Witness Clay // Clay as Witness & Deterritorialize

This Sunday, we listen into a day this summer of crossing the practices of our then resident artists with STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES, Amara Abdal Figueroa and Esteban Cabeza de Baca: with a workshop and presentation by Amara, in conversation with artist Maïa Beyrouti, and a studio visit with Esteban Cabeza de Baca.

This mix bridges conversations and textures of the joined events, where Amara’s “Witness Clay // Clay as Witness” invited us to ask ourselves questions around the idea of clay as a witness, to explore how we witness clay, and what this act of witnessing means. What is being witnessed? Where are the subjective tendencies of material and Earth? Of the human? It called upon a shared process of listening with our hands, with clay as a collaborating and negotiating entity. Clay demands a dialogue, a constant adaptation to its needs and demands. It demands of us that if we seek to wield it, to mold it, we must first and foremost listen to it.

During the studio visit with the title Deterritorialize, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Esteban Cabeza de Baca presented his paintings in the framework of his residency at SAVVY Contemporary. We tune into the intimate works produced from observations at the Berlin Wall, serving to deterritorialize and encourage the fall of borders. This context serves to imagine future landscapes of the artist's hometown in the US-Mexico borderland of San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, imagining what de-territorialized spaces look like through multispecies revitalization. The paintings observe native plants, critters, and spliced species that guide philosophical practices of survival in the age of environmental collapse. For the artist, painting is a vehicle for envisioning the world we want as liberation theory, homesick for a world that doesn’t exist. In Deterritorilize, we listen to painting as it imagines the future third world between borders of Nepantla, the Nahuatl word and concept of "in-between-ness”.

The mix was edited and woven by Ola Zielińska.