California-based artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández explores colonization, extraction, and exploitation in the Southwest in her exhibition Oleaje at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona.
Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: Oleaje
February 10–August 4, 2024
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona
Using a fascinating mix of materials including soil, sequins, and blood, San Francisco, California–based artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández seeks to “map and memorialize the rippling effects of a coercive global trade industry.” Her solo exhibition Oleaje is on view through August 4, 2024 at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, where it was curated by Keshia Turley, the museum’s assistant curator.
Spanish for “groundswell,” the exhibition’s title references seismic disturbances in ocean waters, suggesting the idea that nothing happens in isolation. Throughout the show, Aranibar-Fernández amplifies the connections between extraction and exploitation, reflecting her ongoing interest in the impacts of mining and trade, particularly in South and Central America, Africa, and parts of Asia.
Born in Bolivia and raised in a region flanked by the Amazon jungle and the Andean mountains, Aranibar-Fernández draws on her personal experience of “witnessing the devastation of her homeland’s natural environment by foreign corporations,” according to the exhibition text. She uses extensive archival research that’s translated here into intriguing cartographies and topologies through hand-sewing, planting, and other processes that echo Indigenous traditions.
Testimonio de flores (testimony of flowers) (2022-24), a suspended textile created with tulle, embroidered flowers, sequins, glass beads, and copper, poetically orients viewers to the journey before them as they enter the exhibition—its black beading suggesting trade routes across continents and oceans. Nearby, a two-channel video, Oleaje II (Groundswell II) (2023), filmed under waters traversed by cargo ships and within mountains scarred by silver mining, speaks to the profound connections between water and land, as well as the destruction capitalist systems wreak on the environment and the marginalized communities whose labor undergirds colonial power structures.
The sophisticated synthesis of materiality and labor-intensive processes that makes this exhibition so compelling is particularly evident in Sembrando (Sowing) (2024), a floor installation conceived as a living, borderless, ever-changing map, within which Aranibar-Fernández planted materials she calls “history tellers,” such as charcoal, cotton, and terra preta soil prevalent in the Brazilian Amazon region. By incorporating San Pedro cactus native to the Andes region of South America, and seeds sourced from Native Seeds/Search in Tucson, Arizona, she suggests the importance of biodiversity, sustainable farming, and food security on a global and local scale.
Two additional works stand out, in part because they’re made with materials tied to histories of extraction and exploitation in Arizona. Whereas copper suggests the impacts of mining on Indigenous communities, cotton alludes to the experiences of migratory workers and the role of cotton farming in the region’s water scarcity.
For La memoria de las huellas (the memory of imprints) (2022), Aranibar-Fernández suspends sixty-one copper plates etched with acid in the air, each bearing the image of a specific copper pit in South America on one side and the geographic coordinates of that pit on the other. She’s titled the installation to reference both “visual similarities between mine topographies and human fingerprints” and “the physical impressions that remain as open wounds on the earth.”
For Rastros (Traces) (2023), Aranibar-Fernández stitched lines reflecting the busiest global maritime trade routes onto cotton fabric using white thread dyed with blood, then removed the thread to leave only faint blood stains that fade over time. Here she references unseen impacts such as damage to underwater ecosystems and claims of provenance while alluding to blood spilled for capitalistic pursuits.
Through her rigorous processes and rich materiality, Aranibar-Fernández eloquently speaks to the exploitation of natural resources, the intersections of colonization and extraction, and the connections between exploitative labor practices and marginalized communities.
By embedding damning histories and contemporary expressions of extraction and exploitation within the beauty of hand-sewn, floral-laden cartographies and shimmering metallic forms, Aranibar-Fernández invites viewers to consider their own complicity in creating and sustaining the harms of global trade.
