D.A.B.

(down ass basket)
2024
12" diameter x 24” height
Copper, cotton, and hand-dyed wool (cempasúchil, achiote, and cochineal) basket
Made in residence at Blue Light Junction (Iburra Arts and Research Residency)

1. my parents used to take my sister and i to día de los muertos celebrations in los angeles. every year in school we would build an altar. i often thought about how it was somewhat odd and so beautiful for chileans to take on the holiday in los angeles. i also thought about what kinds of things we assemble to evoke our ancestry. how do you build an altar for copper miners or shepherds? what is it supposed to contain? what kinds of debris can do that sort of thing?

2. i met this 22 year old girl on the campus at a super fancy east coast school last year. she was an archaeology student and told me that she was going to dig near temuco this summer and look for the desa-pare-cidos. i was really happy she had this opportunity, and part of me was jealous that she could go dig up human bodies with zero baggage and for me even talking about chile as an artist was wrapped up in one million contingencies from my family thirty years my senior. but i was also thinking of the argentinian anthropologist laura panizo, whose work documents how the disappearance of bodies during the chilean and argentinian dictatorships represents a rupture to scientific rationality (2005; 2022). the body of the disappeared is a ghost that partakes in making social life, it does "intransferable" things. ghosts appear, they visit family, they haunt us. so when this girl unearths a body, will it become part of a "findings" exhibit at the national or regional museum? what kinds of stories will circulate within state-directed institutions about the findings? i can't imagine the responsibility of having to interpolate (via text) the endless indices of political violence, time, verticality, decomposition, unknowability, or internment that these ghosts offer. it's like eduardo kohn how ghosts think, but versión chilensis. i can't imagine a world where the ghosts no longer push people to keep fighting because people think that all ghosts do is tell stories. anyway, i hope the dig went well.

3. the first time that it got bad, i sat in my car in the parking lot of my apartment and sobbed, more than anything i was confused. i couldn't move from the driver's seat for hours. i eventually found my way upstairs, but if anything i felt good that i could only stomach banana chips intermittently over the next few days. the next day i asked my mom if she could drive me to LAX so i could fly out to the super fancy east coast school and have that encounter with that girl. she agreed. i didn't tell her about the crying in the nissan versa moment. a year passed and we sit in the parking lot of fed ex in granada hills in the same versa. my mom made café de olla and i put some in a cup from my college. i choose two day shipping for the box i had to send. i'm feeling hella sentimental off the concussion. i wish i wasn't so porous, maybe i would be better at feeling. right now i feel like i deserve to beat myself up. i wish there was a cure for being 22 and being literally too down. my mom asks me about my baskets and we talk about wool and we drive home.