Aesthetics of poverty
'Aesthetics of poverty' explores the subordinated position that Indigenous peoples occupy in the contemporary image. I am interested in exposing the mechanisms through which historical heritage operates simultaneously as emancipatory resistance and neo-colonial oppression. Being an indigenous woman, I live this contradiction in a daily basis.
I have long observed how people’s first perception of a photograph of an indigenous family evokes an impression of poverty. Tellingly, this is the case even when the photograph depicts a wealthy family as their indigenous clothing appears to be enough to situate them in a place of marginality. I claim that our complex personalities are largely eclipsed, if not completely ignored, by our ethnic features in western representation. Complexity is replaced by the stereotypes attached to Indigeneity. Through a Google Image search, I collected images that were repetitive under the words “Indigenous Latin America”. I classified these images and connected them with different layers of personal and collective experiences of memory, trauma and displacement from my family’s history and my community. I used clothing and textiles to re-enact those moments in order to give them visibility. |