Micaela de Vivero

Oro no es/ Gold, is it not?

By Joy Sperling

Micaela de Vivero was born in Munich, Germany and grew up in Quito, Ecuador. She graduated from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and received an M.F.A. from Alfred University in New York. She now lives, teaches, and has an art practice in the United States. She travels globally to work and exhibit her sculpture, in part to fulfill a commitment to making transcultural artistic connections that are foundational to her intellectual artistic practice. Intersectionality suffuses and informs Vivero’s sculpture . Her art supports Stuart Hall’s contention that diasporic subjects “speak, sing, and write so eloquently” (171) because they:

“learn to inhabit more than one identity, dwell in more than one culture, and speak in more than one language….[Their] cultural identity is always something, but it is never just one thing: such identities are always open, complex, under construction, taking part in an unfinished game…[T]hey move into the future through a symbolic detour through the past.” (173-4)

Moreover, a single visual object in one of Micaela de Vivero’s pieces can “mean” in multiple ways, both in space and in time. Meaning and message, image and emotion are unfixed and unstable, “delinked” from the norm and function as slippery and multi-accented “sliding signifiers” in Hall’s sense. Micaela de Vivero’s art is interlaced with echoes of her lived history in Ecuador, her understanding of and empathy with Latin American history and her transactions with today’s globalized culture and economy, as well as by her other lived histories in her homes in the United States and around the world. Her work is also clearly situated within decolonial theory. There is no quick or easy way to address the wreckage left by colonial powers globally, but one of the most significant prevailing theories is that of decoloniality, which has emerged in Latin America. It posits that the only possible way to repair societies fundamentally damaged by colonialism in the ‘Global South’ is not to overthrow or negate the colonial matrices of power but to “delink” them from the colonial paradigm—to challenge Eurocentrism and all of its assumptions, including the concepts of Modernity and Modernism—and to interrogate each local structure as it is “delinked” from the colonial. Thus, while larger global systems of power and commerce must be challenged, so too must local systems such as religion, ethnicity, gender, class, and even regionality.

Starting during the COVID-19 lockdown, Micaela de Vivero has made a number of large handmade-paper murals from dry Abaca pulp (leaves of a banana tree) and flax pulp (linseed and the basis of linen fiber), which she moistens with water and layers on large screens to make very large murals. The process is complicated and time consuming. The images produced have an innate sense of fragility and instability, having been created in an atmosphere of unreality and uncertainty—of being locked at home, fearing for herself and her family (close by and afar), for the present and the future, experimenting with new ideas and new crafts alone with limited access to materials, equipment, and external expert advice or assistance, and left to the mercies of time and changes in temperature and humidity. And, unlike manufactured paper, they are inherently fragile objects often subject to cracking and tearing. Paper bears cultural meaning: it is a medium upon which humans have written for centuries; power has been accorded to those with either the ability or need to write in history; the handwritten page holds significance; it facilitates the mapping of the known and unknown. Early maps were not only the means by which we found our way around the world, but they were the way nations claimed ownership of places—by drawing parts of the New World, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and the English claimed parts of it as their own, regardless of who lived there before them. German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt who, although he made a self-funded scientific exploration of Latin America in 1800, was granted an audience by Charles IV of Spain before his expedition and was granted passports, travel permits, and powerful letters of introduction that enabled him to impose the most extensive European cartography and typology on the places, peoples, and plants of Latin America to create a series of systems and structures that have proven almost impossible to retract. The mapping of Latin America exponentially increased the search for gold and other raw materials as well as the exploitation of indigenous labor immediately after the widespread publication of Von Humboldt’s maps.  Mapping holds particular significance in Vivero’s work.

In Contested Territories, a large multi paper mural,Vivero extends this narrative to focus specifically on mapping as a symbolic act of possession. The surface of Contested Territories is punctuated by a series of open-ended forms that are partly drawn with thread on the surface of hand-made paper and partly painted in washes of soft colors. These forms appear like incomplete islands or as islands that appear to rise from the ocean and fall back into it with tidal changes or climate change. They suggest the fleeting nature of territorial possession and, by extension, colonial power in geological history. Once again, Vivero asks the viewer to consider the complicated and many-layered question of possession and power and the hubris of claiming sovereignty over “undiscovered” land and its indigenous people. The map is edged in (fake) gold; its rough outline and natural-colored paper suggest an old, long surviving, or valuable map that has some significance. There is no key to any of Vivero’s maps. Nothing within them is identified—their meaning is encoded, hidden, and deferred. Yet, we sense that these maps are about acquisition and repression: the presence of gold robs them of their innocence and thrusts them into the Western orbit in which money (in the form of gold) equals power. Today, more than ever, we associate gold with power, aggression, and display (often ostentatious displays of power in the form of conspicuous consumption). Even the color gold has been debased. Too much gold feels gaudy, excessive, and unreal. Perhaps that is why it is important to her that her gold is not real: it tarnishes, it is half hidden, and it is intimately just copper, which may have high use-value but has very low exchange-value.

Joy Sperling is professor emerita of Art History and Visual Culture at Denison University.  She is currently finishing a book on women artists in the American Southwest 1910-1950. But most recently, she has written on women sculptors for Hyperallergic, Art Critical, and for the Figge Museum, IA.

Micaela de Vivero
e-mail: micaelavive@hotmail.com

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