Artists
Michelsen Castanon, Karen
Flowers Beneath Our Feet, 2022
Courtesy: Keiko Kimoto, Lizza May David, Gabriel Rossell Santillán
The work of artist Karen Michelsen Castañón brings together different visual sources and interdisciplinary approaches - to depict images of decolonization. This method stems from Michelsen’s training in the textile arts. As K. M. herself narrates, she began to weave, to embroider and dye cloth all methods in textile making - much before engaging with video. While studying her masters in fine arts in Germany, she decided to bring her voice into that context by incorporating audiovisual techniques. By employing video, the artist creates the possibility for a space in which a “turn” - regarding the understanding of coloniality and colonial history - can take place. In the video Une crèche en Chine (2014), the artist weaves documents and interviews with activists and academics into an essay that denounces an ontological aspect of colonialism which is embedded in the white and Christian civilizing mission toward children. She has also filmed and edited a video that was directed by the National Movement of Maya Weavers of Guatemala (2020). In this short video, the weavers denounce the exploitation of life in its entirety by the Guatemalan nation-state. One of the aspects of this exploitation is the unsanctioned appropriation of their weaving knowledge and patterns by western designers. Her audiovisual interview series “No más poemas para Colón” (“No more Poems for Columbus” has been produced parallel to an embroidery of the same title. In her work, textiles communicate stories beyond eurocentric historical narrratives and incorporate current political issues, as the field of visual arts is never neutral. The textile collage elaborated by Karen Michelsen Castañón and Gabriel Rossell Santillán is an interweaving of tradition, knowledge, voice, image and the spiritual realms. Inspired by Rossell Santillan’s project about a Moghul tapestry of the sixteenth century, the piece features elements of the historical tapestry such as plants and animals, as well as knowledge about textile processes through vocabulary in both Nahuatl and Quechua.
Text: Andrea Meza Torres
The work of artist Karen Michelsen Castañón brings together different visual sources and interdisciplinary approaches - to depict images of decolonization. This method stems from Michelsen’s training in the textile arts. As K. M. herself narrates, she began to weave, to embroider and dye cloth all methods in textile making - much before engaging with video. While studying her masters in fine arts in Germany, she decided to bring her voice into that context by incorporating audiovisual techniques. By employing video, the artist creates the possibility for a space in which a “turn” - regarding the understanding of coloniality and colonial history - can take place. In the video Une crèche en Chine (2014), the artist weaves documents and interviews with activists and academics into an essay that denounces an ontological aspect of colonialism which is embedded in the white and Christian civilizing mission toward children. She has also filmed and edited a video that was directed by the National Movement of Maya Weavers of Guatemala (2020). In this short video, the weavers denounce the exploitation of life in its entirety by the Guatemalan nation-state. One of the aspects of this exploitation is the unsanctioned appropriation of their weaving knowledge and patterns by western designers. Her audiovisual interview series “No más poemas para Colón” (“No more Poems for Columbus” has been produced parallel to an embroidery of the same title. In her work, textiles communicate stories beyond eurocentric historical narrratives and incorporate current political issues, as the field of visual arts is never neutral. The textile collage elaborated by Karen Michelsen Castañón and Gabriel Rossell Santillán is an interweaving of tradition, knowledge, voice, image and the spiritual realms. Inspired by Rossell Santillan’s project about a Moghul tapestry of the sixteenth century, the piece features elements of the historical tapestry such as plants and animals, as well as knowledge about textile processes through vocabulary in both Nahuatl and Quechua.
Text: Andrea Meza Torres