Recalled Technologies

Imagining movement as a technology of memory

EXHIBITION DATES: April 27th 2023 – August 19th 2023.

CURATED BY: Yolanda Chois Rivera/ Colombia

There is a constellation that links all the people who participated in this project. It includes many geographical points corresponding to the places we live in. The existing links go beyond the curatorial or editorial exercise; they come from the shared historical time in which the need to interconnect is inherent to the present. This, in turn, gives rise to the emergence of other voices, those of many peoples and individuals who have been on the margins of the construction of visible narratives. In that sense, another important idea is to attend to the need to make connections between realities and worlds that have been isolated from each other for a long time. We conceive our knowledge as fundamental pieces in the contribution to everything that surrounds us. This knowledge comes from places that have been silenced or ignored for a long time in the life model reigning today. Thus, we are moving from being historicized, racialized, colonized, objectified subjects to assuming the position of makers of possible worlds, creators of complex thinking, bearers of ancestral wisdom and ancestral memory, and creators of the scientific processes to come.

This is part of a network that connects us, nourished by both the access to communication facilitated by science and the possibility of considering the specific knowledge, practices, and wisdom of urban and rural communities as an access to a greater knowledge, to certain wisdoms that were never called technologies, but in themselves carry the revolution, create other world foundations, other theories that we are just beginning to weave together. Thus, proposing the idea of Recovered Technologies has to do with bringing together ways of working, ways of seeing the world, and making it possible for other to coexist. It is the movement of our minds and bodies that agitates this process of recovery, through the remembrance of something that was planted or asleep.

This exhibition began with an invitation from TEOR/éTica to propose a project to be exhibited in Lado V. The project is divided into three parts:

A conversation exchange, based on interpretations of Remembered Technologies, between Abdallah Sallisu Kwasi Ohene Ayeh of blaxTARLINES, Martanoemí Noriega, Marton Robinson, and the Consejo Ancestral Willka Yaku. Most of this exchange was transcribed and given form using the risograph technique, and it was printed by Simona Riso in Jamundí, Colombia.

The re-edition of existing installation works by artist Minia Biabiany and the artistic-scientific collective Estudio Nuboso.

Finally, the third element involves creating a physical space within the Lado V space using bamboo or guadua, guide by artisan and constructor Miguel Anacona.

Let’s imagine, then, that this text and exhibition, with its achievements and errors, fantastically invites us to open a portal, from wherever it is being read, to each of the places where artists, thinkers, artisans, philosophers, teachers, among other makers, have put their energy and intention. In this way, we can somehow be in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, listening to a voice that emerges from its roots; we can feel the present of Ghana from a city called Kumasi and especially from KNUST University; we can trace a connection that starts in Greece but has its point of emission in Panama; we can feel the energy nurtured from the Colombian Massif, a very powerful mountain range full of water springs, for the creation of its children; we can perceive the connection of people from the river and the seas with the sky, living in a fishing platform in the Caribbean sea; we can connect with the elemental bamboo or guadua plant, sowed, harvested and built in both Colombia and Costa Rica; we can glimpse the vitality of a thinking that is binding, that lives in someone whose life experience was created between Austria and Ghana, and someone who lives between the north of this continent and whose roots are at its center, in Costa Rica.

Thanks to all the people who have participated during these four months of conversations, thinking and creating, thanks to everything invisible and sacred that sustains us and allows us to create, and thanks to Teorética and especially to Paula Piedra for being there for us in this long journey of remembering our own technologies and wisdom.

Yolanda Chois Rivera