Abstract
In 2018, the performance artist Maria Jose Arjona (b. 1973, Colombia) created a new work for her mid-career retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá: an artist book that refigured the tenth-century fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood” via graphic score, drawing, text, and collage. Developed as an anchor for a series of participatory workshops with children, many either migrants or living in orphanages, the book posed a series of questions intended to catalyze a collective, oracular questioning of community and belonging. The following conversation between Arjona and curator Jennifer Burris takes a close reading of this project as a springboard into understanding the political activism that grounds the artist’s practice. Set against the then-nascent Venezuelan migration crisis in Colombia, Arjona’s project transfigured the mythic language and imagery of an iconic fairytale into an embodied exploration of contamination, borders, and fear of the unknown. Its reimagining approached the original story as a manuscript capable of revealing the organization and modes of power within Western society: an inscription of political embodiment, social interaction, and the enforcement of law and order. Further areas of focus within this conversation include concepts drawn from the original fairytale—drag, desire, and notions of belonging—as well as structural elements of the participatory workshop, like the oracular within radical imagination, architectures of affect created by bodies in a group, and biases inherent in one’s own positioning. Together, these components cohere into Arjona’s approach to performance and form the foundation for her political address to the future.
My gratitude to Maria Jose Arjona for her collaboration across a period of profound personal transition, to Inés Arango for her incisive comments and research support, and to Claudia Segura, with whom I first engaged and began to understand Maria Jose’s work.
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Notes
- 1.
Hay que saberse infinito/To Be Known as Infinite (March 10–May 26, 2018) was organized in four sections: Mientras en el medio/While In-between; Mientras en la ciudad/While in the City; Mientras en la tierra/While in the Earth; Mientras en el aire/While in the Air. In addition to Arjona’s constant residency at the museum, a group of invited artists, all trained in durational movement, re-activated certain works previously performed by Arjona. These artists were Diana Amaya, Diana Angel, Jennyfer Caro, Walter Cobos, Susana Gómez, Santiago González, Mario Orbes, Verónica Orozco, Camilo Ospina, Alejandro Penagos, Daissy Robayo, Bernardo Tovar, Catalina Urdaneta, Javiera Valenzuela, Didier Vergel, and Felipe Villamil. An exhibition catalogue published by MAMBO in July 2018 included all curatorial texts alongside contributions from Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Ricardo Arcos-Palma, André Lepecki, and Juan Sebastián García Sierra.
- 2.
French-Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona (1929–2007) designed the postmodern Museo de Arte Moderno between 1977 and 1988 using the signature red brick that has become a stylistic icon of the city. Clean lines are juxtaposed against ornamental flourishes and a multiplicity of windows—intended to integrate with and reflect Bogotá’s surrounding landscapes.
- 3.
Maria Jose Arjona, Watermill Center—Permanente, 2009/2018. Long-durational performance (reactivation), MDF boards.
- 4.
Maria Jose Arjona, Línea de vida/Lifeline, 2016/2018. Long-durational performance (reactivation), glass bottles, acrylic, and waxed string. This work was developed at the roaming art residency LARA in 2017, which took place in the Galápagos Islands. Arjona became interested in the horizontal movement of sea lions as they slid through the sand, transitioning between water and land.
- 5.
Maria Jose Arjona, Libra de contabilidad/Accounting Book, 2018. Intervened book.
- 6.
As of 2021, there are an estimated two million Venezuelans living in Colombia. The border between the countries has historically been one of the most dynamic in South America; following Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in 1998, a series of five migration waves of Venezuelans to Colombia have taken place, the most recent driven by President Nicolás Maduro’s policies, which have increased unemployment, inflation, and food shortages. While the first waves mobilized a majority of upper- and middle-class Venezuelans, this last wave has been primarily low-income people who have migrated by foot across the border and over a major mountain range, the Cordillera Oriental, to Bogotá.
- 7.
André Lepecki, “the inside of the outside of things,” September 2021. Curatorial text for the solo exhibition at NC-arte Como és adentro és afuera: Un proyecto de Maria Jose Arjona/Within as Is Without: A Project by Maria Jose Arjona (September 30, 2021–December 18, 2021).
- 8.
Here Arjona is referring to the country-wide protests and mass mobilizations of 2021. Sparked by a proposed tax reform that would target subsistence goods in an economy already deeply impacted by both COVID and governmental quarantines, the protests expanded to a general revolt against police brutality and social inequality. Acts of violence—on the part of institutional power as well as the protestors—were widespread.
- 9.
Arjona was the inaugural artist to exhibit at Ballroom Marfa in October of 2003. She later performed her long-durational work Silla/Chair (2011) at a New York City benefit for the non-profit art space.
- 10.
See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- 11.
Conceived by Arjona alongside FLORA ars+natura artistic director José Roca in 2019, AMAZONAS was a year-long creative laboratory and academic investigation for the live arts. Focused on the body, it engaged students of performance, dance, happening, and voice. The name derives from the Amazonas region of Colombia, whose unique topography and biodiversity open up a way of understanding not just the landscape, but also the body with a pluralistic perspective.
- 12.
As part of Arjona’s solo project Como és adentro és afuera/Within as Is Without at NC-arte, she invited a group of performers to create new works for the 38th floor of Bogotá’s Torres Atrio. This unused, dust-filled expanse was staged with a soundtrack Arjona created as well as suspended copper sculptures that rendered in graphic form the outlines of pieces of the “oracle” found on the Sierra Nevada shoreline. Invited artists included Camilo Acosta, Sebastian Arenales, Juan Betancurth, Lina Botero, Cristina Consuegra, Ana Contreras, Daniel Corredor, Juanita Delgado, Vanesa Gomez, Bellaluz Gutierrez, Jessica Mitranni, Alejandro Penagos, Elisa Triana, Villamil y Villamil, Demonia Yeguaza, and 9 voltios.
- 13.
A cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist, Davis has written a number of books either focused on or related to Colombia, including Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia (New York: Knopf, 2020) and One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
- 14.
See: Stefano Pau, “Más allá del ‘infierno verde’ y del ‘paraíso perdido’: Paisaje y perspectiva medioambiental en dos novelas amazónicas peruanas” in América: el relato de un continente, edited by Susanna Regazzano and Fabiola Cecere (Venice: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2019); José Manuel Rubio Recio, El Amazonas: el infierno verde (Madrid: Anaya, 1988).
- 15.
See: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2013).
- 16.
Arjona performed the work “Untitled” from her Serie blanca—acuérdate de acordarte/White Series—Remember to Remember as part of the seventh edition of In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Curated by André Lepecki, these ten days of performative, theoretical, and practical debates reflected on the fine line between the status of the object and being the subject.
- 17.
Lepecki describes this moment, including the institutional staff’s efforts to corral errant bubbles using butterfly nets, in his book Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 18.
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is an isolated mountain range in northern Colombia set against the Caribbean. It’s known for the continued presence of indigenous peoples descended from the Tayrona civilization: the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco, and Kankuamo. Their central belief is that the Sierra Nevada forms the beating heart of the world: what happens to the mountains will soon happen everywhere.
- 19.
Lepecki, “the inside of the outside of things.”
- 20.
The Atrio towers in downtown Bogotá is a mixed-use commercial development project consisting of two towers, one of which, when finished, will be the tallest building in the country. Backed by Colombia’s largest bank, Bancolombia, the towers are situated at the intersection of two major streets, Avenida el Dorado and Avenida Caracas. Designed by architect Richard Rogers, the building overlooks both the Cementerio Central and Barrio Santa Fé, a once-prosperous district now known as a red-light zone riddled with sexual violence crimes. La Red Comunitaria Trans, a trans-feminist organization advocating for the rights of trans women through activism, art, and social protest, is located in the neighborhood and is highly influential both locally and nationally. Similarly, the formerly grandiose nineteenth-century Cementerio Central is currently used surreptitiously for magic rituals of the syncretic Caribbean witchcraft tradition of entierros.
- 21.
See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome” in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987), 3–25.
- 22.
Referencing the Uruguayan socialist guerilla group, the House of Tupamaras proclaims: “Somos una guerrilla marica, nuestro manifiesto es el baile/We are a fag guerrilla, our manifesto is dancing.” See www.tupamaras.com; accessed December 6, 2021.
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Arjona, M.J., Burris, J. (2023). Maria Jose Arjona, Into the Woods. In: Hannum, G., Pyun, K. (eds) Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09378-4_11
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