Photo credit: Drew Chan
YO SOY COLLECTIVE PRESENTS :
ANCESTRAL MAGIK
Ancestral Magik is an exhibition showcasing contemporary narratives from the Latin American continent. Featuring artists based in Narrm who are connected to Latin America, this exhibition unpacks the cultural, social, political and spiritual facets that encompass the Latin American identity. Influenced by social and political movements, stories of migration, and a connection to spirituality and magical realism, artists reject the prevailing false narratives of Latin American culture and come together to tell their stories on their own terms.
Curated by Jess Ibacache
Artwork by Natalie Estay
Proudly supported by: Creative Victoria , Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV) and Blak Dot Gallery
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Ana Maria Gomides
Ana Maria Gomides is an Afro-Brasileira storyteller existing as a settler on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung country. Obsessively concerned by the prospect of ashiness, she spends far too much time, energy and money moisturising herself and encouraging others to do the same.
Archiving the Present
Archiving the Present is a multi-site digital community archive project of archiving-as-creative practice and "remembering as insurgent practice" (Cusicanqui 2020, p.xxxii) from a distinctly Central Americanista y localista perspective (Cañas 2022).
The project began as a collective quick-response to the 2022 destruction of a Salvadoran community mural (painted by the children of the Salvadoran community in the Kensington flats in 1990) as part of a $10.2 million ‘redevelopment’ of the Kensington Community Recreation Centre.
Archiving the Present asks: who gets to be remembered in settler-colonial Australia? How does memory and embodied archiving occur for sites deemed to have no “heritage significance” by national and state-level heritage organisations? What does it mean to engage in acts of creative remembering that sit outside of heritage regimes? How do we remember within displacement and in the context of ongoing dispossession?
We invite you to engage in the 7 creative responses (across poetry, digital work, video, photography and essays) to the now destroyed mural.
Social tag: @canastania
https://archivingthepresent.com/mural-kensington-community-and-recreation-centre
Denisse Sandoval
Denisse Sandoval is a Chilean woman who grew up in New York. She began her art journey during the pandemic lockdown in Melbourne as a healing practice. She grew up hearing stories about dictatorships and coup d'etats from her own family and from her other Latin American friends in her home town of Brentwood, New York. She's lived in Melbourne for over ten years and has a little girl.
Diego Ramirez
Diego Ramírez is an artist, writer and facilitator. After a sustained period of experimentation with otherness and institutional critique, he formalised his interests to look at states of ‘falling’. In 2018, he showed his video work in a solo screening by ACCA x ACMI and he performed in Lifenessless at West Space x Gertrude Contemporary in 2019. He has shown locally and internationally at MARS Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Hong-Gah Museum, CareofMilan, WRO Media Art Biennale, Human Resources LA, Art Central HK, Sydney Contemporary, and Deslave. Originally from the Catholic capital of Guadalajara, Mexico, he currently resides in Narrm Melbourne, Australia. He is represented by MARS Gallery.
Javier Hernandez
Javier Hernandez es un grabador nacido en la Ciudad de México y establecido en Melbourne. En Mexico, en 2015 tuvo acercamiento al grabado en linóleo y madera a través de un curso corto en la ECPM68 impartido por @grabielgrafica. Los temas que toca a través de sus grabados son muy diversos pero conectados por valores que atraviesan la solidaridad, la autonomía, la justicia social, el antiespecismo y a la actitud HazloTúMismx. Entre sus principales influencias están los artistas del Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), Leopoldo Méndez, Artemio Rodríguez, aristas del colectivo gráfico JustSeeds, entre otros.
Javier Hernandez is a Melbourne-based printmaker originally from Mexico City. He was first introduced to linocut and woodcut printmaking in 2015 through a short course at the M68 School of Popular Culture taught by the artist @gabrielgrafica. The themes that run through Javier’s prints are diverse, but they are connected to the values of solidarity, autonomy, social justice, anti-speciesism and a DIY attitude. Among his main influences are the artists from the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) (The People’s Graphic Workshop), Leopoldo Méndez, Artemio Rodríguez and artists from the JustSeeds art collective, among others.
Karena Bravo
Karena Bravo is a multidisciplinary artist from Colombia. Her work is feminine and self-explorative. She uses mixed media techniques to represent Black Women and Women of Colour, their bodies' shape, hair, and style, highlighting their connection with nature and spirituality and representing their beauty, strength, and vulnerability.
Her work aims to be a tool for empowerment, building self-acceptance and confidence. Part of her creative process and outcome have been shaped by the constant necessity to reconnect with her roots. Being far away from home had encouraged Karena to explore different art forms and create a sense of belonging through dance and movement, inspiring her through her visual work and helping her preserve her culture and identity.
Kathleen Gonzalez
Melbourne-based Colombian experimental and contemporary artist. She also is a producer in cross_cultural forms, ethno-dance writer, artistic director and founder of Tunjos y Cantaros Ethnologic Dance Company and Ethnodanceology Art-. a study of dance through the application of a number of disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and ethnography. It proposes ideas in new multi-ethnic phases and stages to encourage future diversity of human’s legacy and expression into this new era.
Kathleen researches contemporary and interactive dance that is emotional, exploring the wisdom and ancestral practices. During the past two years, Kathleen’s creative work was challenged due to the social restrictions. Now her practice processes embrace new ways of mixing technological skills that complement her career. Always striving to understand new original forms of movement, and performative arts. She encourages resonance between art forms and expressions that touch everyone, often addressing cultural exchange on ecological, political, and social environments within communities.
She addresses terms of decolonisation through a curatorial framework that crossover practices that embrace intergenerational issues to standing up for the rights of universal cohesion and human equity.
Kathleen was recently granted a project called Secretos De La Raíz “INNATO”; Presented as part of Countercurrents 2022 - a new public art commissioning partnership between Next Wave and Moreland City Council. Countercurrents is intended to support both site-specific and community-based public art projects.
Currently she is delivering a new site-specific installation and multi-media performance called UNIVER-CURSAL, on display at Town Hall Gallery as part of the major exhibition ‘Tell Me a Story’ exploring the ancient art of storytelling.
Laura Rodriguez Castro
Laura Rodriguez Castro - (zine collaboration with Paula Muraca and Natalie Estay Valenzuela)
Zine led by Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro, co-edited with Paula Muraca and co-curated with Natalie Estay Valenzuela (cover design).
Laura Rodriguez Castro is a Latin American studies researcher, writer and educator interested in decolonial, feminist and anti-racist struggles. She is also interested in visual and arts-methods such as zine-making and photography. Her most recent project seeks to foster dialogues among Australia and Latin America on post-conflict memory-making. She lives and works on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrong people of the Kulin Nation.
Paula Muraca is Co-Managing Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies. She is interested in critical theories of the intercultural, and is completing a PhD at the School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne, on epistemic interculturalisms. She lives and works on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrong and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples.
Natalie Estay Valenzuela is a multimedia artist whose practice lies in dichotomous identity and preserving cultural memory. Born and raised in Noongar Boodjar Perth, Western Australia to Chilean immigrants, Natalie’s Latina(x) identity inspires her to explore these themes through mark making, shape, colour, and contrasts. Her art is an eclectic collection of textiles, design, photography and paper works that have a handmade element and are constructed with a mindful approach.
Lena Becerra
Lena Becerra (b. 1994) is an Argentinian and Italian interdisciplinary artist.
She studied visual arts and printmaking at the University of La Plata as well as in SRISA Florence, Italy.
Her work is focused on the exploration of the sensible layers of feminism and cultural decolonisation through personal experiences of collective awareness.
Through the use of videoart, installations, textiles, sculpture and printmaking (and other mediums) Lena intends to reflect on the complexities of the world she inhabits with the intention of addressing a dialogue between personal and collective memory and trauma, as well as the reconstruction exploration of a space of absence.
Currently living between Melbourne and Berlin, Lena continues to explore themes from an intersectional feminist, decolonial practice perspective and her own experience as a migrant.
Nadia Hernandez
Nadia Hernández’s practice reflects a process of bearing witness to the loss of home and the symbolic power of memory and memorialization. Informed by her experience as a Venezuelan woman living in Australia, and positioning herself both within and outside the Latinx diaspora, Hernández makes art as a means to connect with a sense of place that exists beyond psychic and geographic boundaries.
Nadia Hernández was the winner of the 2021 Grace Cossington Smith Art Award, and winner of the 2019 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. Recent exhibitions include: Speech Patterns: Nadia Hernández and Jon Campbell, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2022; Like A Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions, ACCA, Melbourne, 2022; Una Llama Pequeña (A Small Flame), Melbourne Art Fair with STATION, Melbourne, 2022.
Nadia Hernández is represented by STATION.
Natalie Estay Valenzuela
A multimedia artist whose practice lies in dichotomous identity and preserving cultural memory. Born and raised in Noongar Boodjar Perth, Western Australia to Chilean immigrants, Natalie’s Latina(x) identity inspires her to explore these themes through mark making, shape, colour, and contrasts. Her art is an eclectic collection of textiles, design, photography and paper works that have a handmade element and are constructed with a mindful approach.
Vanessa Valenzuela
Vanessa, is a first generation Latinx-Australian filmmaker born in Naarm, Melbourne and has lived in the West all her life. With a background in journalism, her first entry into filmmaking began with documentaries, in an attempt to look at the world around her and explore different stories and perspectives. Vanessa’s love for dancing and music eventually led her to direct music videos and she has recently entered the world of narrative filmmaking, focusing on family, identity, belonging and womanhood.