Projects > Cali es Cali



24 September 2020 – 
21 February 2021
ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ARTCosta Mesa, California, USAcurated by CASSANDRA COBLENTZ
installation, video, watercolor, exhibition
2020









In Cali es Cali, or “Cali is Cali,” part of the Orange County Museum of Art Expand series, I play with two popular expressions. The first, “Cali es Cali” is an expression from my father’s hometown of Cali, Colombia, and it is akin to the American adage “there’s no place like home.” The second expression is a nickname for California—“Cali”—which has been in use for close to a hundred years but that I perhaps first heard from LL Cool J in his 1988 hit, “Going Back to Cali.” 

As a point of departure and inspiration, I use my late father’s photographic archive—comprised of 4,000 photographs, films, and videos—to consider the fragility and ephemerality of memory and identity. The photographs in the exhibition are juxtaposed next to drawings of the landscape inspired by Von Humboldt’s landscapes and botanical studies which consider the ways in which the land figures in the trajectory and memory of the migrant/ immigrant. The show also includes the video Intercambio: A Cultural Exchange, where a Super 8 film capturing my family's travels across the United in the 1970s is juxtaposed with stock Super 8 footage of an American family traveling across Colombia around the same time. The piece's editing literalizes the notion of “cultural exchange” being an encounter between equivalences—“Colombia es Colombia?”—even as it prefigures some of my future trajectory as a Colombian American.

Top, back wall
Personajes, 2020 
Enlarged ink jet prints of family passport and identification photos

Top, table top vitrine
Objetos de Uso Cotiniano, Pa Mantener La Memoria de Adonde Vinimos y Pa Donde Nos Vamos, Traidos de Un Lugar Y Llevados Otro (Objects for Daily Use, Brought From One Place to Another, So That We Remember Where We Came From), 2020
Table top vitrine  with cacerola (saucepan), cardholder, carriol ( satchel) shoes, passports, vaccination record, glasses, pink and ivory doily, orange and brown doily, camera, Thomas Bros. map

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