Visiting artist Carolina Caycedo is joined by UW Associate Professor Joshua Reid for a discussion on water entities, bodies, geopolitics, and the convergence of Indigenous activism in both Caycedo’s ongoing Be Dammed project and the activities of the Pacific Northwest. Caycedo will speak to the way her work intersects and resides within practices of activism, and how her engagement with individuals and communities affected by industrialization and privatization informs the work. Reid will expand on these practices and speak to the ways his research and work in local and global Indigenous activism relates or raises different sets of questions.
Carolina Caycedo (1978, lives in Los Angeles) was born in London to Colombian parents. She transcends institutional spaces to work in the social realm, where she participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Through work that investigates relationships of movement, assimilation and resistance, representation and control, she addresses contexts, groups and communities that are affected by developmental projects, like the constructions of dams, the privatization of water, and its consequences on riverside communities.
She has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogota, Quezon City, Toronto, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, San Juan, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Mexico DF, Tijuana, and London. Her work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows at Vienna Secession, Intermediae-Matadero Madrid, Agnes B Gallery Paris, Alianza Francesa Bogotá, Hordaland Kunstsenter Bergen, 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and DAAD Gallery in Berlin.
Joshua Reid's research interests include American Indians, identity formation, cultural meanings of space and place, the American and Canadian Wests, the environment, and the Indigenous Pacific. He teaches courses on American Indian History, the American West, U.S. History, and Environmental History. Yale University Press recently published his first book, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, in the Henry Roe Cloud Series for American Indians and Modernity. This examines the Makah Nation's historical relationship with the ocean. He is currently researching a project about Indigenous explorers in the Pacific Ocean, specifically focusing on those individuals who voluntarily traveled throughout the Pacific from the late eighteenth through late nineteenth centuries.
This program is in conjunction with Carolina Caycedo’s visit as a Gurvich Contemporary Art Project artist. During her visit, Caycedo will engage in a range of programs that explore the geopolitics of water, collective resistance, and regional narratives that relate to her ongoing project Be Dammed, aspects of which are on view in the current exhibition Between Bodies.
CREDITS
This program is made possible by the Helen & Max Gurvich Fund. Gurvich Projects seek to build connections between Seattle audiences and artists, both locally and around the globe, who are defying convention through their practice. These visiting artists are invited to explore ideas and engage with a range of audiences via a series of experimental programs and platforms.
