“What We Hold in Common” by Ximena Garrido/Ishmael Randal Weeks is an essay commissioned by PROTODISPATCH, a new digital publication featuring personal perspectives by artists addressing transcontinental concerns, filtered by where they are in the world. It was originally published by the international nonprofit Protocinema and appears here as part of a collaboration between Protocinema and Artnet News.

For PROTODISPATCH, Ximena Garrido/Ishmael Randal Weeks write and share images of a collaborative ongoing work called Materia Comun (Common Materials) which is a participatory earth work. Their focus is on structures that tie coexisting cultures together. Here human bodies, thoughts, and emotions are matter that is equal to vegetation, animals, and the earth itself, interconnected and in constant flux. With the public participants’ own inspiration, the physical materials people brought and texts being read started from mass media and mass-produced objects and slowly became intimate items with deep meaning, personal journals, and letters. Materia Comun (Common Materials) touches the core of humankind’s temporary life in a body, occupying a society/city, in relation to a cyclical, interrelated organism, earth, of which we are each a very small part. — Mari Spirito, founder of Protocinema

We both are from Perú and have experienced similar realities while growing up during the ’80s and ’90s. It was a very intense period of social and political unrest, as well as a deep economic crisis. Perú has a rich ancestral culture and history and was a center of Spanish control during the colonial period. The clash between the two cultures led to a series of disruptions and radical changes, which define its social and cultural realities reflected today. 

With the hope of making meaning of these ancestral, historical, and contemporary realities which are embedded in daily life, we began a process of creating a collaborative project using Peruvian soil, which not only has a sacred significance in Peruvian Andean culture, but is also used as building material for constructing adobe structures. We made a visit to Chilca, a nearby town on the Coast of Lima with black soil lagoons. People travel to this Laguna Milagrosa from different parts of the country, to soak in its ¨magical soil¨ and recover from their daily life and problems, as well as to treat illnesses such as rheumatism, sterility, arthrosis, asthma, etc. The black soil has high levels of minerals, which is also good for several skin conditions.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.