A Mi Vida

BY kukuli velarde                           

A MI VIDA

I am a Peruvian-American artist. My work in general revolves around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture. It is a visual investigation about aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. I focus on Latin American history because it is the reality with which I am familiar. I do so, convinced that its complexity has universal characteristics and any conclusion can be understood beyond the frame of its uniqueness.

My series is titled A Mi Vida (To My Vida). Each piece in this body of work sports my daughter’s features when she was six. I got pregnant at forty-eight and gave birth to a child we named Vida (Life). She has added to my life experience and fed my work in ways I never expected. The idea of creating these intimate works sprouted from my surrendering to parental love and being resigned to the emotional pain that will come when her world shifts away from ours when she grows up. I may have tons of photos of her, but once she is gone to follow her path, my arms will be left empty. I give myself, through the pieces, a chance to embrace her, always one time more, if only in her effigy.

But A Mi Vida is not just about a mother and the natural and unavoidable separation from her offspring, and the feelings the process provokes. The pieces speak of that emotional pain, the pain of separation, including one that is not natural—it is avoidable and unbearable. The project explores separation within the frame of our political landscape. The pain, a thousand times greater, that must overcome a parent and a child when separated by force. The project aims to raise awareness about the difficult times immigrants of color are facing today, from the perspective of an emotional bond abruptly torn. Each piece aims to become a symbolic representation of every immigrant child out there, isolated and scared, trapped in federal detention centers throughout the country. They are deprived of all demonstrations of love and a sense of safety, and remain betrayed by our society, which fails to embrace them, claiming their lives. A Mi Vida is a denunciation of the outrageous treatment of their innocent lives, and it is an urgent request for empathy and protection against the pain of imposed separation.

My terracotta pieces of pre-Columbian inspiration are meant to symbolize immigrant children. For I am an immigrant, a minority with a child in my arms who can’t understand the cruelty of separating families, amidst a political and social environment that has become, every day, more toxic and unsafe. The pre-Columbian connotation implies the connection that exists between people like me, Westernized individuals from Latin America, and the land we left behind, where civilizations of varied cultural achievements and refined aesthetic developments are part of our history, alongside original communities who stubbornly survive 500 years of genocide. This connection is often overlooked, assuming immigrants of color, empty-handed newcomers, a-historic and unable to make any contribution and therefore unde- serving to become part of the cultural tapestry we imagine as the United States.

A Mi Vida aims to highlight the Latin American cultural experience, hinting at the past-present that is part of our mix.

A Mi Vida is each and every piece that forms the series, each of them complete asa little unit of vulnerable clay full of emotional connotations. It is also, and partic- ularly, a performance, for every piece has been made to be carried by a mother’s arms, their ideal way of being. And finally, A Mi Vida is an outdoor and an ephemeral installation, with literally pieces left outside at the mercy of strangers, and an indoor installation inside baby strollers, because they belong to our everyday life, not to be shown as pieces of art on gallery-white pedestals, cold and clean as surgical tables, but for you to feel their “life,” their proximity, their existence.

My little A Mi Vidas are heavy, delicate, and valuable, as the life of any child should be for all of us.

KUKULI VELARDE, b. 1962

Peruvian-born, Philadelphia-based artist Kukuli Velarde’s practice spans ceramic sculpture and painting, drawing deeply on her cultural heritage. The artist’s figures, which often take the form of imagined entities, layer self-portraiture with references to the ancient pottery of Peru, directly connecting with larger issues of gender and the effects of colonization on her home country. Born in Cuzco, Peru and a resident of the South Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia for more than two decades, Velarde studied at Hunter College, City University of New York, and was a resident at The Clay Studio from 1997 to 2001. The artist’s work is represented in museum collections including the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Velarde has been recognized with numerous recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and the first US solo exhibition of her paintings at Taller Puertorriqueño in 2018. Her work was recently included in New Grit: Art & Philly Now, a major exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

For Making Place Matter, Velarde has created A Mi Vida, an installation of painted terracotta sculptures that take the form of babies to reflect the fragile societal links between mother and child.