Juana Valdes: Terrestrial Bodies

Juana Valdes: Terrestrial Bodies

Drawing on her own experience of migration, this installation by the Afro-Cuban American artist takes an anthropological approach to the history of colonization.

In Terrestrial Bodies, the artist Juana Valdes utilizes the aesthetics and strategies of anthropological research to consider how the legacy of colonization has become entrenched in institutions, hierarchies and, most importantly, objects. Informed by her lived experience of migration as an Afro-Cuban American she examines the history of trade, globalization, and the displacement of various peoples and cultures. Her work incorporates a wide array of practices that include ceramics, sculpture, photography, and video.

A timeline of the ancestors of the artist’s mother anchors the exhibition. Compiled by the genetic testing service 23andMe using Zoraida Valdes’s DNA, the appropriated visualization simplifies a genealogical analysis going back eight generations. The report details an ancestry that is predominantly Sub-Saharan and East Asian, rooting the artist’s family heritage at a crossroads between Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The timeline provides a key to the exhibition as a whole, as it reveals how the ancestry of black and brown populations has been inextricably linked to trade and globalization through the historical exploitation of their labor and bodies.

Over the years, Valdes has collected thousands of seemingly ordinary decorative objects, many of which she presents along the perimeter of the gallery atop a custom-built shelf that cuts through the room, suggesting a horizon line. While it may appear that she selected the objects at random, they all were made as commodities and souvenirs for consumers in the Global North (typically defined as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and other developed nations), using labor and resources from the Global South (which generally refers to less economically developed countries located in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean). These objects, banal as they may seem, are fraught, concrete forms of cultural hybridity, and the literal products of inequitable practices in globalization, markets, and labor production. We can see them as embodiments of the charged power dynamics between colonizer and colonized.

These objects also bear symbols, texts, and other markings that describe their manufacturing histories, points of origin, forms of production, and sources of raw materials. A series of cyanotypes pictures the undersides of the objects, where we often find this information, placed out of view and illegible. By documenting the ways in which the labor, craft, and means of production of these objects are themselves physically obscured, the artist reveals how histories of the Global South are often buried. Her use of the cyanotype process also alludes to the work of Anna Atkins, who, shortly after the birth of photography, used the technique to document her extensive collection of sea algae; the process depicts the objects Valdes photographs in a vivid shade of blue, creating a visual allusion to the oceans these objects traveled and to a larger history of the use of international waters for global trade.

Valdes also applies the cyanotype process to her documentation of oceanic maps, installed on the gallery floor. Since the development of Ptolemy's Geography, advances in mapmaking have turned the abstract notion of global travel into a reality—and enabled the processes of globalization and colonization that followed. The maps in the exhibition depict the expanse of ocean between Africa and Latin America, a passage of particular relevance to the artist’s Afro-Cuban heritage, but she has deliberately left the geographic identifiers out of view. Through their abstraction, these maps allude to how the theoretical ideas of coloniality allowed for the erasure of human identity and for horrific acts to have been perpetrated against colonized people throughout history.

—Ricardo Mor

Juana Valdes is an artist with a multidisciplinary practice that ranges from sculpture to printmaking. Her work explores matters of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class, and has been included in group exhibitions at international venues including Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, MOLAA, Los Angeles (2018); SITElines.2016, SITE Santa Fe Biennial; and El Museo del Barrio and MOMA PS1, both in New York. Grants and fellowships include the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Ellies Award, The New York Foundation for the Arts, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Visual Artists Grant, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Juana Valdes: Terrestrial Bodies is organized by Wanda Texon, Senior Curator of MDC’s Museum of Art and Design.