artnexus #120

Ever since her college years, Carolina Caycedo (London, 1978) showed interest in devising projects like A toda mecha (Full Throttle) and the Museo de la Calle (The Street Museum), which allowed her to communicate with people in public spaces and leave her studio to carry them out.

Her own biography enables her to define herself as an immigrant. Born in London, she grew up in Bogotá and then lived in Puerto Rico and in various European cities. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

The asymmetrical relations in the exercise of power and the survival of patriarchal biases have brought her practice closer to unprotected communities and to the defense of the environment and the conservation of natural resources; questioning deforestation and the loss of water sources, and stressing the ostracism and dispossession to which large sectors of the population are subjected. All of these are neuralgic points in her oeuvre.

The Amazonian plight prompted her to design her collective project El origen de la noche (The Origin of the Night). With testimonies and the collaboration of indigenous peoples and the photographic work compiled by a biologist among other actions, she developed a performative practice that she has kept in later interventions dealing with destruction caused by the extractive economy and the loss of water sources.

Her self-definition as a “water advocate” points to her concern over the construction of gigantic projects that affect water sources regardless of the consequences for the land and its inhabitants. Brazil and Colombia are sites in Be Dammed, a project she started in 2012. Important segments of this artwork are her hanging sculptures, whose title, Cosmotarrayas, brings together two words: cosmos and atarraya, an artisanal cast net used to enclose fish. For her sculptures, she uses materials obtained through her work with riverside communities that are affected by actions on the water sources from which they obtain their livelihood. One of these sculptural interventions is featured on the cover of this issue.

IVONNE PINI