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Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: So, so much of my interest in art is to tackle this idea, to tackle this notion of how do we become whole? So how do we heal? Becomes pretty much the same thing. For me, it comes up in my work in ways of remembering and memory. So how do we become whole by remembering who we are? And do how we become whole by remembering who our ancestors were and what are the legacies that we naturally carry within ourselves?
Ricky Gomez: Hello and welcome to Articulated, I’m Ricky Gomez and I work as the Latino Collections archivist here at the Archives of American Art. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Over the past three years, the covid-19 pandemic has reshaped our understanding of physical, mental, and communal health. Through distance and isolation, we evaluated our relationships with one another, raising questions of belonging and interconnectedness beyond individual experiences.
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As we enter the fourth year of this public health emergency, we also approach the third anniversary of the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project, which comprised more than 80 short-form interviews to gauge the state of the arts at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. To commemorate that project and to reflect on how the world has evolved since, we have invited four artists to reflect on healing and belonging in their work, which we have put in dialogue with our oral history collection.
This is the first in a four-episode series on the visual arts and healing co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa, a National Endowment for the Humanities-Oral History Association Fellow. As part of her year-long program, Fernanda is working on In Colors, a project carried out in collaboration with the Archives of American Art.
Fernanda Espinosa: This is Fernanda Espinosa, and I am an independent oral historian leading the In Colors project. Through In Colors, I try to re-assess and re-imagine the oral history archive to bring in a diversity of perspectives and voices that have often been left out of official national histories. Through this collaboration with the Archives of American Art, my emphasis has been on Latinx and Latin-American art histories.
In this first episode, we hear from Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, an Ecuadorian-American interdisciplinary artist from Queens, New York.
She focuses on sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives. Intersectional theories and earth-based healing inform her practice.
Koyoltzintli's work situates at the intersection of herself and the land. At times subject, and at times creator, she formulates intimate encounters with geographies that have birthed her ancestry and shaped her personal history and upbringing, including the Andean mountains and coastal Ecuador.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: I am born in what we know as New York City. At the age of two, my parents move us to Ecuador.
I grew up in Guayaquil, a coastal city in Ecuador and my mother and father, they're both from Manabí. So we went to Manabí quite often to visit family. So I spent a lot of time going back and forth from Guayaquil to Manabí.
When you grow up, you're not thinking about your story; you're living your history. Right? And as I reflect on my work, I really think about how my mother and father, the way that they live, really impacted the way that I also work. My mother took me to Manabí quite often and also to Quito and we would interact with culture, with family, with tradition. And my father—because he was a business person and also drove a truck—I would travel with him to Colombia and to Peru too for business.
So I think that these things, these early memories, really have an impact on my work, especially the beginning of my work as I started doing photojournalism.
I was a very curious person. I did a lot of different classes and extracurricular activities. As I mentioned before, I was into, I was, I was painting a lot. I was learning classical painting. In fact, I was happy that I could replicate and I could sell paintings that are replicas. When I was growing up, in Guayaquil, it was a big thing to be able to do a replica of some European master painting and be able to sell it. So I really took a lot of pride and being able to do that.
Fernanda Espinosa: As an adult, Koyoltzintli
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returned to New York City to go to school.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: My major was performance and sculpture. So I went from doing paintings for my first year and then my second year I really felt like I wanna take other classes. So I started taking performance
All of that was really really, interesting to me and I think there was something liberating about having a studio and using your body instead of painting a body. And the other thing, the other inner dialogue that I had at that time—which it stays true up until this day—is that I wanna be able to contribute to the history of art in a way that feels authentic to me.
And painting did not feel that was the medium that I wanted to continue using I had been using it for so many years, and I think it was when I decided, “Okay I think I need to do something else. Painting is not saying what I wanna say.” So then I start taking performance classes, social practice classes, which at that time was so little. It wasn't evolved as it is right now. I started taking sculpture ceramic, wood. So I had a studio with all these different, forms of art. When I graduated, I wanted to go back to Ecuador because I thought that's what I'm gonna do. I graduated here, I'm done with my studies, I'm gonna go back home.
When I went back to Ecuador, I didn't know exactly what to do. I have this degree in the most abstract thing that someone can get a degree in. How am I gonna apply it? At that point it was interesting, to me I didn't like photography. Photography for me was an instrument of documentation.
Fernanda Espinosa: In an unlikely turn, Koyoltzintli returned to Ecuador and started working with photography. First as a hobby and then as a full-time photojournalist.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: I start photographing, and then I cut. I started really understanding and developing the film. I had someone that was working at a pharmacy, he was developing film and he was interested in photography. So he was showing me these little things. That type of learning that happens before YouTube—you know?—[laughs] like asking people what do you think about this? And they're giving you their response and the universe makes it so the people that you're asking are people that actually know.
It was like the ultimate feeling of freedom and independence that you could imagine just to have your camera and go to all these different situations. And I was quite content, but with the help and suggestion of my editor at that time, I had applied to a scholarship in Denmark. At that point, they had it every other year; they accept only six people from outside the Scandinavian countries. When I was accepted, it was a tremendous shock for me.
But then I thought, how many times am I gonna go to Denmark? And I ended up accepting it. I went there, and I spent a year studying photojournalism. And I started getting more and more interested in photojournalism. Also, everything that had to do with social issues. And I started photographing there and I spent a little bit more time and then I went back to New York for a few months and then I thought, I'm just gonna go back to South America and photograph, and my interest at the time was cities that are bustling and growing in the middle of the Amazon, which is extremely problematic for the indigenous people that live in these areas. So I started going to Brazil, to Peru, places in Ecuador and just photographing.
That process was years, I spent doing photojournalism for at least seven years. When I had to come to New York, at that point it really became my base, because a lot of the magazines and newspapers that I was selling to were in New York.
Fernanda Espinosa: In the late 2000s, Koyoltzintli carried out her last photojournalism assignment.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: I think it was in 2009; I think it was in Brazil. And it's a place called Changa; it borders Colombia.
I was able to photograph, and I was able to carry the stories, and I thought, I'm starting to feel uncomfortable about how as a photographer I get to extract images and realities from other people, but I don't know anything about my own realities, like my own deep sadness, deep traumas. I really felt that in order to be a more authentic photographer, I had to become a more authentic person to myself.
So that was a journey that brought me back to New York and started ''Other stories,'' ''Historias bravas,'' which is a series that I photographed my family and the memories that were never documented. My mom was in New York. My aunts were in New York. They lived there,
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and my grandmother also lived in New York, and she was a pivotal person in life. And I start asking questions, asking questions about our heritage.
So a lot of synchronism going on that I never really tapped into or asked too much about.
A lot of photography It's really about listening. So I spent a lot of time listening to people and I thought, I need to start doing this process with myself. And that's when I started doing these photographs with my family.
From that body of work, I realized that I wanted to explore something else and then something else. Then, the journalism transformed into personal documentary photography.
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Fernanda Espinosa: It is at this point that we see a different journey start manifesting as Koyoltzintli returns to her art practice and starts to look inwards, pointing the lens at herself and at the women in her family who have shaped her. This initial work is titled "Other Stories," a project where the artist revisits unrecorded events from her own youth and re-stages scenarios taken from memory to recreate them in collaboration with immediate family members.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: Other Stories was very pivotal in that way. And also, I had never used the camera that I used for other stories, which is a medium format—the format is square—and it just felt perfect for the series because the images became a formal tableau.
I really wanted to break my work from the nature of documentary, which is so often 35 millimeters, or it's a little bit like that elongated photograph to a form of photography that it's a different way of seeing it. So, in that way, it just made sense. Started using media format, which is what I continue using, up until this day.
Fernanda Espinosa: With these new explorations in format and content, the artist starts to examine personal memories and stories.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: I was reading at the time that memory, it's a very tricky thing because the more that you remember a memory, the more you're gonna change it with time. So when I thought about that, I thought so if I remember less when I remember, I will remember it more accurately.
So I thought, wow how interesting! Especially as a journalist where you want to document things as they are, it was important for me to be okay—I'm not gonna recreate a memory that I have played in my head many times. I'm gonna try to recreate a memory that I have that I do not even remember.
I was really interested in just childhood memories and also childhood memories that were accessible to me. Not childhood memories that when I was five months old, but things that happened when I was four, five, or ten; or things that you are able to remember, but because so much life has happened, you just forgot about them. So then I started doing that and I started remembering:
Then the way that it happened—with this memory with my mother—we started talking about it and I started drawing. So when the photograph happened, the photograph was a representation of the drawing because I thought if I record this, my memory is gonna change the way I perceive the recording, but if I draw it, then there's gonna be a more actual image of that memory. It was very much how I wanna try to get this as identical as it was as possible; even though that not even true? Because my mom could have changed some things as well. But there was that idea of first we do the drawing and we base a photograph on the drawing.
But because it was very slow, I end up doing like maybe ten photographs a year; I didn't want this flood of memories to come, but I really wanted the essential memories to come through.
Sometimes they take time, sometimes, you know, a month would pass, and I don't remember anything. Then the next month something will come up. It took about two years to finish that work. The other thing I wanted to say about it is that when Other Stories (Historias bravas) —when I did, it was what I said before—it was a very personal work, so I wasn't really interested in promoting it or selling it.
I felt happy about the work
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in terms of a healing that had taken place, but I wasn't interested in sharing it with people because I felt, Who cares about my life?
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Fernanda Espinosa: While this first important body of work was a very personal project, it provided a clear point of transition towards an ongoing artistic effort that engages with questions of healing and belonging through the work of memory as well as relationship-building.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: So, so much of my interest in art is to tackle this idea, to tackle this notion of how do we become whole? So how do we heal? Becomes pretty much the same thing. For me, it comes up in my work in ways of remembering and memory. So how do we become whole by remembering who we are? And do how we become whole by remembering who our ancestors were and what are the legacies that we naturally carry within ourselves?
That is something that I really, I'm interested to explore further and further in my practice. I think that at the beginning—as I mentioned before—with ''Other Stories,'' the process of becoming whole was a process of opening up to myself.
It was like my first and most important project. I had a lot of exhibitions and later it became a book. But the way that it was conceived, it was really about healing. It was really about understanding who am I, where I come from, what's my heritage, and how can I be consciously aware of my footprint in this planet?
Fernanda Espinosa: After these first experiments, Koyoltzintli went on to work on the Piedra Redonda project, photographing and working with a traditional healer.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: And after I finished “Other Stories,” right after I went back to Ecuador And I started doing a lot of ceremonies and meeting people in those circles And it was a good thing for me because I was also trying to think about my next project.
So I didn't wanna rush. I wanted to also give myself that opportunity of connecting to healing and to, earth wisdom while I am thinking about what am I gonna do next. And in that time that I meet this lady, Mama Matilde. I met her and I thought, if she allows me, I'm gonna start photographing her. And she loved photography. When I started photographing, she was in complete delight, and that became easy for me.
So then I started photographing, and I spent like almost that entire year just working with her, photographing, going and staying with her and learning. I spent 11 years living with her, photographing her. And I spent a lot of time there and then, a few years passed by, and the lines between being a sister, a helper of a Yachay, which is a wise person and a photographer started merging. If Mama Matilde would've been alive for 20 more years, I would've photographed her for 20 more years, and I wouldn't think twice. I would just be with her. I had such a joy of being with that woman. I wouldn't think of anything else that I need to improve or do or change.
Fernanda Espinosa: Right before the pandemic, Koyoltzintli's long-time teacher and subject of two of her projects, passed away, prompting her to reevaluate her work and place in the world.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: When she passed away, it was a moment of me to really start thinking more about these things that have always permeated in my work, which is where is my place of belonging. How is my work bringing healing or thinking about healing for other communities? How am I working through these themes? the pandemic was the moment for me where I started really thinking, okay, I come from a lineage, I come from a line of healers, whether it's in this lifetime or in another lifetime, and I don't think I'm unique. I think we all have a family member that is or was a healer. So this is also part of our mix of cultures, our mix of traditions, that instead of thinking that the healing happens somewhere else really reflecting that at some point, one of your ancestors
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was a healer. So even just to begin with that premise. When she passed was a moment for me of revisiting my own existence.
I think I had relied on a pattern of life where I go visit her, stay with her, I had relied on that pattern for so long that when the pandemic hit, not only was she gone, but I was also not able to go back and carry on with my life in that way.
As my own personal, rituals—funerary rituals—I started doing performances and I thought that that was the best way to honor her. So I started doing performances in Long Island City, just going to the ocean and doing things for her, that they were not really recorded. I wasn't really thinking about as an art form to be shared with people, although they were art forms because I think that she would enjoy that. She really enjoyed art and that way of thinking. So I did this performances for her. They lasted a few months and then afterward my practice started shifting and I started thinking about what other materials can I use?
I started missing her. So clay became something that made me touch something. I wanted to be able to touch and make something. So I started using clay, arcilla, and I started doing all these forms and all these beings and they were all based on memories that I had with Mama Matilde.
So it was also in honor of her. Almost an entire year I was just doing things, thinking about her. Everything that I was doing was about her.
Fernanda Espinosa: During the Pandemic, Koyoltzintli transitioned to work mostly with clay, re-constructing and re-interpreting pre-Columbian instruments, turning them into ceremonial objects, and performing with them.
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: I'm not a musician. I've never worked with sound, so even to do the sound, I take time with it. Because to me it's such a sacred, but also a new practice. It's not something—and I always meditate on this, on how photography—although now I'm doing all these other things—sometimes I miss how easy photography was for me. I'm like okay, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna use this camera, I'm gonna use this lens, I'm gonna use this film, I'm gonna go to this place, I'm gonna do it at this hour and ninety percent of the time, I like the results. With sound, it's such a new thing. I don't have that familiarity. So it's much more of like, okay, I'm gonna sit and I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna figure this out and I'm gonna play, and then I'm gonna play again and maybe I don't like it and I'm gonna take a break and I'm gonna go back. It's like meeting someone for the first time. That's how it feels. And also connects also to my future or my baby, it's gonna be someone that I'm meeting for the first time and I'm having this dual, this new relationship with sound and birth that are happening at the same time.
And I think about how interesting that is and how that will evolve in my practice. How am I gonna, how those two will exist together as 2023 starts? So that's something that I've been meditating a lot and thinking a lot about.
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Fernanda Espinosa: To hear from other artists working across mediums and identities listen to an interview with Erica Lord by visiting the Pandemic Oral History interviews on the Archives of America art website.
In 2020, Lord was thinking through the entanglement of history, creativity, and evolution as well during her Pandemic Oral History Project interview with Lara Evans. An Alaskan Native of Athabascan, Iñúpiaq, and Finnish descent, Lord creates series and installations through photography, sculpture, and performance that engage with indigenous diaspora and identity.
She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and she recounted her experience with the onset of the pandemic both as a teacher and as an artist looking for modes of expression to reflect and reconcile that moment in history:
Erica Lord: One thing—especially with my freshman or younger students, like, one thing I repeat over and over is, you know, I like—I really like art history as a means of looking back—looking back because history tells us dates and events and
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archaeology finds objects or sociology talks about belief systems, anthropology talks about people, but art history kind of brings those all together. And one of the ways I would test this with them was, like you guys are all too young to know, to have lived through the Vietnam War which we all know that, like, what do people think about it? You know, how did they feel about the Vietnam War, and, you know, it wasn't popular, and I was, like, how do we know that, and it, kind of, always, like, hits—they have this, like, ah ha situation.
It's because of the art—art and music and poetry, like, it's creative expression that helps us to understand, how people are actually feeling or thinking or reacting to things at that time, and so, like, even though there's all these—I mean, they're so much happening in the news right now, like, you're seeing between racial tension and protests and, like, COVID, and all these things, and I don't think it's any coincidence that they're all, kind of, erupting together. It's—I think when we look back on this, it'll be all the more important to look back at the artistic or creative expression that came out during this time because it's one of the—we're being forced to slow down which is really great [laughs] . Like—and contemplate these things and think about this stuff.
I feel like I—it seems like a lot of other artists that I'm talking—that I talk to are also dealing with the same, kind of, challenges where we're not as creative—we're not as productive as we first thought we were going to be. We're not getting as much done as we wanted to or thought we were, but I think eventually a lot will come of this time, and I think that's going to be really important to look back on. There's just so much happening, and artists and creatives in general have always been the ones that, kind of, help us understand the thoughts and feelings.
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Ricky Gomez: This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman at the Archives of American Art. It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio
Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.
For show notes, work cited, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.
The Archives is especially grateful to Fernanda Espinosa for curating this episode, and to Koyoltzintli for sharing her story and practice.
If you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it.
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.
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