Tu pelo es mi bandera

About

The exhibition “Tu pelo es mi bandera” echoes feminist maxims that allude to the individual but are diluted in the community. The works by Victoria Civera (Port de Sagunt, Spain, 1955), Sandra Gamarra (Lima, Peru, 1972), Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1933) and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1967) defend the will to transcend the individual dimension from a deeply reflective, introspective, almost meditative consciousness that is also open to the collective.

If, as the American sociologist Paula Rust has argued, personal life and politics are indistinguishable, they should be conceived as a seamless continuum rather than as two watertight compartments. Thus, in this exhibition, various affinities are intertwined around a sense of autonomy, belonging and grouping, in a delicate balance between the universal and the particular.

Sandra Gamarra's textile proposal, made from alpaca and sheep wool in collaboration with Elvia Paúcar, a Peruvian master of traditional weaving, recovers and redefines the Peruvian flag, whose classic design is divided into three vertical stripes: two red on the sides and one white in the middle. Legend has it that it was the work of José de San Martín, who, waking from a rest in the middle of a liberation campaign, saw birds flying in these colors and “dreamt” of this freedom for the people of the Spanish viceroyalty. It is often taught in schools that white stands for peace and red for the blood shed to achieve it.

This act of liberation could be seen as a white struggle, and the republics as a victory in which the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities were secondary, without agency. But the artist seeks to refute this narrative by replacing the usual three colors with the skin tones of the inhabitants of the Peruvian viceroyalty depicted in the caste paintings. These caste paintings of Amat are made up of twenty pieces that represent the different ethnic groups that coexisted in the territory that is now Peru. In this way, Gamarra not only breaks with the idea of unity and uniformity, but also includes the multiplicity of inhabitants and the pain that fueled these struggles, as well as pointing out that this new republic is the heir to the problems of the racist, classist and slave-owning society that gave rise to it and that persists to this day.

Formally in line with its geometric aspect (which contains a symbolic charge), we appreciate in Victoria Civera's work A solas the will to conjugate two horizons in one. Two colors (red and light blue) form a differentiated unity on two divided metal surfaces. In addition, the title evokes the isolation of a subjective point in a landscape: the line of union between the metals suggests a horizon or meridian that embraces organic materials (natural gut, fabric, rubber), inviting us to imagine new boundaries in which to reconcile sunset and sunrise.

This installation functions almost as a presentation of Civera's own values: the work here acts as a banner, as a defense of her poetics and grounded practice, in a synthesis as polished as a metal that acts as a mirror.

Once again, the spectator encounters a woman alone, in this case personified in the work of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, who, in her combination of paper and line, presents us with a female figure with a singular braid, folded a screen. Its almost fantastic quality alludes to an evanescence that allows us to reinforce and transcend the idea of femininity. In this oneiric register laden with symbolism, we can notice hair as a collective sign of identity. The braid, like so many other hair manifestations, is used not only as a creative expression, but also as a form of group membership, in a pride that leads us to brandish certain hairstyles as if they were distinctive emblems.

This selection is rounded off by Anna Bella Geiger: two flags whose context suggests the defense of a possible future and the construction of an achievable utopia. Made during Brazil's military dictatorship, the artist explains: “That moment in 1969 at the Praça General Osório, when Brazilian artists gathered with their flags and banners, was not a moment of celebration, but of unity in a struggle for freedom: to express our ideas, to fight to regain the right to vote, to put an end to torture! The flags and banners represented, through another art form, our courage to go into a public space to demonstrate against the dictatorship. I conceived the six flags as strips hanging from a fragile fabric such as taffeta, where the symbolic meaning of the colors of the Brazilian flag prevails. But to these colors I added the color of mourning, black, and embroidered a small flag made of newspaper”.

It seems relevant to point out that these textile pieces, in addition to the use of extremely modest materials, do not have a hem, so that they merge with reality, without an edge or a border to establish a distinction or a boundary. Finally, the notion of the flag shines through as an object that is embodied with all its universal charge in the positioning of the artist, who is accustomed to translating her ideas from the figurative to the abstract in a constant conceptual search for density and fragility.

In this exhibition, therefore, various affinities around community and belonging are intertwined like threads and hair, in a delicate balance between the public and the private.