March 15, 2017
It is very exciting to have the work of CONSTELACIONES reviewed by Letch Kinloch in Canadian Art. It’s an honour to be in the brilliant company of Steven Leyden Cochrane, Divya Mehra, and Dana Kletke.
It’s odd to do a big project far away from where we are all now living – thanks to MAWA Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and Canadian Art for helping bring the project back to Winnipeg. Monica Martinez, Helene Vosters, Christina Hajjar and Doris Difarnecio, I love what we have created together!
Winnipeg Art Report: The Slippage of Memory by Letch Kinloch
“At the Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art annual Caroline Dukes Memorial Artist Talk on March 3, the collective CONSTELACIONES, dedicated to process-based, trans-hemispheric collaboration, gave a talk about their work as a multidisciplinary group.
In a recent performance titled Return Atacama, the group carefully wrapped and then carried Chilean-born, Edmonton-based member Monica Mercedes Martinez’s heavy, cross-shaped, ceramic forms from Winnipeg to Chile’s Atacama Desert. They worked together in order to create community and solidarity around Martinez’s return to the land that her family fled in 1974 due to Chile’s military coup, migrating as a group to the landscape she has struggled to connect with her entire life.
As they stood before the crowd at MAWA describing their work, the members of CONSTELACIONES shouldered the heavy weight of ceramic shards they had returned to Winnipeg piled inside a blanket. They also invited audience members to relieve them of this burden, passing along their share of the weight as each member moved to the front of the room to speak about their contribution to and experience of Return Atacama.
Martinez described placing her artwork in the Chilean desert—a site of trauma—working in the punishing desert elements, unwrapping and then carrying the forms to the gathered witnesses, and laying them before the witnesses’ feet, over and over again. The labour of transporting these materials was, as CONSTELACIONES described, a process of release, allowing the forms to return to sand. Following the talk, members of the audience were invited to take home pieces of the sculptures that were carried on the collective’s shoulders, lightening the artists’ loads and opening the possibility for new ritual and engagement with these fragments of memory.”
