The Architecture of Home: Paola de la Calle’s Poetics of Remembrance 

For Colombian American artist Paola de la Calle, home resides within objects, relationships, and one’s interior self. De la Calle’s latest exhibition at Art League Houston, Everything is Ruins in This House, interrogates the affective and aesthetic confluences between photography, fiber, plastics, and ceramics to express the material and immaterial means in which memory is mediated, and ultimately, sustained. Straddling memoir and manifesto, de la Calle’s multimedia works largely deal with the entanglements of place and identity. Through practices of two- and three-dimensional assemblage, printmaking, and textile-making, de la Calle conjures the complex emotional attachments intertwined with place, such as (be)longing, desire, nostalgia, and ambiguous loss. 

The exhibition’s title and thematic impetus draw from the late Colombian author María Mercedes Carranza’s poem “La Patria,” or the motherland. The poem uses the evocative imagery of architectural ruin to chronicle Colombia as a country inexplicably fractured by years of civil unrest, political violence, colonial occupation, resource extraction, and foreign intervention. The exhibition’s title appears in the first line of the last stanza of “La Patria”:

 

“Everything is ruins in this house,

the hug and the music are in ruins,

destiny, every morning, laughter are ruins;

the tears, the silence, the dreams.

The windows show destroyed landscapes,

flesh and ash are confused in the faces,

In the mouths the words scramble with fear.

In this house we are all buried alive.” *

 

The prose of “La Patria” impresses upon the reader a sense of disassociation and tragic hopelessness. Mercedes Carranza writes with urgent intensity and desperation as she observes the ruin of a country, haunted and disillusioned by the ghostly architectures of people come and gone. The last line, “In this house we are all buried alive,” was the title of de la Calle’s first solo exhibition organized by San Francisco’s SOMArts in July 2023. The artist considers this iteration at Art League Houston to be a sequel to her show last summer: “I don’t feel finished. I don’t feel done talking about these themes. Some of the works felt like they had a part two to them.” **

De la Calle aims to visually unearth histories of social and political action, stories of resistance, and practices of self-liberation hidden beneath the literal and metaphorical surface. She explores issues of suffering, migration, and activism, particularly those that intersect with land and labor.

Collecting and archiving emerge as integral practices that nourish de la Calle’s reconstitution of material and image. She considers the utility and familiarity of an object to be its most valuable qualities. When sourcing objects, she often asks if they could exist within her own family’s home — and many of them have. A few of the found objects on display are inherited from her father. This employment of found domestic objects like mirrors and picture frames recalls Mercedes Carranza’s poetic metaphor of home as nation, furthering the thesis that the everyday is political. 

Tale As Old As Time (Reflejo) (2023), a golden tabletop mirror with a scalloped stand and multimedia collage on the interior glass surface, transports the viewer into the domestic realm.

The mirror is positioned alone in front of wallpaper designed by de la Calle composed of rich, dark reds and greens. Repeating patterns of butterfly wings and an ancient Isthmo-Colombian gold zoomorphic pendant draped in luxurious green silk ornaments the wallpaper. Pulsating with graphic energy, the canvas-mirror confronts the viewer with a constellation of motifs representing culture, nature, and violence.

De la Calle plays with a collapsing of time in which ancient artifacts coexist with 20th century plastic toys. The same golden pendant appears on the interior mirror, intersected by a toy soldier whose gun fires with sparks of ruby red beads. The gunfire sprays outward puncturing lush images of plants, urban architecture, and a half-winged butterfly. In this work, as well as others in the exhibition, the perimeters of images are transgressed; their traversal highlighted through prominent, nonlinear sutures of hand-stitched thread. De la Calle draws forth the inherent tension between hard/soft; present/past; precious/non-precious; and beauty/violence. The use of canvas as mirror offers a poignant metaphor of De la Calle’s practice at large in which canvas serves as the reflexive surface to investigate the relationship between gaze, identity, and place. 

Another mirror-based piece titled Herencia (Tu Eres Tus Antepasados) (2024) reminds viewers, in de la Calle’s words, that “your existence is inherited from the people that came before you.” ** This work also contains both found and hand-crafted elements. Inlaid above the mirror is a ceramic plaque that features the word “herencia” in bas relief. As one of the more poignant moments of self-reflection in the exhibition, this installation offers the visitor a space of solace and remembrance.

Critical Tropicana: El Campo, Labor, and Industry 

De la Calle’s slightly dreamy and surreal world of warm colors and lively textures is undercut with a critical awareness of the shifting ideas of Colombia as a place vacillating between paradise and violence. This exhibition offers counternarratives that unlink Colombia’s past with dramatized tales of Pablo Escobar and the War on Drugs that cloud the general North American consciousness. De la Calle’s deconstruction of the recognizable lexicon of Colombian imagery such as coffee beans and bananas, tropical landscapes enclosed by sweeping mountain ranges, and religious icons and symbols can perhaps be articulated as critical tropicana. In this way, de la Calle subverts the allure, romance, and commodification of tropical geographies, cultures, and peoples. In the same manner that Mercedes Carranza’s poem contends with the tension between the picturesque and ruin, de la Calle navigates the terrain of image and truth. Scenes of sensual fabrics and lush tropical forests exist alongside photographs of Medellín’s built environment of high-rise cityscapes and overcrowded barrios, as seen in A Mountain is a Scar (The Story of When the Earth Collided) (2024). The materiality of the textile surface also serves as a place of conjuncture. The raw, slightly frayed edges of coarsely woven canvases are severely juxtaposed with glossy, vibrant images, elucidating the textile planes as points of interface.

The multimedia collage Campo (Pulmón de la Tierra) (2024) is perhaps most explicitly ecological in content, directly engaging with the social, economic, and political conditions of land use, especially in relation to rapid deforestation of tropical environments, dwindling biodiversity, and the violence and mistreatment suffered by laborers. The shape of the central biomorphic graphic composition loosely resembles the symmetrical, duplicative form of lungs. A semiotic mix of religious iconology, glowingly green ripe bananas, dried beans, horses, and pastoral landscapes constitute the image’s skeleton. With a strange chimeric transfixity, the configurations of native Colombian architecture, ecology, and animals are positioned as mirror reflections that unfold from the center canvas. Campo primes the visitor to reflect on the ways that nationhood and identity can be constructed and mutable.

A ceramic grenade anchors two intersecting silver chains that drape the bottom frame. Like a pendant hanging from one’s neck, this adornment further expresses a connection between land and body. The grenade holds multiple meanings: it is equally symbolic of the current state of global psychological and ecological distress as it is a call to consider what lies below the surface, and it functions as a forthright reminder of the ongoing danger of makeshift landmines in Colombia. 

America Invertida (After Joaquín Torres-García) (2023) examines the relationship of power and cartography. The title nods to the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s well-known 1943 drawing of the same name. Torres-García sought to reframe the South as the “new North” to challenge the assumption that artistic and cultural centers of production are concentrated in North America and Western Europe. John Berger also spoke of this re-orientation and expansion of perception resulting from movement: “To emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.” ***

De la Calle’s version of America Invertida pictures an abstracted and flipped map of South America superimposed with a collage of fruit, lace, and traditional cooking pots and dress. Lines of longitude and latitude painted with coffee, ocean waves scrawled with childlike abandon, and charming representations of the sun and moon stain the background of the canvas. This upending of South America illustrates how existing structures of power, value, and meaning are embedded and activated in objects that represent fixed knowledges, like maps.

Opposite of America Invertida is one of de la Calle’s largest textile works to date. Titled The Embrace (2023), the piece features the artist’s signature style of collage, this time with a more expanded range of textiles, including found fabric, cotton, and chiffon. The form of The Embrace is architecturally inspired, with its arch-like painted background and hand-sewn patchwork of pictures resembling fragments of a stained-glass window. The two central figures pose in a nominal embrace, smiling and directing their gaze toward the viewer. A black checkerboard pattern is sewn across the subject’s faces as an act of protection. This refusal of legibility expresses the notion of a life lived under constant threat; how one’s existence, without official documentation, designates one to live in shadow. In the sweeping background, an aircraft flies over photographs of Medellín, leaving behind an expulsion of chemicals visualized as red fabric netting. Culminating in an altarpiece-like crescendo, de la Calle’s motifs of foliage, fabric, bananas, bricks, and horns organically form the work’s upper pediment.

Bold slashes of yarn outline the borders of the textiles and the contours of the two figures. The legible stitch marks conceptualize memory, both materially and spatially. The stitches can be thought of as sutures, a joining of images, people, and place across time. The use of hand-stitched thread in de la Calle’s work represents a mending of disjointed and fragmented memory. 

Tactile Memory 

Textiles are uniquely suited for meaning-making and enacting ways of remembering. 

De la Calle’s foray into cloth and textiles was encouraged by a yearning for a surface with greater tactility compared to paper, and her childhood experience of learning to sew from her Tia Tata, who worked at a Coach factory. An interest in imbuing sculptural dimensionality to her collages led her to explore screenprinting and hand stitching on textile surfaces. This newfound tactile expression  contributed to an enriched critical investigation of photography as topological surface. It is indeed the surface of the material where de la Calle locates the site of critical intervention. 

The work Tio Jaime (Retrato de Un Bananero) (2024) commemorates the life of de la Calle’s uncle and the labor history of  banana plantation workers in Colombia. The central portrait is of de la Calle’s uncle, who worked for Dole and developed stomach cancer due to prolonged exposure to pesticides used to treat the banana crops. The textile piece narrates a personal story of grief and loss in addition to honoring victims of a violent massacre known as the Banana Massacre, which took place on December 5-6, 1928, in Ciénaga. Laborers of the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita, went on strike in November of that year to demand improved working conditions and treatment. Weeks passed with no negotiation from the company on these demands, resulting in the deployment of 700 Colombian Army soldiers by Miguel Abadia Mendez. The ensuing violence led to the death of up to 2,000 workers. The textile’s surface also includes a photograph of the five murdered strike organizers. In this work, de la Calle weaves together “The stories that don’t get told and the people whose lives don’t get to be honored or remembered.” **

De la Calle deeply considers how messages are shared between families, the evolution of oral storytelling, and the diasporic experience of communicating across borders. WhatsApp (La Idea Siempre Fue Regresar) (2023) introduces the technological dimension to contemporary practices of memory and cultural production. In many parts of Latin America, the messenger service WhatsApp is widely used and regarded as the primary mode of international digital communication. 

Printed using a mixture of coffee and iron, WhatsApp renders a landscape of Medellín with beautifully nuanced shades of ochre. The architecture and mountain range are highly pixelated, verging on impressionistic. The phrase “La Idea Siempre Fue Regresar,” followed by two checkmarks (an icon indicating a message has been sent and read on WhatsApp) is boldly articulated in negative space squarely across the mountain range. The text translates to “the idea was always to return,” which references de la Calle’s parents’ desire to eventually return to Colombia while living in the United States. When combined with iron, the painted or printed coffee will naturally break down over time with exposure to light and other environmental elements. De la Calle’s choice to include iron is intentional and should be understood as an exercise of personal agency allowing her to decide what remains remembered and what fades to be forgotten. As stated by the artist, “the image will fall apart over time as memory does.” **

The series titled A Calling Card is a Portal (2024) engages with themes of technology, memory, collecting, and archival practices. De la Calle memorialized letters and documents, family photographs, Google map searches, WhatsApp messages, memes, and other digital media by transferring the images onto ceramic ‘calling card’ plates. Some of the ceramic cards are spare, containing only hand-glazed text such as “Entre aqui y alla” and “Aqui no cabe tu memoria,” while others hold abstracted geographical contours of South America, another nod to Joaquín Torres-García. This act of fossilization preserves the ephemerality of a calling card, rectifying its material trace while also externalizing the digital communication between de la Calle’s friends and family.

Mosquitoes and Mines: A Home Inside A Home

Two printed chiffon fabrics, Mosquitos y Mines (2023-2024), hang from the ceiling in the center of the gallery. Tied to resemble the form of mosquito nets, the fabrics are cinched by rope and weighted by chains that extend downward to meet mounds of loose dirt. The newest sculpture, produced in 2024, contains charms encasing stills from digitized family videos attached along the length of its chain. Three ceramic grenades lay flat against the dirt. The sister sculpture, made last year, features ceramic grenades in place of charms along the chain. A collection of de la Calle’s father’s toy soldiers tethers the chain to the floor. The mosquito nets are, in essence, “a home within a home,” as described by the artist, representing the thin boundary of protection between external threats and one’s own interior safety. Mosquito nets aptly illustrate how cloth or fabric mediate between the body and environment. They too prompt associations between land and climate.

The presence of soil in the gallery references the ongoing excavations by the Colombian government to expel makeshift landmines. The landmines are strategically concentrated in provincial, agricultural areas and therefore directly impact rural communities. The process of extraction involves removing the top layer of soil, which de la Calle allegorically equates with removing a layer of history. The soil, like history and memory, can be stripped, removed, and dispersed at will.

De la Calle’s practice gives substance to the nebulous spatial experience and loss of diaspora and displacement. The word “scar” is inscribed across several textile surfaces as another reminder of the physical residues of memory that live on and in the body. De la Calle’s procedural methods of assembly, collage, and reconfiguration of materials and objects is reparative. In Regarding the Pain of Others, published shortly before her death, Susan Sontag gave expression to the capacity of visual media to combat the ever-present dangers of erasure in regard to human suffering: “The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”

Zhaira Costiniano, Curator and Exhibitions Manager at Art League Houston, underscored the commitment of the organization to presenting artists and practices that engage issues of memory and materiality: “Art League is continuing to explore themes of cultural amnesia and be a platform for such stories to be told and shared.” 

* Jorge Valbuena, “La patria y otros poemas de María Mercedes Carranza,” La Raíz Invertida.
**  Interview with the artist, May 23, 2024.
***  John Berger, And our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos (London: Writers and Readers, 1984), 38.

 

Everything is Ruins in This House is on view at Art League Houston through July 21, 2024, alongside Noel Maghathe’s exhibition Enough for Me in the Main Gallery and Face Me by Jack Morillo in the Hallway Gallery.