Warmi
has childhood memories of chuwas in
the garden of her family home, filled
with richly scented flowers. Chuwas
hold the good things in life – delicious
food, beautiful flowers – in other words,
a woman’s world.
16
Warmi’s chuwas are formed of clay, the
material from which, in so many origin
myths, the first humans were formed.
And she shapes them by hand, without
help from technology, using the
traditional Andean technique of coiling:
twisting the moist clay round and round
before carefully squeezing and pulling
it up to form a thin smooth shell. (The
potter’s wheel was introduced into
South America by the Spaniards in the
seventeenth century but traditional
methods continue to be widely used).
These three chuwas, although they
are self-evidently hand-made, are not
sturdy and functional, not the sort
of practical food bowls where the
contents are more interesting than the
receptacle: they are too delicate, even
fragile, for that. They are decorated
with bright-coloured slips, with a
sequence of words painted around
their inner rims. These words are the
personal pronouns in the three main
languages of the Andean highlands:
Quechua, Aymara and Spanish. In many
regions of Bolivia and Southern Peru
Spanish is the minority language so,
fittingly, the smallest bowl has Spanish
pronouns. Aymara is spoken by about
two million people in the Andean
region while Quechua by about five
million, hence the use of Aymara
pronouns on the medium-sized bowl
and Quechua on the largest. The
Quechua is especially thought-
17
provoking because in this language
a distinction is made between an
inclusive “we” (ñuqanchiq) and an
exclusive “we” (ñuqayku), so that the
speaker – or in this case the writer –
must choose a pronoun that either
includes the addressee or addressees
(all of us, you included), or excludes
them (us, but not you).
Warmi passionately believes there is
a great deal we can and should learn
from traditional Andean culture. These
chuwas exemplify this: the Quechua
and Aymara bowls are brightly-
coloured, their rims opening outwards
like flowers: we are invited in to read
and ponder on the words. The smallest
bowl is less welcoming, more enclosed,
with a darker, blood-coloured interior,
and the Spanish words are harder to
read. The detail on the Quechua bowl
of the exclusive and inclusive forms
of “we” vividly illustrates how we
(westerners) can learn from different
cultures, but we need to be open to
this. And Warmi’s sensitive fingers
have shaped and decorated these
pots to help us.
Valerie Fraser

ALEJANDRO JAIME
(Peru, 1978)
Andenes III / Terraces III, 2014 Developed as part of the project
Digital print, drawing Extracción, Los paisajes del vacío
and watercolour  (Extraction, Landscapes of Void),
exhibited in 2014, the mixed media
work Andenes III presents a series of
representations of terraced landscapes
created to facilitate agricultural
activity. In this project, Jaime
assembles a sort of territorial
genealogy of extraction in South
America by creating works that bring
into dialogue technologies that span
an expansive timeframe, from pre-
Colombian agriculture, via colonial
mining, through to contemporary
copper extraction. In this genealogy,
Andenes III centres on terracing, an
ancient agrarian technology used
throughout the Andean region as a
means of farming steep gradients and
maximising cultivatable land, while
controlling erosion and improving water
absorption. This sophisticated pre-
Hispanic tradition dates back some
4000 years in Peru and constitutes
18
a spatial heritage whose remnants are
visible throughout the country.
Andenes III comprises two drawings
in which Jaime projects imaginary
territories, and a photograph taken in
southern Peru that documents a real
manmade landscape formation. In a
large cross section he reassembles the
distinct parts of the altered landscape,
presenting layers of human intervention
through a counterpoint between finely
sketched lines that suggest the original that draw the gaze upwards and
layer of topsoil, and dense triangular downwards, scaling the platforms
shapes that represent the land in a rhythmic movement that zig-zags
excavated to create the flat terraces. from side to side, thus mimicking the
The high contrast tones of this sparse motion of a physical ascent of the
composition draw attention to the landscape. As the gaze moves across
geometric shapes of the extracted the whole work a vicarious experience
land, evoking sculptural forms that of gradient is produced as the eyes
might invite us to see such earth move diagonally to climb the steep
movements as forerunners of the much topographies. This mobilisation of
later tradition of land art developed sight perhaps nods to the artist’s
through the mid-twentieth century, to constant use of embodied practice in
which Jaime’s practice is itself deeply his work, in which he often develops
indebted. A smaller drawing situated artwork during journeys through
below the side elevation offers an territories where he tracks river
aerial perspective on an imaginary courses, climbs mountains, and leaves
topography that typifies the type of his own traces in the landscape.
precipitous land that terracing
rendered productive. The third Lisa Blackmore
element, a black and white vertical
photograph offering a frontal view
of terraces, reveals the architectural
structure of stone walls that fix the
landscape in its altered form. Onto
these Jaime has painted black forms
19
 (blood) or with its eyes open, while it
is being moved, pulled along by ropes.1
The chronicle tells the story of a huge
stone that was being transported from
a quarry to an Inka building. The stone
gets tired and cannot continue being
dragged along. As it becomes sentient,
the stone cries blood and talks,
NANCY LA ROSA expressing its desire to move no
(Peru, 1980) further, before returning to its original
state as inert matter.

Notas de viaje / Travel Notes, 2014 Notas de viaje was the outcome of
Graphite, screen print, Indian ink research done during an art residency
and inkjet print on paper  in Ollantaytambo, Cusco, Peru. The
appropriation of photographs, drawings
and visual quotes, as well as extracts
from texts and song lyrics, forms the
basis for these travel notes which are
displayed as a visual essay. The way the
work is displayed generates a dialogue
between the component pieces; the
viewer can observe individual images as
well as the intersections between them.
The work centres on the narrative of
a “tired stone” – huge boulders used
in Inka buildings that reportedly
grew weary while being moved to
construction sites and thus remained
in the landscape – and the possible ways
that a visitor can relate to a place.
The ink drawings in the centre are
[1] Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva appropriations from drawings by the
crónica y buen gobierno, 1613. colonial period chroniclers Guamán
Fray Martín de Murúa, Códice
Murua: historia y genealogía de los Poma de Ayala and Fray Martín de
Reyes del Perú, c.1580-1616. Murúa, which depict a stone crying
The chronicle posits the stone as a
being with agency in the sacred realm,
which contrasts to the Western vision
in which the divine materialises
through representations. When they
were eradicating non-Christian idols,
the conquistadors struggled to identify
huacas (sacred Inka sites) because
they expected to encounter figurative
depictions of the divine. Notas de viaje
also addresses this idea through the
incorporation of quotes and an
anonymous seventeenth century
illustration. This clash of worldviews
also transpires in one of the drawings
that references the Spanish conquest,
which features arrows extracted from
the colonial painting Lucha contra
los indios infieles (Fight against
infidel Indians).
Ollantaytambo is the location of an
eponymous fortress, a popular
archaeological site that is an obligatory
stop on the route to Machu Picchu.
Links to tourism are represented in
the drawings that show groups of
visitor or a tourist taking photographs,
which dialogue with archival images
from National Geographic showing
Hiram Bingham (the US explorer who
made public the existence of an
overgrown Machu Picchu in 1911) in
Ollantaytambo during his 1914-5
expedition. The drawings also feature
an image published in Life magazine
in 1946 that depicts a young local guide
showing people around the Temple of
the Sun. Other perspectives on stones
as material and their relation to
symbolic sites are provided in Notas
de viaje by twentieth-century song
lyrics, whose poetic verses connect
us to a sensitivity to nature and the
diverse understandings of stone as
matter loaded with meaning.
Nancy La Rosa

20 21

ALEJANDRO JAIME
(Peru, 1978)
Paisaje Expandido/Paisaje Contenido
IV / Expanded Landscape/Contained
Landscape IV, 2016
Mixed media
[1] Katherine Manthorne ed.,
Traveler Artists: Landscapes of
Latin America from the Patricia
Phelps de Cisneros Collection
(New York: Colección Cisneros,
2015).
22
This artwork is an oil on photographic
print and is the fourth in a series of four
pieces. Alejandro Jaime’s work explores
transitory or fast-deteriorating
landscapes and multifarious man-made
structures. He examines the calamitous
interaction and effect of man on such
areas which when occupied by
indigenous populations can include
places that are sacrosanct. The artist
deliberately obfuscates the boundaries
between industrial and sacred places
to highlight the dire consequences of
mining. The pyramid Jaime paints onto
the photograph is a direct reference to
monumental, sacred architecture. The
photograph, by contrast, makes a link
to the cultural and industrial processes
of modernity.
As such, Paisaje Expandido/Paisaje
Contenido strongly relates to the
themes already espoused by ESCALA
in relation to human rights particularly
in respect of the native inhabitants of
Latin America and crucially the
ruination of the environment. It is
deeply evocative of the damage that
man has done to the landscape by
exploiting the earth’s resources in
South America. The artwork portrays
the exhaustion of natural mineral
resources produced by open deep
mine excavation. It features a
photograph of the Chuquicamata mine
in northern Chile, in operation for
over a century and currently owned
and operated by a Chilean state were idealised scenes of nature.1 The
enterprise. It is reputed to be the rust-coloured palette used to create
largest open pit copper mine in the the pyramidal form that Jaime inserts
world by excavated volume. into the scene mirrors and imitates
the colour of copper, which is symbolic
The enormity of the destruction on of the ore extracted from this mine.
the surrounding geography can He has implanted this pyramid into
be illustrated in scale by careful the depression. This act of filling in
scrutiny of the artwork. The centre the void effectively blocks the cavity,
of the picture features a diminutive perhaps symbolising the impossibility
vehicle (presumably a works truck) of further excavation. By this innovative
traveling along one of the narrow stroke, Jaime turns a gaping gash in the
roads carved into the sides of the earth which could be perceived as a
mine. The artist has responded to the “negative landscape” or “Expanded
environmental disfigurement of a large Landscape” into a “positive landscape”
triangular vacant hole in the ground or “Contained Landscape.”
caused by extensive removal of ore in
copper mining. He has upturned this Sue Davies
image of the void and represented it
in the shape of a pyramid, which the
artist has painted onto a printed
photograph using oil paint. The use
of oil paint references the tradition
of landscape painting produced by
traveller artists and explorers which
23

REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO
(Guatemala, 1974)
Desierto / Desert, 2015 Regina José Galindo is a visual artist
Video, 14:53 mins who specialises in performance art.
Her work deals with both historical
and current socio-political issues of
her country, in response to ethical
injustices such as racial and gender
discrimination, mass killings and
environmental disasters. Her body
is her medium, through which she
creates “powerful visual metaphors
and symbols” that reflect her
Guatemalan experience and
nationality.1 Galindo’s work has been
exhibited in numerous international art
events including four Venice Biennials,
in one of which she was awarded the
Golden Lion prize in the category of
young artist.
24
In Desierto, Galindo and her team
take over a white-cube gallery space
covering it in what seems to be sand,
but is actually sawdust. Within the
dunes, the artist buries herself – and
there she remains for the entirety of
the performance. All the spectator can
see is her head, the only part of her
body which is uncovered. This piece was
commissioned by the Galería Gabriela
Mistral in Santiago, Chile, where it was
also performed. The location proves
essential to the understanding of the will come if extraction activities
work, since the artist’s use of sawdust continue at their present rate.
is a direct reference to the iconic Desierto is a subtle yet powerful
Chilean pine trees, also known as campaign for the preservation of
monkey puzzle trees, and their current the Latin American landscape.
state of exploitation.2
Beatriz Neviani Coslovsky
The Chilean pine is an essential
resource to many local indigenous
communities, as well as being one of
the country’s main national symbols.
Now, it is an endangered species. Its
population is in constant decrease due
to logging, overgrazing and extensive
human harvesting. In this way, a unique
expression of nature falls victim to
capitalism and industry. As Galindo
stands submerged in material that
physically evidences this crime, she
embodies an act of protest and
defence of the local environment. [1] Regina José Galindo and Francisco
The desert which is created from the Gold, “Regina José Galindo,” BOMB,
sand contributes to that critique – it no. 94 (2005–2006): 38–44, 39.
[2] Regina José Galindo, “Desierto.”
is an embodiment of the literal and Available at: http://
metaphorical desertification which www.reginajosegalindo.com
25

GRACIELA ITURBIDE
(Mexico, 1942)
Jardín botánico, Cactus Naturata Graciela Iturbide is mostly known for
Botanical Garden, Cactus Naturata, her work in rural Mexico, picturing the
1996–2004  communities, people, and traditions of
Silver gelatin photograph pastoral life. However, this photograph
on paper focuses purely on plant life and its life
provider, the sun. Taken in Oaxaca,
southern Mexico, the black and white
photograph depicts a botanical garden
designed by Francisco Toledo, one of
Mexico’s leading landscape artists.
Jardín botánico is therefore singular in
Iturbide’s oeuvre since it is dedicated
to a more abstract and depopulated
composition that creates a mood or
feeling through flora. The photograph
itself is a symbol of the intersection
[1] Gordon Campbell, between human intervention and
“Empedocles (c.492—432 B.C.E.),”
Internet Encyclopaedia of nature. This is further emphasised by
Philosophy. Available at: https:// the pre-planned design in the form
www.iep.utm.edu/ of a botanical garden, which itself is a
empedocl/#SH5a
[2] For an example of this constructed representation of nature.
imaginary, see: Alan Taylor, “On Consequently, the image could be
the Border with photographer viewed as symbol of the limitations
John Moore,” The Atlantic.
Available at: https:// imposed on Mexican society, which
www.theatlantic.com nevertheless continues to flourish with
26
all kinds of cultural and floral artistic
expressions. The fence, composed of
spikey cacti, combined with the tent
which acts as the overbearing window
through which the viewer sees the
landscape, contribute to a feeling of
isolation and restriction. Iturbide’s
positioning of the camera, which
simulates a viewpoint of a plant
exposed to the sun and clouds above,
united with Iturbide’s traditional black
and white photography intensifies
this feeling. as a reminder of the control imposed
by location, and its restriction on the
The image inspires recollection of flourishing of the soul. This is an image
the early pre-Socratic philosophical of a world where inequalities remain,
work of Empedocles, who believed captured in a setting where cultural
in transmigration of the soul.1 subjugation is rife. There is a lack of
Transmigration refers to a soul’s symbiosis between nature, human
passage through the separate lives of beings and their governments. The
different beings: plants, animals and nature of a cactus is characterised
humans. This may seem far removed, by its ability to exist stubbornly in the
but the essence of the photograph is most hostile conditions. Accordingly,
rooted in the soul and the struggle of all Iturbide is also displaying hope for the
humans is rooted to their surroundings. people of Mexico in their resilience
through conflict. Her photograph
The work also bears a connection to reaffirms the cactus as the perfect
modern images of the highly politicised symbol for Mexico’s flag.
land border between Mexico and the
United States.2 The multiple controls Joshua Hiskett
and enclosures in Iturbide’s photograph
alludes to the separation of Mexican
and Latin American society from the
United States despite their geographic
proximity. Borders are policed, lives
are controlled, inequality remains. The
lonely cactus rooted in Mexico serves
27

CINTHYA SOTO
(Costa Rica, 1969)
Botánico / Botanical, 2008  Cinthya Soto’s photographic piece
Digital print on paper Botánico is situated within a larger
series named Artificio/Natura which
uses the medium of photography to
encourage the viewer to question
their perception of reality and how
photography is used as a tool to
capture, classify and exhibit
experiences of nature. Botánico itself
is an analogue photograph of a select
portion of the collection of flora at
the Zurich University Botanical Garden,
an institution that boasts a collection
of over eight thousand cultivated
species of plants. Due to the nature
of Soto’s photograph we are left
uncertain of the genre of the piece –
it brings attention to mankind’s
obsession with classifying the natural
world by itself being unclassifiable;
[1] Tamara Bringas, Botánico is neither a landscape nor
“Diálogos, fotografías y otros a still life.
malentendidos,” Textos Errantes,
28 October 2004. Available at:
https://textoserrantes.
wordpress.com
28
Just as Soto has restricted the content
of the photograph through her tightly
framed composition, she has also
restricted the chromatic palette of the
photograph: green and blue dominate
the image while shades of brown
complete the earthy impression.
Colour and composition enable Soto
to produce textures and sensations.
The dense foliage in the foreground
exhibits a rich sense of texture which
invites the viewer into the space
collapsing the distance between the waiting room at the dentist to the
two realities, that of the viewer and carefully managed Kew Gardens. It is
that of the garden. The viewer is then this sense of curation that drives Soto’s
transported into the canopy by a lone work; photography is both the medium
tree trunk where they can become and subject of her artwork. Soto brings
overwhelmed by a sudden saturation into question the phenomenology of
of light. The bright blue sky pushing our experience, probing what makes
through the glass panels is almost our experience intelligible and how
suffocating, while the metal framework we qualify our reality. The medium
reveals the photograph’s true location of photography is layered with
and shatters the illusion of the wild complexities regarding the nature of
tropics. The viewer is abruptly called the human understanding of reality
back from the illusion of the tropical and our obsessive need to classify
utopia through the careful framing of the unclassifiable. Soto´s photograph
the photograph. Soto leaves her artist’s at once self-consciously recognises
mark in the form of the data of the these complexities even as it offers an
Kodak film that is displayed on the invitation to sensorial experience.
edge of the piece: a reminder of the However, it is Soto’s engagement with
technological barrier between the the construction of reality that is at
spectator and the garden. the heart of her work and can leave
the spectator somewhat disorientated.
The convergence of light, colour and
texture creates a familiar image of the Emily Evans
curated tropical ecosystem – one which
can be encountered from the gaudy
29

ALBERTO BARAYA
(Colombia, 1968)
Expedición Machu Picchu: In his long-term project Herbario de
Orquídea parásita verde plantas artificiales (Herbarium of
Machu Picchu Expedition: Artificial Plants), Alberto Bayara
Green Parasitic Orchid, 2013 explores the relationship between
Mixed media humans and nature in relation to the
colonial histories of the New World.
The Royal Botanical Expedition to New
Granada in 1783, which surveyed and
classified species of plants in what
would later become Colombia, resulted
in the production of a huge archive of
specimens and representations of
taxonomies of flora. Along with Western
categorisations of nature, came the
notion that such taxonomies could
be transformed into an enterprise,
providing knowledge about plants that
would lead to their cultivation as crops
and trade as commodities. Baraya, an
artist based in Colombia, describes the
starting point for his Herbario as a bid
[1] Skype interview with Alberto for independence from colonial history
Baraya, 8 November 2018. through his own experience of retracing
[2] Alberto Baraya and Jonathon
Hernández, Desastre Natural. botanical expeditionary routes to gain
(Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2014), 77. his own scientific knowledge. He
30
appropriates the format of the
illustrations produced in the 1780s
and updates them by compiling images
and specimens of artificial plants.
Expedición Machu Picchu: Orquídea
parásita verde is a one of the 300 sheets
in the Herbario de plantas artificiales
that the artist began compiling in 2002.
The composition includes an artificial
Green Parasitic Orchid which Baraya
collected during his expedition to
Peru, alongside a stamp and written
information that identifies him as its
collector and details of the place where
it was gifted to him. The work also
includes a pseudo-scientific drawing of
the specimen with a self-portrait of the
artist’s head. Other information, such as
the materials of the “specimen,” indicate
that the flower was “Made in China.”
In Baraya’s work the medium of botany
is used ironically. He explains: “The
rescued and published work of the
Royal Botanical Expedition to New
Granada appeared at the end of the
1940s and little by little became a
symbolically transcendent event in
Colombia. Colonial enterprise became
an opportunity to reaffirm a national
identity. When I lived in Madrid I began
the Herbario de plantas artificiales
project, a parody of this nationalism,
which focused on the scientific research
tools used and analysis, which still today
claim to be utopic beacons of progress
31
and wellbeing.”1 Fake plants give us a
new reality of nature, and although they
do not replace it, they do offer a direct
relation to the original plant, creating an
ecological bond between the plant and
its owner. Many owners of the plants
which were gifted to Bayara shared with
the artist their spiritual experience and
emotional connection to the object.
These relations then allow enterprises in
places such as China to create industries
that target human attachments to plants,
whether real or artificial.
The final element in Expedición Machu
Picchu are three photographs of Baraya
undergoing anthropometrical studies.
These make further reference to
colonial activity and power, whereby
measurements such as these were
taken of individuals to categorise
different races.2 However, Baraya here
modifies this practice by switching the
role of the traveller and the observer,
thus turning the traveller into the object
of study instead of the observer. Baraya
makes ironic use of such scientific
classifications to demonstrate how the
traveller applies “scientific” methods to
produce sometimes dubious knowledge
about cultures and their inhabitants,
whilst providing insight into wider issues
regarding colonialism, and human
relations with ecology.
Caitlin Stephen

FERNANDO CRUZ
(Colombia, 1951)
Jardín interior / Interior Garden, 2015
Heliograph and intaglio on paper
Combining the early camera-less
photographic technique of heliography
with a process through which leaves
are imprinted onto paper, Fernando
Cruz’s series Jardín interior records
the life of organic matter. In each
image, a sheet of paper is prepared
with photosensitive chemicals,
magnolia leaves are arranged on it and
then exposed to sunlight. The sheet of
paper is then washed, fixed and left to
dry. Nineteenth century photographs
such as heliographs and cyanotypes
occupied the blurry junctures between
scientific documentation and artistic
expression. As exemplified by the
pioneering work British photographer-
botanist Anna Atkins in the 1840s and
William Fox-Talbot’s The Pencil of
Nature (1846), the history of
photography is inseparable from the
quest for botanical capture. At its
inception, photography allowed
scientists and hobbyists to create
precise and lifelike documents of
discrete samples of vegetable life,
which could then be subjected to
taxonomic organisation. Cruz’s series
dialogues with this tradition of
systematisation and legibility, yet his
images are not singular plant samples.
The images in Jardín interior are
heterogeneous and polyvocal records
of the embodied engagements with
the environment that characterise the
photographer’s practice, in which
walking is a consistent method.
shape of the leaves. Here, unprocessed
These images are records not of organic matter infiltrates the sheet of
singular botanical samples, but of paper leaving behind it faint deep
multiple leaves laid out at right angles imprints and traces of soil detached
to each other, which have left their from the leaf’s epidermis. This very
imprints on the paper and remain as physical encounter of organic bodies,
ghostly silhouettes and material traces. so delicately rendered by Cruz,
The overexposure of the paper, left reminds us that paper is a cultural
to react to sunlight for longer than artefact that was also once vegetable
necessary, creates chromatic matter: often the product of highly
gradations that veer between shifting industrialised processing of plant life,
shades of green and ochre, with hints such as tree pulp, cotton, banana leaf.
of blue. Through this over-exposure, As leaf, sun, paper and soil mingle in
the leaves have left blurry silhouettes Jardín interior, organic matter makes
suggestive of the way that organic its mark again and to the work of art
matter is constantly changing and becomes inseparable from the very
eludes technologies of capture and grounds of life.
extraction. The use of intaglio
generates an encounter of hoja (leaf) Lisa Blackmore
and hoja (sheet of paper), a wordplay
sadly lost in English. After making the
heliograph, Cruz dampens the paper
again, placing more leaves on it before
passing it through a rolling press so
that it becomes engraved with the

32 33

REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO
(Guatemala, 1974)
Raíz / Root, 2015  Through the medium of performance,
Video, 6:49 mins Regina José Galindo demonstrates the
Raíces / Roots, 2015  bond between living beings. In two
Video, 5:43 mins separate performances recorded on
film, Galindo and twenty migrants
perform a physical reconnection with
plants that highlights issues around
human engagements with the
environment. Raíz presents Galindo,
nude, lying face down in the soil with
her arms burrowing into the roots of a
tree. Galindo becomes an extension of
these roots, continuing out from the
trunk and becoming deeply connected
to both the living being and her own
personal nationality and identity, for
this tree is a species deriving from the
same part of the world as the artist.
The work and its title highlight the
intimate relationships between human
and non-human bodies, acting as a
tranquil and organic symbol of the
association individuals have between
their places of origin and their
uprooting through migration.
34
Galindo’s nudity highlights her
vulnerability as she reconnects to
the natural world, stripped bare the
clothing that would link her to urban
culture. This piece resonates with
Raíces, Galindo’s accompanying work,
which depicts twenty fully clothed
migrants performing similar actions
of deep-rootedness; they too become
the extension of trees from their native
lands. Here we see the literal and
metaphorical action of the migrants
clinging to their roots. Contrasting landscape of the pieces. Therefore,
with Raíz, the migrants are positioned Galindo reminds us of this process and
differently to Galindo. The body of the how human and non-human bodies
artist becomes a deep extension of have a shared history of uprooting,
nature since her arms are buried into mobility and migration, bringing to
the soil and her flesh is pressed tightly the forefront of the mind ideas around
against the ground into which the roots the deep connections between bodies
burrow. In Raíces, by contrast, the and nature.
migrants place their bodies almost
on top of the soil, inserting their arms Ellie Parson
into shallow furrows from which soil
has been excavated. Here we see a
representation of the process which
took place when the migrants were
uprooted from their places of origin.
Their connection to their homeland
remains, yet they are never physically
reconnected.
The pieces also reference botanical
studies which took place in the
eighteenth century. Botany including
plants and species of animal were also
uprooted from their origins and placed
in botanical gardens, as is shown in the
35
 transformation and plurality: the book
no longer offers explanations through
the act of reading, but becomes open
to multiple meanings through the act
of looking.

The historical delirium of the colonial

CRISTINA PAPE
(Brazil, 1953)
Livro No. 1 / Book No. 1, 1999
Varnish, gold leaf and gesso
on book
To see this work, visit the
exhibition Gone to Ground:
Mapping Terrains in the
Albert Sloman Library.
As the exotic “other” in Latin America,
gold mining drastically changed the
economy in the colonial period. This
historical backdrop manifests itself in
the gold leaf used on Cristina Pape’s
Livro No. 1, which changes the object
into a material entity, making what
seems to be an ordinary “book” exotic
or exciting. The artwork is a real book,
which the artist has covered in gold
leaf so that it looks almost fake or a
cast mould. There are some blemishes
in the leaf, but these appear only as
specks, and the leaf is laid out in lines
that are evocative of lines of text and
so that the binding line along the
book’s spine is still clear. In formal
terms, the creation of the artwork is
rooted in the action of rendering the
object useless: this book can no longer
be read. The book’s function is now to
be an artwork, and this makes literal
the opposition between form and
function. The act of covering the object
in gold leaf now makes it subject to
search for gold transpires in the work,
where madness now manifests in the
act of creation, as the everyday object
is appropriated, remade and elevated.
As an object, the book is already
a loaded and complex artefact,
referencing education, language and
faith. Yet it is still completely
transformed into something else, a
work of art and even an immovable
object – the piece must be carried
flat and be moved minimally to remain
intact. There is some irony in this as
the work is explicitly referencing gold,
a precious mineral related to
extraction and imperial travel, which
here coats an object that must not
be moved.
Gold as a historical symbol and
material inevitably refers to colonial
practices of extraction and the search
for gold in turn is inevitably linked to
Christianity and myth, with colonisers
such as Columbus fatefully obsessed
with stories of Solomon and Ophir.
The Bible and gold mining worked in
tandem because the myth of gold in
the Bible used to justify the exploits of
explorers. In Livro No. 1 the potential
that the hidden book could be a
religious text is relevant too, yet there
is no way to tell the content of the
original object. This opacity mimics the
way in which Christianity was enforced
in colonised countries through the
destruction of knowledge and the
creation of new narratives and
imaginaries. The Bible is often not a
public text but is used as an instrument
of power rather than as a source of
education and spirituality. In Pape’s
work, this is made physical: the original
book is hidden and unknown, but
because this is done by a coating of
gold leaf, we engage with it as a
mythical and special object.
Daisy Seymour

36 37

SONIA LABOURIAU
(Brazil, 1956)
Rose for Heraclitus, 1995
Ceramic
[1] Paula Terra Cabo and Gabriela
Salgado, “Rose for Heraclitus,” in
Outros 500: Highlights of Brazilian
contemporary art in UECLAA
(University of Essex Collection of
Latin American Art), edited by
Gabriela Salgado (Colchester:
UECLAA, 2001), 17.
38
Sonia Labouriaus’ Rose for Heraclitus,
was made in collaboration with local
potters especially for the exhibition
Continuum, Brazilian art, 1960-1990,
curated by University of Essex PhD
student Paula Terra Cabo in 1995. It
was exhibited again at the University
in the Albert Sloman Library in Outros
500, a show organised by the former
ESCALA curator Gabriela Salgado in
2000 to mark 500 years of the arrival
of the first Europeans in Brazil. The
exhibition catalogue produced in
the latter draws out details from
Labouriau’s process and the dialogues
that her artworks establish with
ancient philosophical notions of
cosmic order.
Sonia Labouriau works with clay to mark
the passage of time in works that either
designate or are activated by natural
forces such as water, fire and gravity.
In some cases she casts works in
compacted clay and powder which
gradually disintegrate over time; in
others she uses urucum flour to model
pieces which then dissolve when laid
on a surface coated with water, and
not even the original red colour of
the urucum seeds remains. Rose for
Heraclitus is activated by fire – alcohol
poured into the ceramic sculpture and
lit. In Heraclitus’ philosophy, fire is the
prime element, unifying the things in
the world which are separated by
opposites. Fire is partly identifiable with
Logos, the common characteristic of all material beings which – like plant
natural objects. Fire and Logos, ensure and human life – require careful
the ultimate balance and continuity of preservation for them to endure over
changes between opposites.1 time. As well as a prompt to recognise
the ephemerality of plant life and the
Exhibited on campus for the third time, conditions needed for it to flourish,
the work now converses with other Rose for Heraclitus also stands as a
ideas, materials and geographies. testament to the vocation of care
A rose rendered in clay, the object of the many people involved in
intersects subterranean matter and ESCALA over the years who have
plants that rise from it, seeking out the worked to enliven the Collection
light of the sun. Like the elemental fire and keep it fresh in the minds of
already referenced in the piece, the the University’s communities.
sun is another fiery presence in the
cosmos, one that can make life flourish Lisa Blackmore
through the energy it provides or stunt
it if temperatures rise excessively.
That fragile balance and the threat of
imbalance are perhaps what we might
intuit from the charred residues that
have been left on Labouriau’s rose.
These traces speak to the fragility
of the world around us and the piece
itself, reminding us that artworks are
39
Gone to Ground
Environmental works from the
Essex Collection of Art from
Latin America

Art Exchange, University of Essex

15 January – 16 February 2019

Exhibition Curator: Lisa Blackmore

with Sue Davies, Emily Evans,
Joshua Hiskett, Edie Hughes,
Yang Lyu, Ellie Parson, Caitlin Stephen
and Daisy Seymour

Art Exchange
Director: Jess Twyman
Gallery Manager: Emma Berry
Intern: Beatriz Neviani Coslovsky

ESCALA
Curator: Sarah Demelo
Founding Directors: Dawn Ades
and Valerie Fraser

Catalogue design: Dean Pavitt

Texts copyright © the authors

To see photographs and

more information about the
artworks discussed here,
visit http://escala.org.uk