Fragments of Inner, Middle and Upper Worlds

Viewable from the outside of the gallery entrance through its glass doors, a fountain of cast multiples of a heron are spitting water into a constructed pond and onto videos of a breathing belly button and a mangrove trunk finding balance over a woman’s flexed spine. The square water feature sits next to three slender Gumbo Limbos, native self-healing trees that search for the sky as they shoot through a hanging square wood frame. On another adjacent square wood frame that is suspended at a higher level, a broad tree branch and air plants rest. These ascending ‘stairs’ were inspired by the terraces built by Pre-Columbian cultures and their ‘Pachas’, the lower/inner world of the dead, the middle world of the living and the upper world of the spirits. This site-specific installation was produced during a week-long residency at Laundromat Art Space residency by Roxana Barba, Claudio Marcotulli and Laurencia Strauss. 

The central area of Laundromat Art Space houses several moving image works in display: Kuifi ül , a film by Francisco Huichaqueo based in the headwaters of a river in Mapuche territory, Heron and Rituales Porosos, a dance film set on the Little River developed from an encounter with a wounded heron and a video of a ritual with grass and soil by Roxana Barba with cinematography by Claudio Marcotulli, as well as a video with images of Headwaters of the Miami River by Laurencia Strauss and Claudio Marcotulli. 

A related video installation includes another heron spitting water between the viewer and the static of a portable black & white TV, so that the water passing in front of the TV catches its reflected light. The water lands in a vessel and then circulates through translucent tubing back to the heron, to create a simple and absurd collage-like fountain. Cinder blocks, a tree stump, an air plant and purple grow lights are the fountain’s base. Both installations include typical artificial landscape elements such as wildlife figurines, water pumps and plastic hoses. Despite their artificiality, through the movement and sounds of water, these can activate our sense of belonging with natural ecologies. 

The collaborative installation Fragments of Inner, Middle and Upper Worlds considers how we exist as natural beings in urban landscapes, drawing inspiration from Miami’s natural, constructed and destructed environments. This includes the water that finds its course amidst the dredged land and redirected waters of the Everglades as well as ancestral indigenous cosmovisions.