Catalina Swinburn (Santiago, 1979) has been working with the geopolitical concept of displacement. Her practice of weaving vintage documents paper sheets as support became a manifest of political disagreement by using documents of displaced patrimonial treasures, or musical scores of operas with exile thematics, or geopolitical maps. Her weaving exercise is trespassing by a diasporic feeling with a poetic and subtle aesthetic. She persues to rescue ancestrals rituals related to sacred places, ancestral geography and original memory.
Catalina’s work translate into key messages and universal concerns such as: sustainability, identity, gender equality and globalisation underlining the connections of the Global South throughout history. The use of weave and vintage documets are used by her as a vital and dynamic language for raising awareness both physically and conceptually while aiming to strengthen the integration between various communities from the Global South in making reference to female resilience.
The work of Catalina Swinburn operates on a shifting border she establishes between cult and artistic practice. Her exploration of different visual media –video, installation, photography and performance results in often metaphoric and symbolic manipulations, which challenge reality as a representation of a world the artist is living in. Her practice summarises her identity as a female Latin American artist in an era with a multiplicity of encounters and realities.
The starting point of the series of paper works, is an investigation related to displaced archaeological pieces that were taken from their original place, and travelled to different institutions around the world to be exhibited as a power emblem. These skins —with their various folds and contingent aspects— are the place of fissures and traces bearing witness to memory. The process in which Catalina Swinburn creates her interpersonal work emphasises on the human necessity of the conditions of being, loss and destruction. Regenerating these narratives articulates for the artist both a sense of urgency and a mode of resistance. The artwork is therefore activated by the artist’s position as both fabricator and performer of the sculpture. This could be seen as a metaphor for resistance, where woven narratives are portrayed as a substitute for the silence of women throughout history.
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