NÉLIDA MENDOZA'S IDENTITY SYSTEMS

In what way do you feel traveling and migration influences your work?

I was practically born in a suitcase because my whole family was from Asuncion and later, we were political refugees in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the 1980's I went first to Rome where my sister was living, and then to Carrara, where I spent 15 years working with stone. I have lived in Sicily since 1993, where and I move between Palermo and the Taormina area.

The trip arouses my curiosity: it is the most important thing, my research image. At the beginning I attributed it to an identity concept because my mother was the wife of an exile, she lived at home without much social life and her greatest desire was always to return to Asuncion to see her parents. This feeling was present at home and then transferred to my research: I always look for a distant image, of something that is kilometers away.

Living in Argentina, my family always went back to Asunción, and that means so many things. We would go to my grandparents' place because didn't have a house of our own: we would go from house to house, and that was transferred to my identity later on. It is more interesting and important -I always tell my students- to try to eat anything, to investigate, to be open, to sleep anywhere, to know, to listen and to see how some things for us are tacit and actually for others they are not.

Being open to new experiences...

Most of all, being open to a dialogue of interpreting the other. The world is rich in people, we have to understand that what we are trying to say can be said in different ways.

Could you talk about your participation in the Sicilian soundscape study network and how this experience has influenced your work?

We founded it in Sicily with Stefano Zorzanello who is an Italian musician and who has always worked on the basis of the experiments that Murray Schafer did on the Soundscape. Zorzanello mainly tries to make people aware to know how to hear with an ecological system of listening.

This project started with few resources and today it is an international project, used by many artists. In the region, this type of mechanism is used a lot, mainly because of the volcano, and also because it is an island with a lot of movement of people, so we experiment from there. Alessandro Aiello also comes from there, but he is more dedicated to the attention and sound of words more associated to a social and political context. 

What is your exhibition "Fuerte Olimpo and other stories" for this edition of Pinta Sud | ASU at K Arte y Naturaleza gallery about?

Years ago, architect Anibal Cardoso Ocampo was working on a restoration project for Fort Borbón, located in the city of Fuerte Olimpo, in northern Paraguay, almost on the border with Bolivia.  It is a beautiful fort, abandoned, which has not been restored. There, I could see another time, where nature is imminent, the river is a highway; but then the system of life they have there, the way of communicating, is also different. The place caught my attention so I thought of doing a project on Fuerte Olimpo.

Then the project was born with Fernando Moure -the curator of the gallery K /Arte y Naturaleza- with whom I had worked on other occasions.

The border is a traction for me. A traction system, borders where the temperature rises depending on whether you can pass or not. The images presented in this exhibition are elaborated with a sound design system, where the sound is representing some imagenes: the act of waiting, the anxieties of whether you will be able to pass or not, the dialogues in the bus, the last part of Argentina where you start listening to the radio of Asuncion and my mother got excited. The project has the collaboration of Alessandro Aiello and Juanchi Franco.

The entire exhibition is crossed by ten audios -it is a Soundscape- that accompanies a site-specific sculpture that I made with yellow steel. The yellow has great prominence in this exhibition because the walls of the Olimpo wall are "invaded" by the honeycombs of bees.  People take the stones out of the wall to get some honey. And also, because we traveled in an airplane very early in the morning where the sun invaded the plane and that was my initial image.

In addition, in the 1980s I donated a sculpture "Margina" in Carrara marble to the city of Asuncion. After several events, this sculpture arrived at the Manzana de la Rivera, where it is currently located.

The Gallery K / Arte y Naturaleza, for this exhibition, has been responsible for bringing from Buenos Aires, a series of my works, contemporary to this marble "Margina". These works arrived from Italy to Buenos Aires, several years ago. So, we wanted to give a space to this story of "works that wander" and will be exhibited in one of the rooms of the gallery with a video documentary that tells this kind of journey of the works of Carrara to Asuncion.

How do you see the interplay between nature and new technologies? Are they in opposition to each other?

No, I don't contrast them.  I am passionate about new technologies. I find it essential to work in collaboration and co-participation, which is difficult. Everything that is new excites me, but I come from a past generation, where thinking and ways of reasoning had other structures, but I can always collaborate for a new vision. I work with many young people at the university and I am passionate about this dialogue. But I think you always have to be careful when inserting yourself in new systems, because they do not detach themselves from the old ones, there is no such isolation of the new from the old. And you have to pay attention to what things get lost along the way.

What language do you think in?

I've always wondered, I don't know. Lately I have been coming to Asuncion every year, so I speak more in Spanish, but I am always a foreigner when it comes to language: it is a very difficult frontier to cross. I have a lot of mixture between Spanish, Italian and English. It doesn't bother me, it's enough that they understand me and I understand them, but when it comes to identities it's more difficult to understand. In the installation of "Olimpo y otras historias" we use some sounds recordings of myself thinking and speaking in Spanish.