In her installation "Fractured Footprints" (2024), Mexican multidisciplinary artist Betsabeé Romero employs something you may spot in an artisanal shoe shop - antique wooden lasts.
Yet here there is no connection with fashion, Romero uses indeed the lasts in a symbolical way. Engraved and painted by hand, the lasts hint at the suffering that borders cause and, implicitly, also at the routes of migrants leaving their countries to escape economic hardships, war and persecution.
Romero draws with the lasts maps of different territories and borders that assume the meaning of metaphorical scars, the lasts are indeed split by a red neon light that calls to mind blood.
Using data and information from the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations, Romero reminds us that on the Morocco-Spain route, thousands of migrants died or disappeared between 2019 and 2021. Numbers dramatically increased, going from 474 to 2,170.
There are other maps and routes that Romero includes in her installation: the artist highlights through them that 85% of the Gaza Strip population was displaced since 2023. Besides, the border between the Unites States and Mexico has become the most dangerous land migratory route in the world, while millions of Ukrainians left their homes since Russia invaded the country.
For Romero, these invisible routes become inscribed on the body and engraved on the feet tracing them, like fresh wounds (from a distance the wooden lasts with the neon lights look a bit like long sutured scars on the walls…). Indeed, borders are intended here as imposed lines that oppose necessity and survival, scarring somebody for life.
This is just one of Romero’s installations, part of a collateral event at the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice (until 24th November). Romero’s exhibition "The Endless Spiral", at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, located in St. Mark's Square, is organized and commissioned by the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, California, and curated by Argentine art historian, researcher and MOLAA Chief Curator Gabriela Urtiaga.
Romero lives and works in Mexico City and themes of migration, miscegenation, and mobility, cultural traditions, religion and the juxtaposition of individual and collective memory have always been dear to her heart.
In her practice she is also interested in addressing the problems of public art and popular art, their permanence and relationship with the social fabric and with alternative audiences to contemporary art.
Her exhibition in Venice resonates with this year's theme "Foreigners Everywhere," as Romero explores border tensions, but also ponders on her personal experience of being a foreigner in the world and of coming across multiple barriers in her life and transgressing the boundaries of established categories.
The exhibition starts on the ground floor of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, with two rooms dedicated to "Families Divided by Sharp Borders" and "Breaking the Perverse Frontiers of the Mirror".
In the former Romero creates a festoon of tin cutouts that reveal themselves as dramatic since they show a family on the run.
The second installation features instead concave safety mirrors integrating LEDs. The mirrors with their mapped and rigged surfaces, distort the reflection of people entering the room, generating confusion and doubts and symbolizing a broken universe.
Upstairs the installation "Memories of a Moving Totem" introduces visitors to the idea of mobility and the symbology of memory instruments.
This installation could be inspiring for fashion and textile designers as well (fashion students, pay attention to the materials and meanings in this installation) as it may prompt them to think about how to create prints with unusual items.
The hand-engraved rolls on the floor painted with gold leaf are indeed actually repurposed and upcycled GoKart wheels.
Romero makes a parallelism here between the cylinder seals and stamps found in different cultures, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica (the San Andrés cylinder seal was found in an Olmec archaeological site in the present-day Mexican state of Tabasco). Engraved with written characters or figurative scenes or both, the cylinders were used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface - generally wet clay, cloth and other materials.
These cylinders left culturally important imprints, but the advent of Western wheels changed everything, prioritizing speed and forgetfulness.
By turning GoKart wheels into cylinder stamps, Romero reclaims the art and the craft behind the original rolls, eliminates from the equation the speed variable and re-establishes a slower and therefore more human rhythm as the carvings were made by hand.
Memories become once again more prominent, and they are represented by the lace strips hanging along the walls and decorated with gold motifs, a theme that goes well with Venice, and in particular with Mariano Fortuny's printing techniques.
There are two further installations to discover, one is entitled "The Shadow of the House Was Also Broken" and it consists in a paper house floating in a room.
The fragile structure doesn't represent the tangible presence of a house, but points at the home we carry inside us, a haven that can survive any destruction (some visitors may want to stop and ponder on this concept and on the concept of domicide in our times...).
Finally, "Dreaming of a Sunrise with Feathers in The Endless Spiral", is a structure of colorful feathers that can be admired from different points of views.
Depending from where you are, you may see in it a wing, a snail or a crest, and this work may also be interpreted as an architectural or as a ritual piece. Yet it's not important to define its physical form, but the messages it carries.
It speaks indeed to the interconnectedness of humanity, symbolizing the collectivity as a continuum in space. In this way, Romero's work serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration, reminding us of our common humanity amidst a world divided by boundaries that the artist is not afraid of traversing.
After all, Gabriela Urtiaga describes Romero as "a nomadic spirit," who willingly confronts the pressing issues that define our times and invites audiences to engage with essential and urgent topics that transcend borders and transgress boundaries.
"The Endless Spiral" by Betsabeé Romero will travel to the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in 2025.
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