Week Seven: Athualpa

I have told you about Jose Barrios, my father. Better known as Pepe to his family, or "la polvora" to his friends back in Mexico. "La polvora" means gun powder. My Apa tells me he has always been a nice man, cordial and respectful to all. But, when he was young, people did not dare cross him, for if they did, my father would not hesitate to whip out his pistol. He carried one since he was eight years old. He also started drinking and smoking at this age.

Such stories seem impossible to believe. At times I do not know when he is fibbing or telling the absolute truth. In a way, I don't care. It's the way in which he tells it, the shape his words take, like birds made of smoke, as they leave his mouth. These stories were drawn out with Athualpa, as I said in a previous post. Therefore, I decided to sketch my father sleeping, curled up. Wrinkles rake his face. He is wise and old and my friend.

He enjoyed the part where Athualpa shares his favorite description of the pampas, "...como un cielo al revez." My father stopped me at that point and asked me, "Que crees que significa?" "Pues maybe the man thinks that the pampas are so flat that you can't tell where the sky begins and where the land starts." "Alamejor," my papa said. "Or maybe, the man is so in love with the Pampas that he believes it to be heaven. So that the sky does not hold that sacred holy place, the land that he loves is that sacred place."

I drew my father in a landscape of mountains and sky. My father is my heaven, my sacred place. His stories, full of mountains and colors are my Pampas.

Week Six: Hudson Part 2

The return to childhood. Everyone's desire. It was so safe then. It was so warm. It was simple. It was dreamy. Hudson describes his childhood as a playground of wonder. The Argentinian landscape giving him trees and rats to play with.

Reading these passages made me think of my childhood. It was not safe, and it was not that happy. It was rough, and blurry. I never felt happy as a child. A lot of traumatic events that I do not care to talk to caused me to grow up fast, experience raw reality too soon. However, I always managed to push, to strive, to seek happiness.

The drawing I made is small, looks like the page out of a journal. I write in a journal a lot. It keeps my head on straight. In this small picture, I draw my small little home. A yellow house with three small rooms that was always inhabited by at least fifteen family members. People sleeping on the floor. People sleeping on couches. Fast showers, overstuffed refrigerator. My house would get so hot during the summer. Sometimes it would be unbearable to sleep indoors. I remember sleeping outside on my lawn sometimes.

My childhood house is next to a self portrait. A cartoon of me looking a bit sad, a bit distraught. A headdress of shapes shoot from my brain. For me, depression has always been by my side. I try my best to use if for the good. To create. Those shapes sprouting from my head came to me at a moment of great depression. Focusing on the patterns was a form of meditation, it helped distract me. So, that is how I began to draw, to focus on the pleasure of creating a curvaceous line, of cross-hatching. My childhood constructs my headdress.

Week Five: Hudson

Although we were to read Hudson for this week, I had an unexpected surprise.

My father called early on the Tuesday of that week and told me, "Hija, voy pa ya. Te veo en seis horas." Typical of my father. Always spontaneous. Even at his ripe age of 65. The open road, driving for hours, he is no stranger to these things. He was a truck driver for many years. He would sometimes drive fifteen hours straight. "Los Barrios son buen choferes," he would proudly say with a slight tilt of his head. Then a hearty laugh would rise from his belly and his beautiful smile would send stars into the universe.

My father is my friend. I would even vouch to say he is my soul mate. So, naturally, we stayed in bed that afternoon and I read to him. I read to him Athualpa. He loved it. Was inspired, just as I was. We would pause at a line and marvel at it. He then proceeded to tell me many stories. One in particular will stay with me forever. He said that once, he was driving through the Mexican Sierras, and as he descended from a high ridge in his truck, he saw a vast canyon. The most beautiful landscape he has ever seen. He told me that at that moment, the landscape penetrated his eyes, consumed him, and became part of his soul.

I decided to make a lantern depicting Athualpa's wind. The curious gift-giver, leaving traces of magic and stories scattered throughout the Pampas. The medium is paper, burnt with a wood burner and decorated with soft pastels. It gives off a magical, ethereal light. I think if looks as my soul did, imagining my father as a young boy, praising the earth and God.

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