Calabazas / Gourds 1992. Gourds, polyurethane foam, wood, glue.

CALABAZAS AT SAN FRANCISCO ART SPACE

Calabazas / Gourds at San Francisco Artspace. San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.

The idea for the exhibition at San Francisco Artspace titled Calabazas, was to make sculptural objects out of indigenous materials from Colombia. In so doing I break with the Latin American High Art tradition, by my choice of materials which would be considered "not worthy of Art"; in Latin America they would be too common, too familiar, too close to our reality. But presented to the North American audience, the materials look exotic and unrecognizable, the meanings are lost, and the work speaks mostly at a formal and sensory level. Paradoxically the work, although of ti common ti materials, fulfills the expectations of exoticism usually placed on Latin-American artists like me.

Gourds were used by pre-Columbian cultures as containers. Somehow, in urbanized and industrialized Colombia, this tradition has survived and gourds are still used in daily life. I have mixed this element of Colombian cultural history with the modernist, formalist aesthetic tradition (which sought inspiration in natural forms and exotic cultures).

This piece, as well as the "panela" piece, were part of a exhibition in which the concept was to make sculptural objects out of indigenous materials from Colombia. In so doing I break with the Latin American High Art tradition by using materials "not worthy of Art", as they are too common, too familiar, too close to our reality. But presented to the North American audience, the materials look exotic and unrecognizable, the meanings are lost, and the work speaks mostly at a formal and sensory level. Paradoxically the work, although of "common" materials, fulfills the expectations of exoticism usually placed on Latin-American artists like me.

BANDERA / FLAG
Guava candy.

Blocks of white and red guava candy called "bocadillos", are the most traditional and typical Colombian desert candy. Displayed on the floor, in the dimensions of a standard flag, it becomes a nationalistic symbol of pop Colombian culture. Presented to an audience foreign to Colombian traditions and culture, it looks like a minimalist arrangement of somewhat imperfect industrial products, except that this clean and sterile arrangement has an intense smell of guava.

PANELA
Sugar blocks.

Agua de Panela is a very sweet hot drink made out of these raw blocks of sugar. First, you break it in clunks using a river stone. Then you boil it. It smells delicious, and if you have a cold, you add a little bit of lime on it. It is an energy drink, used by the poorest in society, as it gives you raw energy and keeps you going. Colombian cyclists use it in the tour of France as their secret weapon. It is great to warm up in cold weather and you can add small pieces of fresh cheese which melt and become squeaky as you chew them.

These square, pre industrial blocks, are the most basic units of the sugar industry. You don’t need containers for the raw sugar. They are simply cut in squres while still a hot thick fluid, and then air dried. They will keep the shape and are quite strong. I like how these very basic manufacturing methods are so popular and important to our culture. I made an abstract constructivist arrangement of these sweet-smelling blocks. I was thinking of Mies van der Rohe while making it. Decades later they are still perfectly preserved in storage in San Francisco.

GLUE / COLA
Cowhide glue and metal

I remember the distinct bad smell of the glue carpenters used when I was a child. They had to melt it with heat before using it so it’s scent would fly around the streets of Bogota. This was before the invention of artificial glues, like PVA, or Elmers Glue, or Colbón. For my exhibition at SF Artspace I was looking for exotic unrecognizable materials in Colombia. I was surprised to still find in use these mysterious sticks of cowhide glue were still available in large sacks, completely unrecognizable with a mysterious patina and smell. I stringed them in a metal coil and hung some of them.

JABON DE BARRA / LAUNDRY SOAP BARS
White soap, blue soap and jabon de tierra/ earth's soap.

One of my most vivid memories was always playing near the ‘alberca’ while Blanca Ines, our housekeeper washed clothing by hand. She used a ‘totuma’ to pour water on it, and rubbed the fabric with white and blue soaps as they made the whites whiter. When I went to study for an MFA in the USA I was surprised that nobody washed their clothes by hand, and instead powder soap and laundry machines were used. I like the pre-industrial legacy of these soap objects, raw cubes of several kinds of soaps, and the fact that they were still widely available in Colombia. Their strong smells will give a hint to the viewer to what they were, but for an industrialized audience they probably couldn’t guess what these objects and materials were for.

JABON DE BOLA / LAUNDRY SOAP BALL
Laundry soap bars

I was also very pleased to find a ‘jabon de tierra’, which is probably the oldest and most simple kind of soap. These brown blocks are simply fat and ashes. What I found weird and interesting was that this ‘earth soap’ was meant to be used in your body. It smells really bad as you used it, but none of that smell sticks to you.

Curiously enough, I had kept all of these sculptures in storage in San Francisco, and they look magnificent, with a little bit of a white patina, but perfectly preserved.

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“ Cardoso continued her investigation into the cultural significance of natural elements in a series called Colombian Materials. In a return to her method of placing preserved animals in positions and arrangements in which order and repetition predominate, Cardoso made a sculptural installation entitled The Amazon (1992), comprised of numerous desiccated piranhas mounted on stands, which face in the same direction as if swimming in unison. Upon their pedestals they are simultaneously magnificent and threatening and yet also inert tourist souvenirs, embodying all the clichéd cultural assumptions about these fish, once menacing natural wonder now industrially farmed. Flag (1992) addressed the issue of nationhood, identity, and the produce originating from the land simply by imitating the form of a flag in the distinctive pink-striped, handmade guava sweets typical of Colombia. An aesthetic of organic minimalism and hand-manufactured readymade meets with an evocation of the consumption of identity, the basis of modernity and of the end of colonialism in the era and politics of the nation-state. Cultural specificity, distinctiveness, and localism are foregrounded over the mass-produced, branded and imported. Gourds is a
series of sculptures that assemble the near spherical, egg-like, and biomorphic shapes of gourds into chains, columns, and clusters like cells dividing. The materials however, also have a popular and folkloric connotation derived from Colombian culture “.

Roca, Jose y Martin, Alejandro.
Animalario de Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
(Bogotá: Seguros Bolívar, 2013), 19.