#Antonio Pichilla

[de-mykel]

Antonio Pichilla Quiacain. Kukulkan, 2020.

handmade textile

[ashleysingermfablog]

Wk 8, March 29th, 2024 Research

Thoughts and writings by María Iñigo Clavo

Tz’utujil artist Antonio Pichilla’s 2007 sculpture Envoltorio (Wrapper) is an unknown object wrapped in red fabric.

From the text: Mysticism as Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable... Thoughts and writings by María Iñigo Clavo, 2020…

In the 2000s, concepts such as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’s “ecologies of knowledges” began to signal a shift in approach to artefacts and their spirituality noting that each epistemology had its own wisdom to share, making evident the weaknesses of translation that uses just one specific epistemological frame. Clavo unpacks how today (2020), a new generation of thinkers are taking up the question of translation as a reliable space of negotiation in a framework of spiritual artefacts. Scholars such as Métis Zoe Todd and Anishinaabe Vanessa Watts have written on how non-Western epistemologies have been misappropriated or abstracted in historical and some contemporary and still prominent museum spaces, galleries and by collectors of these artefacts.For example, Watts takes up Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory—which popularized the notion of the interconnection between humans and nonhumans—to argue that Latour nonetheless maintains a hierarchy of beings with humans at the top. According to Watts, this misunderstands the Amerindian sense of nonhierarchical confluence between humans and the “natural”/nonhuman world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her Braiding Sweetgrass text, unpacks life as in alignment with the 'Web of Life' (Native American philosophy). She aligns with the text above by also interacting that no human stands at the top or centre of the life web. The life web acts as a way of seeing that all animals, plants, micro-organisms and even soil sub-straits are dependant on one another.

José Carvalho calls this attempt to adopt or assimilate non-western cosmologies in an hegemonic frame the creation of an “epistemological counterpoint,” in which new concepts are only allowed to be part of the “score” as long as they follow a principal (Western) melody, a melody that disregards life as web but prevails with humans or 'man' has having dominion. 

This critique of textual and conceptual translation is equally applicable when it comes to the visual arts and their modes of display:

In Mayan cultures, there is a tradition of wrapping things for various purposes. Food, personal belongings, and objects with special spiritual energy such as bones, the objects of ancestors, or stones, might be wrapped in textiles that serve as protectors of the object’s magical energy. Each community has its own traditional textiles of different colors, and knowledge about them is ancestrally passed through generations. The textiles operate as the connectors between two worlds: the magic/spiritual/unknown and the material human realms. Wrapping is an act of secrecy, and this privacy and opacity carries a sacred sense.

In this decolonical text, the footers as written by art writer María Iñigo Clavo provide a wealth of information not only the article on spiritualism, decolonisation and being the other, or otherness. This is my favourite footnote and I would like to add it here...

On an author that has studied decolonial thought... "I am not an anthropologist and am not attempting to write as an expert on indigenous cultures or cosmologies. I would like to state that I do not believe that non-indigenous people cannot address indigenous spirituality, or research or make art about it. Rather, I think that an utterance from any place can contribute to the processes of collective healing and learning from each other, and thus, I assume that the place from which my utterance (as any place) comes involves its own blind spots."

[contemporaryartdaily]

The 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

[ortut]

Antonio Pichillá - Punto de fuga (Vanishing point), 2004

[sexypinkon]

~Sexypink~  IN-BETWEÈN WORLDS at LIBERIA in Bogota , Colombia . To be led by Curator and Director of LIBERIA María Camila Montalvo Senior and Art Historian Julián Gonzáles Sánchez . These conversations with four artists from the Caribbean and Latin America will focus on Spirituality in Art practice - using spiritual elements as a transversal part of their creative process and its broad implications in its presentations in various spaces to the public . The Trinidad and Tobago Performance Artist Akuzuru piece- ' Spiritual Embodiment and Environmental Healing ' - will be aired on Zoom on July 2 , 2020 at 7pm Trinidad & Tobago time / 6pm Colombia time . You are invited to attend this event. First session this Thursday June 18th at 6 pm with Antonio Pichilla.

Sign up for the following link and we'll send you the Zoom link: https://bit.ly/2UB9rJy

[micaramel]

Artists: Pacita Abad, Liu Chuang, Mae Clark, Mary Dhapalany, Izmail Efimov, Chang En-Man, Charles Gaines, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Julia Mage’au Gray, Bibhusan Basnet & Pooja Gurung, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Andrew Thomas Huang, Sudhira Karna, Vvzela Kook, Emma Kunz, Liu Kuo-Sung, Hao Liang, Rebati Mandal, Madhumala Mandal, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Patrizio Di Massimo, Ana Mendieta, Pavel Mikushev, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Uriel Orlow, Lam Tung Pang, Antonio Pichilla, So Wing Po, John Pule, Komal Purbe, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Ashmina Ranjit, Citra Sasmita, Ekaram Singh, Katerina Teaiwa, Batsa Gopal Vaidya, Pan Lu & Bo Wang, Brittney Leeanne Williams, Trevor Yeung, Hung Fai & Wai Pong Yu

Venue: Para Site, Hong Kong

Exhibition Title: Garden of Six Seasons

Date: May 16 – August 30, 2020

Curated By: Hit Man Gurung, Sheelasha Rajbhandari

Artistic Director: Cosmin Costinas

Selected By: Christina Li

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Para Site, Hong Kong

Press Release:

Little by little and then all of a sudden, in the two months between the original opening date of this exhibition and the actual date, all events merged into one event, familiar in its conjuring of sickness, death, and our fear of others, and yet awesomely new in its might, effortlessly stopping the unstoppable wheels of our world. There are many things that will change against our will and many things that we must change ourselves. Changes that were already on the way, in how we work, pay, and value each other, our being together, and the presence, the signs, the gestures, and the touching in the art world will find perhaps a chance in the ruins of any certainty to arrive faster. Others, we will have to summon and midwife ourselves, working together for the ruin of the old and ruinous. How we will succeed in this, and thrive in the impoverishment that looms over our future, in the severed and narrow parishes we have been forced into, for months, maybe more, we are yet to see.

This exhibition was made with a certain desire and privilege of embracing the world. Without melancholy, from the fortunate gaze of Hong Kong, where we can open to the public with a certain sense of safety, we can now perhaps reflect on what became obsolete about this exhibition, in the two months that have passed. The art world of the past allowed many artists without much privilege the conversations, mobility, knowledge, and transcontinental intimacy often reserved for oligarchs. This exhibition was a product of that, conceived with the help of our artist colleagues in Kathmandu, as a precursor to the Kathmandu Triennale, which we symbolically removed from the ill-fated Gregorian calendar year of 2020 and restored in the ancestral indigenous Nepali system of counting the time. This system registers the 7 months from now (seemingly an eternity from our vantage point), when at the time of this writing we are still planning to open the Triennale, as 2077. In the exhibition, we wanted to talk about the world as it stood until this recent season, with its struggles, visions, and passions. A world that was, perhaps for the first time, beginning to truly admit that it is seen, dreamt, and described from hundreds of different angles, each inhabited by communities with histories, rules, idiosyncrasies, and visual languages, and almost all of them lumped together as ‘indigenous cultures’. This plurality was creeping into the way we were representing the world through art and this was one of the leading thoughts that organized the exhibition we were putting together. Alongside that nagging and perhaps obnoxious pretense of affecting change through our practice, which, until the end of last season, had been a central part of how so many of us saw our role in the world, even when such change seemed a monumental task. In this new season, change is happening above us, with frightening ease.

Like the whole exhibition, its title is obsolete in many ways. It is the name of a real garden in Kathmandu, better known by its other name, Garden of Dreams, built by a dynastic prime minister in Nepal, exactly 100 years ago. It was designed as an Edwardian English Neo-Classical Garden amidst Kathmandu’s urban fabric. The waves of change in the last century brought its six pavilions down to three. Climate change merged Kathmandu Valley’s famed six seasons into four. The Rana dynasty of the garden’s patron is long gone. So is the monarchy, swept away more recently by the revolution of this generation, the source of Nepal’s abundant critical energy that can teach us all so much.

As you enter the exhibition, you might feel and see things differently than you would have in the previous seasons. At Para Site’s top floor, you will be drawn into an (almost) symmetrical architecture, with a darkened perimeter corridor enclosing a brighter space, a patio that hides perhaps an austere garden. Along this corridor, with an ease that might make more sense to you now, the artworks connect our bodies, their insides, the networked maps of our social worlds, and the cosmos with its frightening designs. You will encounter artists who have worked in different traditions, gongbi and xieyi, braidings of hair and pandanus, yet all of them of our time, on the cusp of seasons. Many of them harness the power of women to think about our world. The patio extends these axes, the (gendered) body, its microscopic interiors, its laterals in the social crust of the Earth and its higher place in the universe, each level populated by strangers and dangers, as seen through different traditions of healing and art. The very core of the exhibition is thus occupied by medical thinking, with its different cultural histories and understandings of where the disease nests, what is to be healed, what can be left untouched, and when to let go.

Downstairs at Para Site, the secrets in the back room might be more hidden than they appear at first. Even more, at the exhibition’s temporary station in Sheung Wan, you will enter a secret garden, artificial like any other, but perhaps more cold. Like the way medicine sees more than the inside of our bodies, and mapping the world draws both more and less than what really exists in the terrain, unseen by humans, gardens are themselves small visions of both a human organism and of the entire universe. Tending to a garden is akin to healing a body and to keeping a cosmic balance. But gardens were seen very differently across continents: implausible symmetric rows of calming but petty harmony, serene surfaces of water dividing the world in unreal halves, mountains and waterfalls and oceans no bigger than a gravesite, savagery hidden in a manor’s lawn, or gardens built by runaway slaves, summoning the landscapes of the home continent, its crops, knowledge, and beauty.

As you face the tall wall of mirrors on the longest side of the exhibition, you see that the world there closes in on itself, quite uncomfortably. Gardens are also set apart by how we live and move in them. There are gardens where empires organize their entire universe with millions of us lost amongst the weeds, and others where lovers frolic about carefree, or lovers-to-be cruise each other, aroused among secret succulent leaves, fondling and fucking under the damp dark canopies. Other gardens however, are solitary rooms, where scholars painstakingly stage their knowledge of everything alive and dead, weeding and pruning around the stones with their tired hands. And then there are the gardens of our darkest nightmares, the gardens of loneliness in our own inner world, bereft of any human touch, beneath our burning, febrile thorax.

Garden of Six Seasons is a precursor to the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (Artistic Director: Cosmin Costinas, Curators: Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung).

The works of Izmail Efimov, Britta Marakatt-Labba, and Pavel Mikushev have been included with the crucial curatorial advice and support of Anders Kreuger. Alongside artist fees to all participating artists, Para Site is offering medical and dental insurance coverage for Hong Kong artists in the exhibition, generously made possible by the following supporters: Katie De Tilly, Dave Chapman, Chantal Wong, Yuk King Tan, Crystal Chen, and those who wish to remain anonymous.

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The content of these activities does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Link: “Garden of Six Seasons” at Para Site

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3jYPJ5q

[ashleysingermfablog]

Wk 8, March 27th, 2024 Research

⭐️ Mysticism

Antonio Pichilla, Abuelo (grandfather), 2015, textile

From the text: In The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James…

James writes that the term “mysticism” is often used synonymously (and derisively) with the vaguely spiritual, the illogical, or the romantic. Yet, although the mystical may be ungraspable and inexpressible, James argues that true mystical experiences are not at all opposed to “facts or logic” and, when taken as a consistent phenomenon throughout history, are not entirely ambiguous or undefinable.

He proposes four hallmarks by which to identify a mystical experience:

1) Ineffability: “its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”

2) Noetic quality: the state may be highly affective, but it is primarily a state of knowledge, whereby one achieves “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.”

3) Transiency: it is fleeting and impermanent.

4) Passivity: the subject does not have the power to induce it or control its course.”

Many contemporary witch practices revolve around the use of organic matter. Ghia Vatlie, self proclaimed modern witch, uses roses in her healing practice of self-soothment and creates offerings to mystical entities.

From Ghia Vatlie:

Rose is a highly versatile flower and magickal herb. That’s why there are more ways to use dried rose petals in magick and witchcraft than you think. Many people like roses in general, but a lot of witches (myself included) tend to be especially fond of roses. After all, roses are beautiful, smell good, and embody a natural elegance of their own. For this reason, witches use rose petals in love spells and workings that relate to relationships. However, rose petals also contain potent magickal energies that don’t specifically relate to love magick or romance charms. In fact, there are plenty of other spiritual uses for rose petals.

For offerings, rose petals make an excellent offering or sacrifice to any deity, spirit, faery, demon, or other inter-dimensional entity that you sense will enjoy them. It’s the energy of rose petals that makes them appealing to certain entities. Goddesses such as Aphrodite, Venus, Gaia, Flora, Astarte, Lilith, and more appreciate receiving rose petals. For example, I’ve sprinkled rose petals on the shoreline to honor Aphrodite. Use your intuition to sense whether or not an entity would appreciate a handful of rose petals before using them in a ritual or spell.

Drinking rose tea is a great way to kick back and get magickal. Tea magick is a real thing and not only is rose tea relaxing, but it tastes wonderful. Any time you make rose tea is an opportunity to make magic. What I do is set an intention while the roses are seeping into the water. The water absorbs my intention and when I drink it, I absorb that energy within my being. This, in turn, helps me manifest my intention. Rose tea is also helpful for assisting with your psychic development and boosting your confidence. Again, I prefer to use the organic Rose Buds and Petals (Red) by Alive Herbals for tea more than other products.

Can I find tea roses in Auckland? Can I enact this ritual?

From the text: Roman and Pagan traditions, mysticism and flowers...

Floralia, a festival honoring the Roman goddess Flora (goddess of spring), was a precursor of May Day and lasted five days bridging the end of April and the beginning of May. The academic website Classical Wisdom, notes the festival was "a time of dancing, gathering of flowers and the wearing of colourful clothes."

The May Day revelries were associated with fertility and new life. Villagers danced around maypoles, see above. The Celts of ancient Britain celebrated Beltane, a pagan holiday marking the beginning of a new season. These ancients built bonfires to mark the beginning of the summer season, and it was this celebration that evolved into the medieval fetes known as May Day. 

If Mysticism can be enacted through offerings of rose petals and danced out of a May Pole, can Mysticism be traced?

From the text: Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable by María Iñigo Clavo, 2020…

In the above article art can be seen perhaps as a way of tracing mystical experience. As Art-K’uh, can be understood as scared in culture. María Iñigo Clavo, anthropological writer and indigenous artist states that "there is no word in the Mayan languages to signify “art.” When contemporary indigenous artists, educated in Western metropolitan art schools, started to look for a term for art in their languages, many different ideas were proposed. Naoj in Kaqchikel refers, in a general sense, to “knowledge-wisdom-understanding”; X’ajaan in Tz’utujiil connotes sacred feelings and respect; and K’uh in Q’eqchi refers to something that is imbued with “a sacred state of thinking-feeling.” Clavo continues that "the idea of the “sacred” or “transcendental” in art in Western culture has most clearly manifested itself in the expropriation of objects from non-Western communities. This occurred most explicitly during the colonial era, when “foreign” objects were plundered and then placed in museum collections as demonstrations of national power—a practice that became especially commonplace in the nineteenth century. Yet, even though it is less pronounced now, this process of designating something other than Western art as “sacred” in order to exercise power continues today in various other forms."

In her recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), filmmaker and theorist Ariella Azoulay remarks that turning an ethnographic artifact into a (transcendental) piece of art necessarily involves a process of salvaging, classifying, preserving, authenticating, evaluating, and handling it. She notes that there is an implicit expertise and claim of scientific “neutrality” when non-Western artifacts are turned into transcendental, elevated, and universal artworks in the Western sense. This process of conversion also legitimizes the historic theft of these objects and their isolation from the communities and cultural contexts in which they were produced. This is “constitutive of the various scholarly, curatorial and professional procedures (in which collecting is but one example) which have transformed world-destroying violence into a decent and acceptable occupation.

It is how you handle art, it is how you evaluate mysticism, that transposes the experience of the spiritual inside matter/ or an object.

[contemporaryartdaily]

“Garden of Six Seasons” at Para Site