Handwoven from fibers into a fluid grid-like structure, Carolina Caycedo’s series of malleable fishnet sculptures, Cosmotarrayas (2016), were collected and gifted, among other objects, during the artist’s field research trips to several riverside communities in rural areas of Colombia and Brazil. The sculptural pieces of hand-dyed artisanal nets are hung from the ceiling, creating varying conical and tent-like shapes. Caycedo combines these nets with personal objects from the communities she visited to create vessels that speak to the histories of land, people, and individuals concerning the dispossession and resistance of extractive development projects in several American bioregions. Her fishing nets function as a tactile form of abstract information that embodies and conveys the traditions and memories of the individuals who wove them. Created by hand, each net carries a unique thickness of knots and ties encoded with traditional forms of wisdom, knowledge, sovereignty, and sense of value.

Caycedo’s large-scale mural, Yuma, or the Land of Friends II (2020), merges satellite imagery of the El Quimbo Dam in Colombia during its construction phases from 2010-2014, which redirected the Magdalena Rivera (a main waterway) that dramatically affected the land and indigenous communities of the region, with topographic maps and aerial photos from the 1940s and 50s. The varying patterns and shapes of the Earth’s body captured in her pictures appear distinguishable, but it takes a moment to decipher and recognize the multiple layers of various topographical features of the land’s surface from distinct points in time that Caycedo has heavily manipulated—she layers and melds much of the features of her source material into an almost abstract composition. Her work reveals the physical dislocation of the natural world, a body that has been stripped, carved, and restructured in the name of development and progress. 

Her works collectively reveals the multiple bodies affected by these industrial-based projects and the interconnectedness between ourselves and the natural elements of rivers, stones, and trees that surround us. Caycedo’s work asks viewers to reconsider our gaze and reevaluate our understanding of how we relate to our environments—ultimately how our bodies relate to land and place. Her work, rooted in a decolonial perspective and pan-Indigenous cosmological belief system, extends the possibilities of human interaction with and co-existence within the natural world.

Artist texts by Marissa Del Toro