MEMORABILIA

About

The term memorabilia refers to objects associated with memorable people and events. While these items tend to pay tribute to dominant historical narratives, sports figures, or celebrities, the artists in Memorabilia commemorate events that are often ignored or denigrated, such as the extraction of natural resources, land grabbing, dispossession, and the struggle for women’s rights.

In No Flag Large Enough: Colonizer, Cian Dayrit focuses on the hidden histories of the Philippine islands. He signposts and adds vernacular words to his work such as “manlulupig”—a Tagalog word that means colonizer—on the forehead a person resembling Magellan, who colonized the island of Cebu 500 years ago.

Associations between the treatment of land and women’s bodies inspired Priscilla Dobler-Dzul’s embroidery Las Américas, nuestro cuerpo, nuestra tierra y nuestra historia. The work comments upon how the privatization of indigenous land, public sectors, and medical sectors all contribute to the exploitation of natural resources and increased inequality, particularly for women of color. In the words of the artist, “Las Américas is based around our mythologies, our bodies and stories. Stop erasing our bodies and redlining our lands.”

Giovani Fabián Guerrero’s artworks reveal collective memories of his Cherán community (Mexico). In 5 talamontes retenidos (5 seized loggers), he recalls the action led by women defending the forests from timber trafficking on April 15, 2011. On that day, five illegal loggers were caught, bound to a tree, and nearly lynched by the local community, which is afflicted by corruption and forestry crimes. In Memorabilia, he exhibits a large drawing and assemblage from a series inspired by his native community’s struggle for autonomy.

Voluspa Jarpa’s The Last Moment of the Democratic Women’s Association emerged from her research into a 19th century Austrian feminist political movement that demanded more equality, labor rights, and education for women. Inspired by an 1848 lithography entitled The Lips of the Democratic Women’s Club, which presented women’s liberation as a disastrous end to social order, Jarpa’s series of paintings draws connections between salacious cartoons from the 19th century and contemporary pornography, among other representations of the female body and sexuality.