Towards the Southern Cross
Sadko Hadzihasanovic, Shelly Bahl, Amelia Jiménez and Gene Threndyle
Calbuco and Matucana 100 (Santiago), Chile, 2002
Commissioned by A Space Gallery, Toronto
Liquid. Ice. Steam. Sly water transmutes itself through so many ingenious forms so migration works its affects on people and on artists. Indeed for artists migration is a continuous feat. Ideas, thoughts, feelings transmuted embark on a voyage to the page, the canvas, the medium. Yet when artists set out on a physical journey as well, another possibility awaits.
Drifting amongst their ideas, their selves, new lands make dramatic entrances like volcanic eruptions bubbling up from the sea. Some recline glimmering like liquid turquoise jewels while the dark Andes cast their shadows behind. Others smash up against consciousness just as the frigid Humbolt current shoots up from the Antarctic into the warm waters of the Pacific.
To move requires displacement, destruction, loss and metamorphosis. They predicate birth and resurrection. Kamakaze waves whisper tales to another shore, living and dying in the act.
Moving from one site to another, four artists with creative baggage land. Their physical terrain is a glittering poverty-riddled Third World metropolis and a small island in the Chilean archipelago. Like vertebrae, the Andes connect the two. Not always visible through swirling pollution, raging forest fires or distant clouds, like old selves the mountains remain ubiquitous.
For Toronto-based artist Gene Threndyle, Chile conjured up travels to masterful resplendent Spanish gardens—their architecture, flora, colour—and thoughts of the kaleidoscopic city he calls home. In Calbuco, a Chilean island fishing town of some thirty thousand people, a venerable old colonial fountain stands in the centre of the town square. Jet-black with three tiers, scarlet-beaked black-headed white swans encircle its base. Yet half choked with garbage, it still managed to cascade a steady stream of water into its granite basin.
After spending some hours carrying heavy stones from the beach and carefully selecting white, violet and yellow shells, Gene embellished each tier, using giant stones in the basin. Moss-covered smaller stones were transported to the upper tier. Teeming with every type of shell available, vivid lime and translucent seaweed made a final debonair touch to the middle tier. Glistening with droplets, the affect was to create something akin to a feast, a cornucopia of the natural world, native to the island. As well as a reclaiming of a pre-colonial world and its elements, it was nothing but cheek. For it looked vastly more glorious as the square’s social focal point than it did in its original garbage ridden disassociated colonial state.
The public, fascinated by the tall sturdy white man and his short brown assistant, struggling with heavily laden plastic bags, took to it. Perhaps the adults who half smiled recognized the splendid irony of it: that it took “a migrant” to add the notably weighty (but impermanent) veneer, making the fountain some witness to pre, colonial, and post-colonial glory and tragedy. For without the Spanish conquest, would there have been a fountain at all?
At Threndyle’s departure, the fountain still stood fully arrayed in its natural glory.
Appalled by the river’s diversion in Santiago (the Rio Mapocho) Threndyle saw a way to return its bones to a source of sorts. The Rio Mapocho’s nature was about to be twisted, redirected to construct a tunnel beneath the river tunnel on top of a new highway. Cars surely constitute Chile’s post-colonial religion. Removing some unearthed stones from the tunnel’s construction site—formerly the river’s bed—Threndyle placed them in a fountain’s basin not far from Matucana 100, the Santiago exhibition site. A letter painted on each stone spelled out the river’s name. Blunt in its simplicity, the eloquence of Threndyle’s warning could hardly be outdone. Will Chileans soon have nothing but more pollution to breathe in as a remembrance of their mighty Rio Mapucho?
For a former immigrant returning to her birthplace, the experience flowed from a different well. Like many returning “home” she was empowered as the “cultural expert." Maybe this weight inspired Amelia Jiménez return to her girlhood. Working with local children in Calbuco, childhood memory inspired her to construct a series of kites with locally bought materials fashioned with imported imagery.
On a cold day at the end of the beacon pier, held aloft, the shiny gold and dark purple paper patches on the white kites shone when they caught the sun.
Although free to catch the cunning winds, strings clutched in small hands braving the elements held them stable. But like those caught in the act of departure, some snatched up by the wind fell into the sea, while others had difficulty in braving the strong winds at all.
Coming from a family fractured by the Pinochet coup in 1974, Jiménez’s work caught in quicksand, shifting identities through multiple migrations and trips back and forth, literally, spiritually and ideologically.
Launching two additional project—shirts and a work in progress based on a rusted see-saw—her work stayed locked in a steadfast gaze backwards. Using Chinese patterned papers bought in Toronto, Amelia constructed girl-sized Chinese-style shirts, hanging one in the window of a Calbuco shoemaker. In a place where illiteracy is in fact not as widespread as in North America, the shirts did not fit somehow. They echoed back to some other shore, where large signs or statues still identify what is for sale in the shop.
The seesaw, encased in unshakeable rust, sat in the grounds of the exhibition in Santiago, with a barely audible sound recording as its only accompaniment. It seemed, like its creator, to be brooding, in a state of arrested childhood. Part of her family fled Pinochet’s regime, while the rest stayed. Jiménez’s return to Chile led to realizations of how those who never leave may flourish. That, and like so many Chileans, she returned to stir that bitter concoction, replete with watery truths, half-truths and untruths around collaboration. Undaunted, the only solid thing in the pot remains that inevitably unanswerable question: would it have been better to never have left at all?
Strewn with such difficult memories, it was to this same childhood field that Sadko Hadzihasanovic returned. Using minimal materials, he worked from published photographs of missing Toronto children, posting photocopied sketches in the midst of graffiti and advertisements on bus stops and posts around Santiago.
On small canvas pieces In Calbuco, one painting in affect reproduced a photograph. The other painting bore the necessary witness to the original but had been carefully aged, as if the child had been missing some years, growing up in some unknown state.
After some negotiation, Hadzihasanovic placed the paintings in a Calbuco variety shop window underneath the handwritten sign, “perdios,” “missing” in Spanish.
Truly, the installation looked banal, as if it had been there always, too long in fact, as the sad brown eyes gazed out of pane to the fountain in the town square. Even if the child were to be found, those missing years will remain resolutely just that: irredeemable and unknowable.
After a single afternoon, Hadzihasanovic, a father himself who fled the former Yugoslavia’s horrific devastations, left the painting in the window but had the sign removed, fearing that locals would think a local child had in fact disappeared from home.
Even in this place, a numbing fourteen-hour non-stop bus ride from Santiago and many thousands of miles from Europe, Hadzihasanovic had redirected terrifying streams of reality. And, shockingly, it was all done through two simple images. Who can imagine the torments slowly crucifying those left behind when a child who is loved, wanted, disappears?
Home. Shelly Bahl’s work in Calbuco made for an odd summoning of all that word conjures up. She found an abandoned half-built house with its concrete posts still encased in wooden coverings, metal bars sticking out of the ends. This impossible home overlooked the sea. Through the glassless window shells, the view opened up to the smaller more distant islands in the Chilean archipelago. After a long search up and down the hilly village streets, she discovered a pale beige wallpaper, evenly covered with flower sprigs. Hanging the papers on viewers’ consciousness with care, gently she layered ideas about orientalism, kitsch appropriation and mass-produced imagery.
She stamped her enticing Indian dancing girls on it in red ink. Bedecked in marvelously intricate jewelry, the knowing half-smiling girls danced all over the paper like apsaras (mythical women, voluptuously enticing supplicants to the true path). Stamped in black ink, other women joined them, suggestively draped over cars alone and in pairs. Hung in strips down and across the house’s skeletal remains the wallpaper was further embellished with pictures from old kitsch magazines and locally bought children’s stickers. In lurid saturated colour, the rosy-cheeked girls leaned forward over their motorbikes’ handlebars, hot in pursuit of girl power.
Surreal, the affect was also beyond pathetic as a place anyone but the most utterly desperate would seek out as a form of shelter. Yet it was this very thing that mirrored the realities faced by real people on the move. Among the smiles and suppressed chuckles of the locals, Bahl played hostess at a house-warming party, complete with refreshments. Though most North Americans would see the village as impoverished, it was likely a working class village. Flooded with fellow and Chilean artists, some of the villagers came along to congratulate Bahl on her new home as well.
Paradoxically the “girl power” stickers and Indian dancing girls played the coquette, mocking the pseudo house-warming gifts, that included an apple, a shirt, a toy tank and soldier and a ceramic white statue of Jesus himself.
At our departure, though many of the gifts left in the house had vanished, the house seemed truly broken-hearted, a hollow place, bereft of walls, windows, cheer, and now, once again, of people too.
The people and the artists left to return to a better life, elsewhere, leaving the dregs of what could not be carried, behind them.
Bahl’s similarly embellished window wallpaper at Matucana 100, the community arts centre, in Santiago struck a bald contrast with the house. Formerly a city works yard, originally it was part of an upscale neighbourhood, but during Pinochet’s dictatorship, it became a border, determined by a class dictatorship. Not far from the contemporary elegant train station (designed by the French architect Eiffel), Matucana 100’s founding represents an attempt to regenerate the area.
For four Canadians, the creative experience in the Third World led to sources being discovered and rethought. No rivers were damned. Seeing the diverse extreme realities of Chilean artists, those with SUVs and those without for instance, lit flames under many charged but productive exchanges. Despite the formidable obstacles they faced on site, each artist returned slightly altered. Fingers searching through still glowing ashes for signs of a phoenix may get burned. But like the raging forest fires scarring Chile’s astounding forests, the passage to Chile left no artist unchanged. Meanwhile Chile shudders under mounting global and political pressure, and suffers pollution’s ravages. Still, the internal indigenous movement struggling for political change and land reform burgeons. And for these artists, the phoenix’s shadow appears in all their creations on their return home.
Drifting amongst their ideas, their selves, new lands make dramatic entrances like volcanic eruptions bubbling up from the sea. Some recline glimmering like liquid turquoise jewels while the dark Andes cast their shadows behind. Others smash up against consciousness just as the frigid Humbolt current shoots up from the Antarctic into the warm waters of the Pacific.
To move requires displacement, destruction, loss and metamorphosis. They predicate birth and resurrection. Kamakaze waves whisper tales to another shore, living and dying in the act.
Moving from one site to another, four artists with creative baggage land. Their physical terrain is a glittering poverty-riddled Third World metropolis and a small island in the Chilean archipelago. Like vertebrae, the Andes connect the two. Not always visible through swirling pollution, raging forest fires or distant clouds, like old selves the mountains remain ubiquitous.
For Toronto-based artist Gene Threndyle, Chile conjured up travels to masterful resplendent Spanish gardens—their architecture, flora, colour—and thoughts of the kaleidoscopic city he calls home. In Calbuco, a Chilean island fishing town of some thirty thousand people, a venerable old colonial fountain stands in the centre of the town square. Jet-black with three tiers, scarlet-beaked black-headed white swans encircle its base. Yet half choked with garbage, it still managed to cascade a steady stream of water into its granite basin.
After spending some hours carrying heavy stones from the beach and carefully selecting white, violet and yellow shells, Gene embellished each tier, using giant stones in the basin. Moss-covered smaller stones were transported to the upper tier. Teeming with every type of shell available, vivid lime and translucent seaweed made a final debonair touch to the middle tier. Glistening with droplets, the affect was to create something akin to a feast, a cornucopia of the natural world, native to the island. As well as a reclaiming of a pre-colonial world and its elements, it was nothing but cheek. For it looked vastly more glorious as the square’s social focal point than it did in its original garbage ridden disassociated colonial state.
The public, fascinated by the tall sturdy white man and his short brown assistant, struggling with heavily laden plastic bags, took to it. Perhaps the adults who half smiled recognized the splendid irony of it: that it took “a migrant” to add the notably weighty (but impermanent) veneer, making the fountain some witness to pre, colonial, and post-colonial glory and tragedy. For without the Spanish conquest, would there have been a fountain at all?
At Threndyle’s departure, the fountain still stood fully arrayed in its natural glory.
Appalled by the river’s diversion in Santiago (the Rio Mapocho) Threndyle saw a way to return its bones to a source of sorts. The Rio Mapocho’s nature was about to be twisted, redirected to construct a tunnel beneath the river tunnel on top of a new highway. Cars surely constitute Chile’s post-colonial religion. Removing some unearthed stones from the tunnel’s construction site—formerly the river’s bed—Threndyle placed them in a fountain’s basin not far from Matucana 100, the Santiago exhibition site. A letter painted on each stone spelled out the river’s name. Blunt in its simplicity, the eloquence of Threndyle’s warning could hardly be outdone. Will Chileans soon have nothing but more pollution to breathe in as a remembrance of their mighty Rio Mapucho?
For a former immigrant returning to her birthplace, the experience flowed from a different well. Like many returning “home” she was empowered as the “cultural expert." Maybe this weight inspired Amelia Jiménez return to her girlhood. Working with local children in Calbuco, childhood memory inspired her to construct a series of kites with locally bought materials fashioned with imported imagery.
On a cold day at the end of the beacon pier, held aloft, the shiny gold and dark purple paper patches on the white kites shone when they caught the sun.
Although free to catch the cunning winds, strings clutched in small hands braving the elements held them stable. But like those caught in the act of departure, some snatched up by the wind fell into the sea, while others had difficulty in braving the strong winds at all.
Coming from a family fractured by the Pinochet coup in 1974, Jiménez’s work caught in quicksand, shifting identities through multiple migrations and trips back and forth, literally, spiritually and ideologically.
Launching two additional project—shirts and a work in progress based on a rusted see-saw—her work stayed locked in a steadfast gaze backwards. Using Chinese patterned papers bought in Toronto, Amelia constructed girl-sized Chinese-style shirts, hanging one in the window of a Calbuco shoemaker. In a place where illiteracy is in fact not as widespread as in North America, the shirts did not fit somehow. They echoed back to some other shore, where large signs or statues still identify what is for sale in the shop.
The seesaw, encased in unshakeable rust, sat in the grounds of the exhibition in Santiago, with a barely audible sound recording as its only accompaniment. It seemed, like its creator, to be brooding, in a state of arrested childhood. Part of her family fled Pinochet’s regime, while the rest stayed. Jiménez’s return to Chile led to realizations of how those who never leave may flourish. That, and like so many Chileans, she returned to stir that bitter concoction, replete with watery truths, half-truths and untruths around collaboration. Undaunted, the only solid thing in the pot remains that inevitably unanswerable question: would it have been better to never have left at all?
Strewn with such difficult memories, it was to this same childhood field that Sadko Hadzihasanovic returned. Using minimal materials, he worked from published photographs of missing Toronto children, posting photocopied sketches in the midst of graffiti and advertisements on bus stops and posts around Santiago.
On small canvas pieces In Calbuco, one painting in affect reproduced a photograph. The other painting bore the necessary witness to the original but had been carefully aged, as if the child had been missing some years, growing up in some unknown state.
After some negotiation, Hadzihasanovic placed the paintings in a Calbuco variety shop window underneath the handwritten sign, “perdios,” “missing” in Spanish.
Truly, the installation looked banal, as if it had been there always, too long in fact, as the sad brown eyes gazed out of pane to the fountain in the town square. Even if the child were to be found, those missing years will remain resolutely just that: irredeemable and unknowable.
After a single afternoon, Hadzihasanovic, a father himself who fled the former Yugoslavia’s horrific devastations, left the painting in the window but had the sign removed, fearing that locals would think a local child had in fact disappeared from home.
Even in this place, a numbing fourteen-hour non-stop bus ride from Santiago and many thousands of miles from Europe, Hadzihasanovic had redirected terrifying streams of reality. And, shockingly, it was all done through two simple images. Who can imagine the torments slowly crucifying those left behind when a child who is loved, wanted, disappears?
Home. Shelly Bahl’s work in Calbuco made for an odd summoning of all that word conjures up. She found an abandoned half-built house with its concrete posts still encased in wooden coverings, metal bars sticking out of the ends. This impossible home overlooked the sea. Through the glassless window shells, the view opened up to the smaller more distant islands in the Chilean archipelago. After a long search up and down the hilly village streets, she discovered a pale beige wallpaper, evenly covered with flower sprigs. Hanging the papers on viewers’ consciousness with care, gently she layered ideas about orientalism, kitsch appropriation and mass-produced imagery.
She stamped her enticing Indian dancing girls on it in red ink. Bedecked in marvelously intricate jewelry, the knowing half-smiling girls danced all over the paper like apsaras (mythical women, voluptuously enticing supplicants to the true path). Stamped in black ink, other women joined them, suggestively draped over cars alone and in pairs. Hung in strips down and across the house’s skeletal remains the wallpaper was further embellished with pictures from old kitsch magazines and locally bought children’s stickers. In lurid saturated colour, the rosy-cheeked girls leaned forward over their motorbikes’ handlebars, hot in pursuit of girl power.
Surreal, the affect was also beyond pathetic as a place anyone but the most utterly desperate would seek out as a form of shelter. Yet it was this very thing that mirrored the realities faced by real people on the move. Among the smiles and suppressed chuckles of the locals, Bahl played hostess at a house-warming party, complete with refreshments. Though most North Americans would see the village as impoverished, it was likely a working class village. Flooded with fellow and Chilean artists, some of the villagers came along to congratulate Bahl on her new home as well.
Paradoxically the “girl power” stickers and Indian dancing girls played the coquette, mocking the pseudo house-warming gifts, that included an apple, a shirt, a toy tank and soldier and a ceramic white statue of Jesus himself.
At our departure, though many of the gifts left in the house had vanished, the house seemed truly broken-hearted, a hollow place, bereft of walls, windows, cheer, and now, once again, of people too.
The people and the artists left to return to a better life, elsewhere, leaving the dregs of what could not be carried, behind them.
Bahl’s similarly embellished window wallpaper at Matucana 100, the community arts centre, in Santiago struck a bald contrast with the house. Formerly a city works yard, originally it was part of an upscale neighbourhood, but during Pinochet’s dictatorship, it became a border, determined by a class dictatorship. Not far from the contemporary elegant train station (designed by the French architect Eiffel), Matucana 100’s founding represents an attempt to regenerate the area.
For four Canadians, the creative experience in the Third World led to sources being discovered and rethought. No rivers were damned. Seeing the diverse extreme realities of Chilean artists, those with SUVs and those without for instance, lit flames under many charged but productive exchanges. Despite the formidable obstacles they faced on site, each artist returned slightly altered. Fingers searching through still glowing ashes for signs of a phoenix may get burned. But like the raging forest fires scarring Chile’s astounding forests, the passage to Chile left no artist unchanged. Meanwhile Chile shudders under mounting global and political pressure, and suffers pollution’s ravages. Still, the internal indigenous movement struggling for political change and land reform burgeons. And for these artists, the phoenix’s shadow appears in all their creations on their return home.
