“Another Postcard Here and There”WhiteBox’ Series New York ArtScapes

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Review by Angel Mendoza

“Another Postcard Here and There” WhiteBox Series New York ArtScapes Curated by Yohanna Roa

The reality of New York City is different for workers, many of them immigrants, who make long journeys to their workplaces every day and generally receive the minimum wage. This reality is far from the New York of the postcards sold in Museums, where an idealized city, large skyscrapers and cosmopolitan artists can be seen. These images do not reflect that behind that landscape, there is a human workforce that must deal with the cost of living in the city. The exhibition “ Another Postcard Here and There” is part of the WhiteBox’s series “New York ArtScapes” (the first investigation was Taller Boricua, From Art Workers Coalitions Through Today). These are activations and expansions of archives related to the city of New York, which seek to open and show the complexities of cultural production in the city, which do not have real recognition by the discourse of power, which usually adds ” what is not the white man”, as a “kind of contribution” to the Relevant Official History with a capital letter.

After two years of work, I have located two archives produced in this city in connection with Latin America. The first is the AMAME archive (Audiovisual Memory of Ecuadorian Migration Archive), which preserves the video letters of nearly a hundred Ecuadorian families (mostly based in NYC) who exchanged video correspondence to cope with the separation, distance, and nostalgia during their migratory processes between 1976 and 2010.

The second archive is “Poblanos, Voces de Nueva York,” which contains a series of materials inherent to the activities of a radio program carried out between 1992 and 1993 by Oscar López in collaboration with Enriqueta Silva and Carlos Arellano. In which the inhabitants of the city of Puebla, Mexico, based in the city of NY, narrate their personal experiences and their living conditions.

n my experience as a curator, historian, and archivist, I believe that the past is something that we can transform because, far from being a line of truths or certainties, the past is a construction that involves points of view, positions, and exercises of power. I have developed the concept of matriarchive and defined it as a place of enunciation that operates as an organic network, a matrix capable of assembling relationships and archival experiences. From this concept, artists can activate the documents, but by connecting them with their present reality, the problems are relocated to the current time and place, with roots in the past. Although the exhibition focuses on documents from both archives, it is through artist activations that we can observe the past and interpret it differently, connecting it with the present.

I have developed two exhibitions with a similar methodology. JMA Matriarchive in Resistance was based on the archive of a Mexican architect who participated in social movements during the 60s and 70s in Europe, Africa, and South America. For the exhibition in NY, I invited local artists to connect the matriarchive: Territory under discussion for the Museo la Tertulia de Colombia in which my interest focused on the use of the Museum’s archive to make evident the problems of social class, race, and gender, present in the museum’s collection.

“Another Postcard, Here and There” is a curation that connects and expands the memories of immigrant workers from Ecuador and Mexico with the current NYC, a hyper-gentrified city. This exhibition expands on romanticized postcards to reveal how, daily, a group of inhabitants constitute the city´s identity.