Like a construction site fantasmita (the ghostly copy) situates us in a space of grief, a space in progress. A ghostly copy at the edge of the real, and the imaginary, the living and the dead, the physical and the digital, the past and the future. A moment in between, as we transit from one reality to the other. In Fantasmita (the ghostly copy) the fabric is object and space, an intimate refuge of auto-ethnography, and reflective of the possibilities of conscious processing. Fantasmita is an invitation to connect with unfinished grief, with the warp of memory that holds us between yesterday and tomorrow.
ghostly
The intimate process of memory is exposed in ghostly. This collection of works portrays a permission for memory, mourning, and transformation in the rapid, future-oriented digital age. Working across the physical and the digital, the compositions layer ancestral, emotional, and more than-human symbols to expose the transformational capacities of interconnected knowledge. Cables, broken devices, stained bed sheets, debris from urban construction, domestic objects, and organic matter become the surface materials, and result in paintings, embroideries, and mixed media works that embody the process of an affective and autonomous memory practice.
Included:
- Fantasmita (ghostly), 2023 (above)
- w/g,g,w/o,b,w/b,o,w/b,b, 2022
- recordar lo intimo (to remember the intimate), 2020
- Urdimbre, 2023
- The Perfect Storm, 2022
- PRCSS, 2019
- Piedra Blanda / Soft Stone, 2016
Images by Nadia Bautista.
Layers of care, memory, and autonomy become a new translation for remembering beyond the digital. In a process that resembles an autonomous data recovery process, a broken device is deconstructed, and its smallest interior parts are extracted and microscopically observed. Visual patterns are harvested, as speculative representations of the data that was lost when this device ceased to function. The images are embroidered onto an upcycled material. An old bedsheet becomes soft-ware, an autonomous personal archive.
What happens when our machines default, and our data gets lost? Can we recover the affective data that connects us with the lessons, and reminders, we capture with our devices? Performing a process of autonomous data recovery, small interior components are extracted in a speculative act that projects that loss data can be accessed through the images.
Material prototype for a soft-drive of cyborg memory.
Exposing the intimate process of grief, tactile materials unfold on the meshed surface. The porous membrane reveals layers of love and loss, projected as memories, onto a weaving that exists as mourning in-between time and space.
Red and black lines interface on a repurposed shower curtain embroidered both by hand and machine, with abstract images of screenshots of microbial lives, and original images of microscopic organisms found in still water. The resulting surface is imperfect, a glitched representation, outcome of a random layout, impossible to predict, in which improvable symbols are revealed.
Reflecting on predictive technologies, sections of this piece were scanned and overlaid with red squares representing predictive policing software used by NYPD. The image was printed on a transparent sheet, overlaying a poem. This piece was published by SFPC Dark Matters zine in 2022.
Intra-estructuras are intimate microscopic observations of domestic and bodily matter including dirt, hair, plants, water, pimples, blood, fluids, scabs, burnt charcoal, herbs, and others. From an augmented perspective, I identify and mine patterns that reveal commonalities accros ways of being.
PRCSS, 2019. Wool, acrylic, spray paint, electrical tape, bleach on found fabric, 48 x 66 in.
In PRCSS the potential of a process-based methodology, guided by blind variation, repetition, and experience is mapped onto a repurposed fabric. The limits of the surface are challenged, transforming it into a hybrid. Alive but inorganic, repulsing but embellished, a surface that holds a process of transformation as a quality without a name.
Piedra Blanda is a collaborative project developed by CARNE (A collective formed by Lucía Cozzi and Maria Olga Samperio that created urban and domestic interventions from 2014-2016) for Oh Boy! Exhibition in Savannah, GA. Piedra Blanda contemplates materials softly changing. In this piece, repurposed pillow cases are intervened over and over following blind variation. As the fabric becomes too weak to continue threading through it, we digitize it, bringing it back to its ‘hard’ state, creating ripples and textures that hint at new possible states of matter.