Conversations

In Conversation with Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa & Pablo José Ramírez

Transcript:

Xiaowen Zhu: Thanks for tuning in for Times Art Center Berlin’s online program “In Conversation with Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa & Pablo José Ramírez.” My name is Xiaowen Zhu, the assistant director of Times Art Center Berlin. We are the first non-profit, parallel institution set up overseas by an Asian art museum, namely, the Guangdong Times Museum. I’m now recording this conversation from our space in central Berlin. The weather is grey, but we have two brilliant speakers today joining us from afar.

We have the talk on the occasion of our current exhibition Más Allá, el Mar Canta (Beyond, the Sea Sings): Diasporic Intimacies and Labor. Curated by Pablo, the exhibition borrows its name and takes inspiration from the book by the Afro-Chinese Cuban writer Regino Pedroso. It scrutinizes narratives of migration from China to Central America and the Caribbean as a starting point to consider systems of kinship and ontologies of intimacy. Naufus’ work, along with other amazing artists’ work in the show, speaks from the dilemma of diasporic subjectivities, powered by explorations of colonial labor, personal and collective motifs.

First, please allow me to introduce our speakers today.

Pablo José Ramírez is a curator, art writer and cultural theorist living and working in Guatemala and Amsterdam. He is the Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. His work revisits post-colonial societies to consider non-Western ontologies, indigeneity, forms of racial occlusion, and sound. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2015 he co-curated the 19th Bienal Paiz: Trans-visible with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. Ramírez was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean and is currently the Editor in Chief and co-founder of Infrasonica, a curatorial platform dedicated to the research around non-Western sonic cultures. Ramírez is part of the curatorial team of the Carnegie International 58th.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa is an artist based in Guatemala City. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a research fellow at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2013. Using performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, Ramírez-Figueroa’s work conjures live and sculptural representations that explore themes of loss, displacement, and cultural resistance. He has recently participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His work currently on view at Times Art Center Berlin is titled Chiperrec. It’s a hanging installation consisting of a deformed and dwarfed Camellia sinensis tree cast in bronze. The form and size of the tree is inspired by the tea producing trees in Guatemala.

So welcome. Pablo, would you like to first give our listeners a bit of context of the exhibition before you dive into the conversation with Naufus?

PJR: Of course, thank you so much, Xiaowen. Thank you to the Times Art Center Berlin for making this project possible, and a special thank you to Naufus for being here today. It’s great to spend some time chatting with you. Especially around the work Chiperrec (2021) that has brought so many connections and many windows to the exhibition. It connects, it resonates with some of the main axioms of the exhibition Más Allá, el Mar Canta: Diasporic Intimacies and Labor. The exhibition shows the history of the Chinese diaspora in Central American and the Caribbean and aims at building upon the constellation of artistic practices, ranging from performance, sculpture, installation, sound and moving image. The artists in the show have been, in one way or another, engaged with research, with personal stories and narratives around Chinese diasporic regions. It’s not necessarily an exhibition with a historical focus, but more a project that tries to understand the region known as Central America and the Caribbean, which is crossed by many colonial histories, so much cruelty, but is also crossed by a creative force that comes from the histories of mestizaje – from cultures, from diasporas that find each other. The flip side of coloniality is resilience and creativity. This is of course manifested in such a wonderful way in the practices of artists such as Naufus’, and we have the wonderful opportunity to dive deeper into the work Chiperrec that he presents in the show, but also into the research that allowed this new commission to happen.

I am sure that there were many things that were left outside of the actual art object, for instance the histories of research, many archival materials and conversations. So Naufus, maybe you could give us a little introduction of the work in the exhibition: What is the work Chiperrec about? Could you explain the connection to your practice at large?

NRF: Thank you, Pablo. Well, the work consists of a small, but life-size Camellia sinesis tree, as I saw them on the Chiperrec plantation in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. It is a dwarfed tree hanging from the ceiling and from it hang beaded strings with medallions made from transparent black resin. They are based on drawings I made about the history of the plantation Chiperrec, the history of tea, and also the history of the Chinese in Central America. What really inspired me to make this piece was seeing the dates in some history books that said that the first Camellia sinesis tree entered Guatemala in the mid-19th century. Comparing them to the dates that Robert Fortune [a Scottish botanist who was hired by Great Britain to ‘hunt plants’] stole tea trees from China, [I realized they] were really close, and I still don’t know how that happened. As far as I know, Robert Fortune worked for the British Army and he was hired by the British government to enter China to steal tea trees. Britain had a hard time dealing with China because it were independent, it was self-sufficient, it didn’t need to import anything, it only exported luxury goods such as silk, tea, porcellain and other goods. The tea was always paid in silver. This was not a good deal for Britain who wanted to penetrate this market, and, of course, the first thing they did was gift Chinese people opium, so they would become addicted, and they would have the reason to import something. Opium was grown on the British colonies in Asia, what is now India, Afghanistan, etc. This is how they tried to weaken the Chinese independence and inpenetrability to colonial power. In this way, they tried to get cheaper tea, porcellain, fabrics and other goods. Robert Fortune was part of this operation: he entered China through one of the ports that was open to Westerners at the time. He disguised himself as a Chinese person and was able to go all the way to Yunnan province, where he kidnapped Chinese indigenous people and stole a few [tea] trees, which he transported from China to the English colonies. The reason he needed to kidnap Chinese indigenous people was because in addition to the tree, he needed to bring back knowledge to India—the knowledge on the process of making tea taste differently was very valuable to Britain.

At the same time, there was a lot of German interest in Guatemala, with Germans bringing a lot of new plants to the country to try to exploit [the land]. Guatemala, until that time, was mainly dependent on the indigo plant, and also on the cochineal dyeing process [a natural red dye made from cochineal insects]. But of course, it was the chemical replacement for these pigments that was still an open space in Guatemala for European investors. Tea happened to be one of these plants that were brought over.

A lot of Germans in Guatemala were coming from the colonies in Africa, and they were bringing with them ideas of how to treat people. As we know, some of those dealings with people in German African colonies were later used in WWII, and it all seems to be connected in a really messy way. Specifically in Guatemala, it was both: this forced, cruel mix of blood between indigenous women and German men, but apparently also a way to live together at times.

This fell apart during WWII, when US intelligence agencies published documents on German companies in Guatemala that were directly aiding the German’s side in the war. It was specifically [at the plantation] Chiperrec, where they held large meetings in the German colony and where the storage of arms was also located, which they sent over to Germany. After WWII, the land of Chiperrec was taken from the Germans and given to Mayan women as a cooperative, which, in itself, is a beautiful ending. Part of this history of the plantation is also that the plantation is located above a series of sacred Mayan caves, the Chiperrec caves.

[Another thought here was] that for indigenous people in Yunnan, the tea is a spiritual being. That is why I felt it like it was appropriate that it ended in this [sacred] tea plantation in Guatemala. Of course, the modes of looking at tea trees were very different: in Yunnan, they leave the trees to grow as tall as they can, and just pick the new leaves; in Guatemala, in this very harsh colonial way, you cut the tree down to almost the bottom every year. That means that the [Guatemalan tea] trees are now 200 years old, but they are short and deformed. They are not aesthetically beautiful, they are ugly short trees. I also have to say that Chiperrec is not good-quality tea. I really enjoy it, but [the plantation] probably needs some help from Taiwan or China on the techniques of drying it. While the flavor is not very good, the quality of trees is very good, so it is definitely the technique [that needs improving].
Guatemala was also receptive to migration of coolies in the 19th century who were fleeing from nearby British colonies such as Belize. I don’t know if there were any coolies who worked on that [Chirripec] plantation, but they did work on the sugar plantations in Baja Verapaz.

The medallions [of my work] are a little like storybook illustrations, I really wanted to dive fully into the narrative format, and the stories are strong, because everything here can be verified, even though it might sound completely made up.
In the history of Alta Verapaz and Chiperrec, there was a lot of violence during our war. There are murals near the plantation of men whose limbs are all chopped off, and who are tied to the trees. So there are also this symbolism of violence and resistence [as part of the tea trees].

In a way, the work also ties into the series I did a few years ago called Obsidian Mirror (2018) [example here] which were very graphic, figurative, sometimes fantastical drawings around my experiences of the civil war or images that I can’t really depict in black and white. So those images in an obsidian mirror, which are made from black ink on black paper, which you can only see if you move your head because of different reflections of the material. In the case of Chiperrec, it’s black transparent resin, which I think [similar to Obsidian Mirror] is also not immediately visible.

PJR: I would like to follow up with some things that you mentioned. It is such a fascinating history that is emblematic of how complex coloniality, the diasporas and labor actually are. We could say that the history of these tea trees and the history of Chirripec contains the suffering of so many people and the cruelty of British colonialism, Spanish colonialism, etc. On the one hand, we have the political history—the civil war, WWII and how that impacted the transition from the German-owned plantation to this Cooperative of indigenous Kekchí women. On the other hand, we have a less visible entanglement that we could call ‘interspecies politics.’ For instance how the tea tree and therefore the taste changed. We have this Chinese tea tree in Guatemala that was changed because of different conditions of production and cultivation and became something else. This tea taste and flavor is something we as Guatemalans know very well, we grew up tasting the Chirripec tea as a local flavor. So I was thinking if we could say, a little bit playfully, that this tea could be referred to as a mestizo tea that also relates to the history of mestizaje, to the Chinese, and the indigenous workers. What are your thoughts on this, and how do you see the Cooperative now that it is owned by indigenous Kekchí women?

NRF: You are right. Chirripec tea might be one of my earliest taste memories. It has no association with the fanciness, or foreigness, it feels totally Guatemalan, totally common. You can find it in every little store.

I got into the hobby of collecting Chinese tea when I lived in Berlin a few years ago. I was exploring its different varieties and the different grades at that time. When I was at a tea tasting at a shop with another customer, he asked me, “Do you have tea in Guatemala?” And I said, “Yeah, we have oldest tea outside China and India.” But I’ve given the tea to some of my Chinese friends, they’ve tasted it, and obviously the quality is not good. Maybe it was good enough at that time, and we have to imagine that this tea was originally brought to Guatemala to export to Germany. So maybe it was good enough for the German taste at the time, as a low-quality tea. I believe the same people that owned the Chirripec tea also owned the cacao plantations which was also an important crop for Germany.

PJR: Yes, I was thinking that this also happened with some other natural goods, like cardamom.

NRF: Yes, cardamom was actually also brought by the same person that brought tea trees.

PJR: It was the same person, that is interesting. There is something about these transplanted natural goods, and how we tend to forget their colonial entanglement. In the case of the Chinese tea, I find it really interesting how it is crossed by this global historical trauma—WWII, this connection between that plantation and the Nazi regime, but also the CIA and the exploitation of the land. And thinking about that, Naufus, I am curious about looking at your practice. You are engaged with this very complex research, but then you transit between this complexity, the many layers and connections but then you filter and absorb that, and the work becomes something else related to fiction, related to speculation, but also it is related to the history, to the fact. I don’t know if you would agree with this, but your research is not translated into the work as a mere reflection of it. Your research always takes a step forward, and kind of plays a little bit with history.

In this case, I wanted to ask how you decided to work with these drawings, and how you came up with the idea of the bronze tree installation with resin medallions?

NRF: You are right. It is weird, I have told people that I am a research-based artist, but I don’t think anybody has ever believed me. Because the final project is usually very visually rich. So, at the end, it doesn’t seem to have much connection to my initial research. In this case, of course, there were many ways to see it, and they were many fountains to inform me. Some of them were written by German Guatemalans that painted a ‘nicer picture,’ but there were also documentaries which were more explicit. I also saw some US intelligence documents from the 1940s, that were very explicit about this plantation and the workings of the German community, which, part of me thinks, may have been US propaganda. Maybe these Germans were just growing tea, which is what I read in some books in Guatemala.

There are many layers to reading this piece—also emotional layers such as the taste of tea, or tea with milk. As we said, the taste of the tea is almost at the same level with coffee, you drink it out of your little cup in Guatemala, or at least you were doing that in my generation. There are also other sensory memories, for instance of my life in growing up as a refugee in Canada where tea culture is bigger, and also other emotional reactions to all these cruel and bizarre stories, such as how Robert Fortune dressed up like a Chinese man, crossed the whole country and kidnapped [people]. When you read about the history of the coolies, of course your heart breaks for these people who were tricked into jobs abroad and then enslaved and sold to various Latin American countries as cheap workers, which also reflects the history of Indigenous and Black people in the Americas.

I came up with all of this when I first visited the plantation in Chirripec in May [2021] to go see real plantations that I’ve never visited before. I was shocked, especially by the ugliness and shortness of the trees, because it wasn’t what I imagined from what I had read. But it also brought it all together—the cruelty to this plant, and also the different relations you have as a Guatemala when visiting other towns, and other people. I accidently spilled my teacup on top of a table where they had old photographs of the original German owners. Of course, I apologized, but at the same time, it might have been part of my little pleasure in soiling these images a little bit, you know.

Part of my practice is just drawing, drawing and picking the images which I think better fit the story. I knew that I wanted to start with a big tree on one of the medallions, where people are sitting on the branches. To me, it’s the indigenous people of Yunnan and other provinces who ancestrally grow and make tea before even mainland China took it over. Tea belongs to them. I wanted to end with a more spiritual aspect around the relationship with the Kekchí and their land. So the last image is this kind of scarecrow, a tall female figure made of tree branches, hovering over a group of women looking at it, and another image of a child figure whose body opens as part of the caves of Chiperrec, which are underneath the plantation. At the same time, I leave enough imagery that people don’t need to know the story, which is obviously a bit overwhelming—skipping from big things like the Opium War, with the British wanting to penetrate and bring China to its knees; and then to the story of coolies, WWII, and our civil war. These are big historical narratives that can tire you, take away your energy. So for the work, there are little medallions that you can choose to your liking, you can research whichever you want. It is optional to look further, which, I think, is one of the good things about making figurative works. You can pick and choose what you actually want to research more.

PJR: Yes, I think you get the feeling when seeing the work. There is something about going around the installation and choosing from those images which fragments of history you want to look at. The translucency of the resin is also interesting here, looking at the image, but also looking through it, at what is behind. So that is something that I think personally really reflects on this complexity that you just mentioned.

NRF: Yes, I feel like the medallions have the quality of looking almost like degraded photocopies, because the transparent black resin has a blurriness to it.

PJR: To wrap up, I would just like to say thank you, and to ask you what you are working on at the moment?

NRF: There is so much information with this research on tea, so I don’t know yet what I will do with it. But after this, I am diving into the history of silk in Guatemala. I already wanted to do a piece about silk before, when I had an exhibition in Krefeld—traditionally the place in Germany where silk was cultivated. Right now, I am reading letters from the 18th and early 19th century of the Counts of xxx , and their ambitions of ‘addressing the capitals,’ as they put it. It seems like [silk] was an enterprise totally run by the aristocrats of Guatemala City. But of course, there is another cruel history with indigenous women’s hands working the silk, and the deformities that happen when you’re dealing with these insects and materials.

PJR: I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next. Thank you so much, Naufus. There was lots of food for thought, and I’m sure we will keep talking about this.

XZ: I was fascinated and moved by these sensitivities in Naufus’ work. How the taste of tea connects you to the idea of home, but also how you remove yourself in your research when looking at all these major historical happenings. I was reminded of two Chinese sayings: The first one is “南橘北枳,” meaning “Sweet oranges in the South would taste bitter in the North,” so very similar to what you were talking about with the ‘kidnapping’ of the trees from China all the way to Guatemala; the second one is “人挪活树挪死,” which means “A shift in position makes a person live better, but when it comes to a tree, it might suffer from quite the opposite result.” Again, this is what you were talking about. Your work adds another layer of suffering and human exploitation to the historical tea trading. Thank you for this research but also your personal observations during this talk – I felt it was a very nurturing conversation.

Thank you both for the illuminating contribution. The exhibition is on view at Times Art Center Berlin until December 19, 2021. We’re open from Tuesday to Saturday, 12 to 7 pm. Please make sure to check out our website timesartcenter.org for further information. Más Allá, el Mar Canta also has an online publication page that keeps evolving throughout the exhibition period.
Stay updated on our future events and new projects via social media.

We’ll publish this talk on our YouTube channel and Facebook as well, so type in a comment if you have questions for Pablo and Naufus. We’ll make sure to pass them on.

Thanks again for listening. Keep well and healthy. See you next time.