Recalled Technologies

Imagining movement as a technology of memory

EXHIBITION DATES: April 20th 2023 – August 19th 2023.

CURATED BY: Yolanda Chois Rivera/ Colombia

This story could be a curatorial text. In it everything is possible because we do not need visas, dollars, nor machinery to make it become “real.” All that we need is the intention of making a connection.

We are building a bamboo yurt. We are going to install it at the entrance of Lado V. In that garden, it will appear like a spaceship, like a vortex in time. The yurt will be a micronation, visited by visible beings, ethereal, amorphous, polymorphous, monstrous, before they go on to disappear. We will sit down on different days and nights to participate in a palabreo, a practice in which words are liberated, shared, and do not respond to a hierarchical order. The Wilka Yaku Counsel will guide us. From their andean territory in Cauca, they will bring the wisdom with which they walk and open water and earth portals. That bamboo construction will be made by us, by you who read this, accompanied by Miguel Anacona, a Guadua artisan that lives in the east of a city in the Pacific. 

One day, we will be able to observe, not far away, fishing kites, images traced from the land of the cutwater in Bocas de Ceniza, brought here by the Estudio Nuboso collective. Kites in cyanotype, photos of photos tattooed in stone, the timbers and the facades of Bocas, screen-printed flags that indicate where the wind is coming from to help with the fishing. These images, connected to a cutwater that overlooks an imposing Colombian river as it reaches the Caribbean Sea, carry the strength of this place. In that intersection, a community of fishermen fish with their kites. Their technology is poetic. Estudio Nuboso will take us to see those fishing kites.

One of those nights in the yurt, we will tune our ears and hear the not so distant songs of Toli Toli, a chant of the memory of several Guadeloupeans that accompanied generations, a lullaby that recounts the tale of a small worm that produces silk, the same thread with which people weave a type of fishing net in that archipelago of the Antilles called Guadeloupe. Have you ever heard a Toli Toli? Minia Biabiany will make this possible for us: to somehow observe that deep memory, mediated by a structure, also built in bamboo, which recalls the shape of that fishing net. This way, the Caribbean Sea will be present through a memory of sound, inhabiting the place.

In the yurt, echoes will also be present, voices saved from a conversation that began throughout this time, people who have been exchanging memories, ways of understanding what technology is and what it means to remember, to recover or bring back a technology. Those conversations that have already occurred will become texts and images printed in a machine, also a recovered technology: a risograph printer operated by Simona Riso. Everything that Audu Salisu talked about with Marton Robinson, from the UK to Canada; all that Martanoemí Noriega exchanged with the Wilka Yaku Counsel, from Greece to Colombia; everything that Kwassi Ohene-Ayeh replied to a text about two Black Star Lines, from Ghana to Colombia, all of it went through that Riso machine and will travel to this micronation in San José, rooted by the yurt.

And if none of this happens, this text will remain a testimony of how we can believe and share a rooted imagination to recover and recreate our memories of those who, in different ways and through historical times, have made us believe beyond the possibility of creating worlds.

Yolanda Chois Rivera