Argentina Week 4: Rastrillada y Tierra Adentro

The inside. Of you. Of a fruit. Of a land.

A feeling. A pride. A tenderness.

Roots. Deep in soil.

Tierra Caliente.

What is familiar?

What is communal?

What is nation?

How do we arrive at a culture?

This week, I have been thinking about consciousness. The buzzing awareness of now, of reality, of existence. The way we create our landscape is our own personal story, are very own tierra adentro. However, culture does scrape its mark on us, sculpts, or rather, decorates us a bit. In Argentina, and in many other Latin American countries, the colliding of cultures, in the contact zone of colonization, affects the people and the land. The indigenous becomes mestizos, the white becomes off-white, a knew hue of beige, of mocha, of leathery brown.

I wanted to capture this exact notion, the marking of culture on our tierra adentro, on our roots. I found a very gnarly piece of wood, similar to the fiberous shape of a root. I decided to burn and etch markings on the wood. The wood, or root, symbolizes the interior, what lies beneath the surface, what stays close to the warm earth. The markings, symbolize culture, symbolize the inevitable sculpting and shaping of roots, of heritage, of life. I was perhaps going to use a specific indigenous pattern from an Argentine tribe, but I thought, what better than to let my insides, my interior loose on this root.

Furthermore, I began thinking about the rastriada. The rake scraping. La guella, the footprint, the animal track. The lines on the wood symbolize this scraping, this inevitable trace of being human around other humans. The constant dismemberment and reassembledge of our identities, or our consciousness.

Kory