Transmestizx, Ecuador
Transmestizx – una instalación audiovisual interactiva de Daniela Moreno Wray
Residencia en medialabUIO / CIESPAL – diciembre 2015
Exhibition, CAC Quito, Junio 2016
https://dmw.hotglue.me/?transmestiza
Articulo en El Telegrafo 29/06/16
http://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/cultura/7/transmestizx-rompe-las-narraciones-homogeneas
Curatorial text:
Nothing is more impermanent than memory and yet it is the building material of identity. Writing and, later, photography created more permanent yet vulnerable mediums for transmission. Now in this technological age our memories are trusted to machines, infinite ones and zeros, immense data banks, the mines of immaterial capitalism. Our memory is difuse, markers and names that function like knots in ancient cords. Turn off the machines and there is nothing, errors and 404 messages.
The world that Transmestizx evokes is based on research in predigital archives and oral histories, fragments that speak to us of ages past, photographs of previous generations, interviews, old films, landowners, indians, political pancarts, landscapes, struggles and uprisings, mansions, barns and priests.
3 women were present at the founding of the Ecuadorian Communist Party in 1926 – the indigenous leader Dolores Cacuango and the white activists Nela Martinez and Maria Luis Gomez de la Torre. These women would become key figures in imagining and fighting for a new Ecuadorian society. At the same time Natalia Jarrín presided over the landowners of Cayambe, building her stately home in the town square and naming after herself parts of the snowcapped volcano that dominates the town. Years later her granddaugher would join the Communist Party and fight for the land rights of the indigenous population. Opposites and oponents that configure or deconstruct collective and individual identities.
Transmestizx is an invocation of these women, their landscapes, and the struggles in which they were involved, in an effort to constitute a living memory of interculturality and to establish an identity that can bridge these gaps and understand these opponents as part of an ongoing tapestry of resistence, differences and meetings.
Using free software and cheap technology stripped to the basics, Transmestizx incarnates the impermanent, shifting and shared nature of these memories, building a space for re-membering from the common pool of software and archives. Assuming error, limitation and fragility as shared by both technology and memory itself, Transmestizx requires the participation of the public to exist, echoing the necesity for a collective construction that can infect imaginaries beyond the limits of memory.
Pedro Soler