Monumentos vivos y plagas biológicas I, Pendueles [Living Monuments and Biological Pests I, Pendueles] (2020)
Cyanotype on cotton paper
70 x 100 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2020.239.1
The northern strip of the peninsula is peppered with indiana palm trees, which were brought back by returning emigrants. They rise up like slim lighthouses to show, tell us that ‘that is where someone lived who had made their fortune in the Americas’. That migratory movement at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries when thousands of people were forced to emigrate overseas, due to the untenable economic situation, gave us the figure of the indiano (the emigrant who returned from the Americas having amassed a fortune). They planted palms trees that they bought in the Canary Islands at the homes they built in their birthplaces on their return. Those palm trees were – and still continue to be – exotic, symbols of power and conquering, since Christopher Columbus mentioned them on his first voyage. In 2013, what would be the first attack by the palm weevil was documented in Gondomar (Vigo); considered an invasive species, it infected the first indiana palm tree and would turn out to be the harbinger of the weevils that spread throughout the north of the peninsula, where those century-old specimens were located.
In that same year, the monument to Christopher Columbus in the city of Buenos Aires was replaced by the one to Juana de Azurduy, as part of the breaking free from the trappings of colonialism. Standing in the square behind the Casa Rosada (the presidential palace) – a key site on a symbolic axis of power connecting the Argentine National Congress and the Government of the Nation – the two figures were/are looking in different directions, which has a clear political meaning. Columbus was looking towards Europe and Juana is looking towards the Americas.
This coincidence in time here underpins the start of a paradox that we can consider to be symptomatic. Considering both facts as interrelated events of the effects of colonialism, the Rojoultramar project relates the environmental crisis with the social injustice stemming from colonialism, noting the currency of symbols on the landscape and their response to the continuity of capitalism. It seeks the connection between forced migrations – of human and non-human beings – at different points of history, and explores the landscape as a cultural construct that depicts our memory and identity, examines political-social and environmental problems, and the new challenges that preserving memory, culture and identify is facing.
The accumulated visual archive becomes material to use cyanotype for artistic research. This analogue photography technique is linked to the project in two ways: historically, as it is a technique from the nineteenth century, the period of the migration to the Americas; and symbolically, by its intense ultramarine colour for the trade and migratory processes.
As she embarked on this work on monuments and pests, Rakel sought strategies to cast light on the contemporary symbolic and visual construct. Maps, schemas, documents, routes and botanical studies reveal the complex design of a non-linear account, which led to her drafting a new reading of the breaking free from the trappings of colonialism.
Rakel Gómez Vázquez lives and works between Madrid and Bilbao. An artist and researcher, she graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Her art embraces creation as research, and is structured as an expanded ecofeminist documentation. She explores the landscape from an eco-critical approach, where she relates the environmental crisis to social injustice stemming from colonialism, and observing its response to the continuity of capitalism. By consulting archives, libraries and visits of art galleries and anthropological, ethnographic and ethnological museums, the field work is combined with her usual tools – drawing, printmaking, installation, photography and photosensitive analogue techniques such as cyanotype – to produce her art.