Dechado de Virtudes
october 5 - december 28, 2024
El Sielo galería, Carrer de Salvadors 22, Piso 4. L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona
ARTIST: Alejandra Mizrahi
Curated by: Oriol Fontdevila
Intemperie, alongside El Sielo Gallery, presents: Dechado de Virtudes, a solo exhibition by Alejandra Mizrahi curated by Oriol Fontdevila.
Alejandra has been an artist at Intemperie since 2018, and this exhibition belongs to a cycle of the project marked by collaboration with other galleries in the scene.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Dechado de Virtudes is the first solo show by Alejandra Mizrahi (Tucumán, 1981) in Barcelona and Spain, curated by the researcher and writer Oriol Fontdevila.
Mizrahi is a prominent artist in textile experimentation, emphasizing the continuity of textile traditions from the northwestern region of Argentina, whether pre-Hispanic in origin or established during the colonial period. Mizrahi reinterprets these traditions, subjecting them to improbable relationships and tensions. In this site specific exhibition, the artist highlights textile work as a material and symbolic infrastructure that shapes what we define as human.
Oriol Fontdevila.
Dechado de Virtudes (gallery text)
YZVUPS 1, RJBIDG 2, HOMNW 3, XNQK 4 y AETLCF 5 are five machines that weave textile 6 with textual 7 and infrastructural 8 elements.
YZVUPS, RJBIDG, HOMNW, XNQK and AETLCF are five assemblages that twist around at least one operational mode: Tensión 9. Tension is revealed here as a substantial force in terms of the semiotic agency, becoming the substance of the elements it conquers 10.
YZVUPS, RJBIDG, HOMNW, XNQK and AETLCF are a collection of patterns 11, albeit voluptuous ones, intertwining while exceeding the sum of their parts. Dechado de virtudes attests to the fabric in its moment of potenza, as a constitutive force to the fabric when it’s engaged in composing lifeworlds while simultaneously unraveling and potentially transforming them. 12.
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The first five pieces should refer to a potential image of the venue, where the five pieces are located.
6 Alejandra Mizrahi (Tucumán, 1981) emphasizes the significance of carrying on with traditions from the NorthWest region of Argentina, whether they come from pre-Hispanic heritage or were established in the colonial period, and in the process subjects them to improbable tensions.
Mizrahi has conducted a profuse documentation work around la randa (Needle lace), one of the oldest techniques for producing lace. This research has led the artist to a more than ten-year collaboration with the community of Randeras de El Cercado, that has now become a worker cooperative, that keeps, in their own way, making this lace technique inherited by Castilian ladies -the so-called “conqueror women”-, that had settled in this land five hundred years before.
7 Textiles were the way in which post-structuralist criticism liberated the text from the rigidity conferred on it by semiologists. In contrast to the efforts of formalists and structuralists to reduce the production of meaning to a set of generalizable narrative patterns, the metaphors of the web, the braid, the texture, the textile, provided a further string of thinkers with the possibility of identifying the text as a much more dynamic field of operations for the production of meaning (ranging at least from Jacques Derrida's ‘writing as a weaving of differences’ to Donna Haraway's more recent string games). Under this influence, texts do not reproduce closed structures at all, but produce structuring by interweaving meanings, in an open and active, unfinished and infinite way, as Roland Barthes argued.
However, Dechado de virtudes brings together the idea of text as weaving with another consideration that decolonial critique has found on its flip side: weaving as text, which is particularly eloquent in relation to stories of appropriation, oppression, and resistance. This is what Janet Catherine Berlo has argued in her analysis of the textile traditions of Mesoamerica and South America.
Under the motto “weaves are the books that the colony could not burn”, Mayan communities have reclaimed textile craftsmanship as a kind of surface that bears witness to pre-Columbian memory and colonial oppression. This expression also highlights the fact that textiles have historically worked as agents for the transmission of signs, which nevertheless require a reading that is done “with your fingertips” " as Elvira Espejo Ayca put it. If the woven structure shares semiotic qualities with the text it does so by foregrounding a tactile feature, creating a tension between the work performed by eyes and hands.
8 The stretcher frame subjects the weave to a moment of tension, that is where its very condition of possibility is at stake. However, Mizrahi points to the frame as the first embodiment of the weave and not as a procedural circumstance, a transitional infrastructure or an intermediation to be forgotten. Frame and weave create a symbiotic body in the artist’s hands seeking to fuse the part that mediates and the part that is mediated. Additionally in Dechado de virtudes the frame-weave bodies are taken to an anthropomorphic scale, aiming to highlight the bodies of the visitors as woven bodies too. This also occurs with the architectural scale, which is connoted as a possibility of frame while simultaneously serving as a woven shell when her patterns spread as parasites until they reach El Sielo’s beams.
9 Tension is a central concept in Mizrahi’s work. The possibility of both the text and the textile to do things, to influence both formation and deformation of meanings and identities, is found to be tributary to a characteristic that is material in nature: elasticity. Without tension, the warp threads would not meet and interweave with the weft. Without tension, the hand would hardly draw the strokes of the letters or string them together. Without the tension, the words would not come together with the meanings, just as the semantic shifts that words undergo with changes of context and their transits through communities of use, would hardly be possible.
10 Mizrahi highlights tension as a physical characteristic that textiles share with language, serving as a component involved in the processes of meaning-making without being solely a part of the symbolic. Mizrahi’s approach parallels what Julia Bryan-Wilson has called the “political texture” of textile work. According to the art historian, textiles always enter the political sphere, since textiles primarily provide textures to speech: they imply keeping opposites in tension, stretched, stressed, perhaps even to the point of breaking, rather than blurring them as simplified binary oppositions.
11 Dechado de virtudes stems from a childhood memory from Mizrahi in the fabric shop run by her family in San Miguel de Tucumán: The artist recalls the fascination she felt back then for the fabric swatches with zigzags-cut edges, around which her family would gather to choose the rolls of fabric to be sold on the following season. For the artist those swatches embodied a certain power, as they opened up a possibility of dialogue, of a discussion to Salish a continuity or to introduce a break, perhaps even, reach a consensus.
12 Mizrahi thus proceeds with Dechado de virtudes to deconstruct the main motif that has organized embroidery swatches since mid 19th century: the alphabet letters.
Mizrahi questions the ability of both weaving and text to trigger action, which is why the exhibition unfolds as a field of operations -a sort of pattern- centred around embroidered alphabets, rather than a syntactic or semantic approach to the signs that compose them. Dechado de virtudes starts from the alphabet to delve into the texture of the signs, the material weave that contributes to the construction of words
Oriol Fontdevila