Karen Paulina Biswell & María Amilbia Siagama Siagama: ADUA

This text was commissioned on the occasion of Karen Paulina Biswell and María Amilbia Siagama Siagama’s joint exhibition, ADUA. The text is written by Natalia Valencia Arango, a curator, writer and editor based in London. 

For their first collaborative exhibition in the UK, Colombian/French artist Karen Paulina Biswell and Colombian/Embera-Chami artist and cultural guardian María Amilbia Siagama Siagama present an ongoing project developed over the course of fourteen years. Their work confer an intertwining of languages and world views, materialised through a dialogue between photography, drawing, embroidering, installation, and traditional Embera-Chami rituals. Exploring the intersections of identity, ritual, and healing, the duo weave a narrative of transformation, anchoring their collaboration in the principles of reciprocity and exchange. 

The exhibition takes its title from the Embera word for “I don’t know”, and is a conceptual thread running through their collaboration, alluding to the broader complexities implicit in the intersection between these specific Western and non-Western aesthetics, philosophies, and ecological worldviews. An emphasis is placed on the lack of definitive answers; “I don’t know” suggests a scepticism with regards to ideas of “different cultures coming together, blending seamlessly and creating a sense of sheer harmony” which do not acknowledge the historical violence and contentiousness that defined the initial meeting of the two cultures.

Biswell’s upbringing and artistic methods, straddling Colombian and French cultures, inform her visual explorations of vulnerability, femininity, and the shifting nature of identity. The artist approaches the colonial legacy implied in the use of photography within anthropological research, informed by an interest in the evolution of portraiture within the Western art historical canon. Siagama Siagama, who lives in rural Risaralda, Colombia, lends her practice of painting, embroidery, altar making, and her ancestral knowledge to the collaboration. Her work is rooted in the traditions of her Embera-Chami people, foremost the custom of body painting using jagua ink. In Cosmos +, Siagama Siagama’s interventions in school textbooks aesthetically interfere with Western scientific narratives and worldviews. By incorporating Embera symbols and cosmology, she reappropriates these texts, transforming them into sites of enquiry and reimagination. Siagama Siagama draws over analogue negatives of self-portraits made by Biswell; they also sew and embroider fabrics, assembling installations alluding to, and guided by, traditional Embera-Chami altar-making processes, thus conceiving of the exhibition space as a meeting point for reflection, withdrawal, and where a sense of interrogation and imagination can take place.

One traditional cultural element informing this collaborative work is the Embera-Chami ceremonial use of Brugmansia Insignis plant (“iguaka”), a sacred ingestion ritual performed in order to connect individuals to nature, spirits, and collective memory. The plant is considered not merely as a botanical entity but as a spiritual agent and master that provides support for seeing, healing, and dreaming. Its flowers face down towards the underworld, establishing a connection to the abyss, the invisible realm, burials, the spirits of the deceased and the vast spectrum of knowledge contained within the earth. It is used ceremoniously to gain guidance in locating precious metals, identifying weeds, and aiding in the sustainable management of the territory. During “Benakúa” (Brugmania rituals), participants travel back and forth from the underworld in order to gain wisdom; influenced by the hallucinogenic effect of the plant, they go through phases of memory alteration and amnesia, an experience which in turn triggers new understandings of reality, operating through a process of “knowing through forgetting”. Brugmansia rituals are a mind-altering spiritual experience that subsequently materialise in concrete instructions to lead a mindful and balanced existence with nature. Much like the contemporary misuse of the sacred coca plant for cocaine production, the alkaloids of the Brugmansia plant are also used in Colombia’s urban centres to intoxicate victims of robbery and assault. In Biswell’s work, photographs of the flower are superimposed with different motifs, reflecting the contemporary cohabitation of this ancient, sacred plant, and Colombian socio-political realities.

sIn a poignant gesture, for this exhibition, Biswell revisits portraits of Embera/Chamí people she has taken over the course of fifteen years. This time, however, the artist omits the ordinary process that converts an image from a negative into a positive, which would lend the photographs a realism, and is conventional of the representational and archival tendencies of photographic portraiture. Working exclusively with negative images, these portraits express the impossibilities of “accurate” representations of non-Western cultures, offering an aesthetic and conceptual criticism of the destructive, hegemonic impulse to classify, taxonomize, and ultimately absorb alterity. Biswell’s visual approach opens up space for the many layers of opacity and unpredictability that exist within the attempt to interact with other cultures, thus highlighting the fact that these interactions are always underscored by imbalances and a lack of definitive answers