The Open Mind Series is a selection of interviews with artists, designers and other ‘creators’ from around the world giving us an insight into how they see the world now and tomorrow. No qualifications required. No taboo. No right or wrong. Just openness. And artworks.
How do you imagine the world in 20 years?
I imagine an alternative landscape; new perspectives of seeing will develop. We are facing a moment of new definitions, established concepts have come into question. New dynamic and evolving terms related to how people identify are re-codified. I want to imagine a new code of communication: the world as an event, a suspension of ordinary existence.
How do you imagine the world in 1000 years?
I can only think backwards… so I imagine it like the archaic times, living more connected to nature, to spirituality, to transcendence.
What is the plant, animal or object that most inspires you and how?
Anything that can be taken out of context. A plant that can have health-related or spiritual powers. An animal that can have a symbolic or mythical meaning like the sacred scarabs of Egypt, and any object that has the ability to transcend and invest powers. I like taking images of objects from ancient memory and reusing them within my own iconography; such as the use in my performances of ritual capes and armors that I make myself with vintage paper documentation on the subject they represent. Wearing a cloak is both a female and a male attribute; its a ritual piece that acts beyond gendered identities on the frontier. The Cloak is also a talisman, keeping one safefrom harm, and secure throughout transitions. For me re-generating these narratives articulates a sense of urgency and is a mode of resistance.
What is the emotion that drives you in your work?
THE RITUAL.
I intend to rescue ancestral rituals related to sacred places, ancestral geography and original memory, and take them into my own exploration where the work is presented as a syncretic bricolage, as an attempt to reconcile different doctrines, a process of trans-culturalization and miscegenation, the union of the sacred and the secular. I believe my woven art pieces are eloquent expressions of women concern with cultural tradition and transmutation. Textiles are among the most visible signs of sacred space and sacred roles. Cloth has always been an alternative discourse.
What does community mean to you personally?
SHARING.
Community means for me the people you share a common place with. It could be a geographical place, a time space, a working group, your friends, your family, society, and humanity at large at an aspirational final stage.
How do you connect with the Earth today?
Contemplating it, and also connecting with its times. There is also an essential correspondence between the realms of agriculture and weaving, an isomorphic relationship. To work the earth and to weave provide life’s fundamentals: food and clothing. There are profound, conceptual, linguistic and religious connections between the two.
What is your dream for the arts world?
I think art should serve the purposes of its time. Art must be made in accordance with contingency and must always function as an activator of awareness.
What’s the best thing on earth?
Conscious human experience.
The work of Chilean visual artist Catalina Swinburn operates on the shifting border that she establishes between cult and artistic practice through the use of rites (performance) and the arrangement of objects. Her exploration of different visual media results in highly emotional images created with metaphoric and symbolic manipulations that challenge reality as a representation the artist is part of. She lives and works in London, Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile.