Translation, Diaspora, and Latinx Art: A Conversation with Isabella Cilia

Feature Article »
By Jeff Young,Professor of Art, Art Education »

Recently, Jeff Young was able to catch-up with Isabella Cilia. Cilia earned the B.F.A. in
Studio Art: Emphasis in Painting in May, 2019 and is currently traveling between Texas and Colombia.

What positions/jobs do you currently hold (including titles)?

Since I finished my arts programming fellowship in Upstate New York with the Wassaic Project last year, I have been working as a freelance editor and artist assistant. At the moment I am supporting a colleague in the editorial process of a collection of English/Spanish interviews with eight Dominican contemporary artists. The project is forthcoming and has been a pleasure to assist with, no less because its conceptual framework aligns with my own research interests, which include artistic production in Latin America, Latin American diasporas, and the relationship between art and politics.

After you graduated from UCA, you were accepted for the Ox-Bow Fellowship at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Michigan. How was that experience beneficial to you as an artist?

I think it’s incredible that the Ox-Bow School of Art accepts two applicants from non-partnering schools every summer. In fact, I only learned of the fellowship because of another UCA alum who had been accepted some years prior, Brandon Mathis, one of my first professors at UCA. If I’m being totally honest, from the moment I got there, I felt like my head was going to spin right off. I was totally overwhelmed. The residency, which is three months long, fully funded, and includes a stipend, is affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was my first encounter with an art school environment, even if it was more like a summer camp. People were constantly talking about things I didn’t understand and artists that I had never heard of. Suddenly I had curators visiting my studio and asking me questions, some which I haven’t forgotten to this day. In fact, one question, which I always talk about when I talk about this experience, totally changed the course of my practice— leading me even, to give up making art for a while as I tried to figure out how to answer it (which I will address at length in my next responses). Overall, however, the most important part of this experience was that I made beautiful and fruitful friendships with artists who I keep up with regularly to this day.

What did you do next after completing that fellowship?

Immediately after my fellowship ended I moved to Philadelphia. My plan at that time was to live in Philly and look for jobs in New York. When the pandemic hit, I was commuting to New York City every single day from Philly to work as a production assistant at an art fair during Armory Week. Of course, the pandemic halted everything, the applications I was working on were canceled, and I had no idea what would happen to the art world in an unprecedented event like that. I stayed in Philly, and I couldn’t explain why I was spending most of my time learning Spanish. Well in truth, I was experiencing a crisis in my art practice. In a word, I could say that I was starting to ask myself questions about how to represent the experience of being between these two places: Colombia and the United States. A curator came to my studio at the beginning of this investigation when I was at Ox-Bow. He said to me, “”But how is your work addressing what is happening in Colombia?”” While it’s possible that this question was unfair, and I think it could be argued that it was, I realized that I did not wish to alienate Latin American artists or viewers. Perhaps most embarrassing to me at that moment, was that I didn’t actually know what was happening in Colombia. I think that behind the intention of my work was a deep desire to connect to Colombia and to ask myself what it meant to be from, or not be from, or to love a place that is both mythic and also very politically real. During the pandemic, I closed the gap in my heritage-speaker Spanish, so that I could read in Spanish about art— and most importantly, so I could learn what was happening in Colombia.

Your experiences and work have led you to see the importance of language translation. In fact, you have said that translation has become “conceptually central” to your practice as an arts worker and artist. Can you explain why that is so?

I never expected for Spanish to take on such a central role in my practice. I am currently reading a book by Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan theorist, curator, and conceptual artist who has been deeply influential in artistic circles throughout Latin America since the late 1960s. In his book, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, Camnitzer relates the dematerialization of conceptual art to the avoidance of an erosion of information, which can happen easily with images, no less because of their polysemic nature. Since I occupy two contexts simultaneously I find images to be both fascinating and very sticky. Where the image of a banana in Guatemala or Colombia is undoubtedly political (because of the violent history of banana republics), in the U.S. an image of a banana is unlikely to bring forth similar connections and may even lead viewers to think of “paradise,” the mundane, or a general idea of “Latino-ness.” As a way to navigate this, I have become obsessed with the cultural structures which underpin language. Conceptually, the incongruence and untranslatability of language is infinitely rich. For example, the word “”tierra”” in Spanish, is everything from “”home,” (or even “”ancestral home””), to “”Earth,”” to “”soil,”” and to “”land.” The poetic relationship here seems to me to be highly revealing of a relationship to land that is not so evident in the English language, and thus not so closely married in our imagination as English speakers. As an arts worker, I often think about what it means for art produced in one context to cross into another, what its purpose is, and how it unfolds before new and foreign audiences. My interest in this concerns the political role of art, especially given the contemporary emphasis on decolonization and museographic revisionism that many major museums have undertaken.

In my own practice, I have explored the conceptual principles of translation and diaspora through the embodied reconstruction and redrawing of a 1976 portrait my grandmother made of my father when he was 12, which subsequently disappeared in Bogotá that same year, leaving only a photo as a trace. I relate the act of re-drawing or copying, to a notion best articulated by postcolonial theorist Guyarthi Spivak: Translation constitutes the most intimate act of reading. To this I offer re-drawing as the most intimate act of seeing, wherein I digest the visual output of my grandmother and reproduce a choreography that she last performed in 1976, as a way of relating to her (seeing with her eyes and seeing with her hands). Through this act I cross the thresholds which had always separated us during her life: Texas and Colombia, English and Spanish, North and South.

Currently, you are considering pursuing a graduate degree in translation. How do you think this will help you as an arts worker and artist?

I should share that translation has also played a very concrete role in my life for the past year. I have been working on an independent project on my website called The Radical Women Translation Project. The project functions as a companion tool to a ground-breaking 2017 exhibition of the same name, (Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985). The original project is the work of curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Ginuta with Marcela Guerrero, and addresses vast art historical lacunas through original scholarship that has brought the practices of many Latina artists into international attention. My project seeks to do its part in answering the call to action for further research, put forth in the foreward which can be found in the exhibition catalog. I translate interviews from Spanish to English of artists whose works were included in this exhibition, and who have no prior English language interviews available in text or video format online. It is a project that considers the value of interviews as primary source material and seeks to expand access to such material through translation. The project has opened many exciting doors for me both in the U.S. and in Latin America. My practical interest is in facilitating translation of art writing and other art world texts between the two regions and the diaspora. I am pursuing a graduate degree because I deeply desire to enrich my knowledge of translation, especially because it is the theoretical lens that I wish to bring to all of my contributions as a Colombian-American diasporic arts worker and artist. As an exciting aside, there has been a growing interest as of the last few years in academic circles on the topic of U.S. Latinx artistic production and scholarship. An important note is that historically, U.S. Latinx artistic production has been largely overlooked. For me this is exciting as it means that I have a place in a growing field of discourse, and I hope to arrive with a firm background in translation and with many things to say.

Can you describe how being an art student at UCA prepared you for your experiences after graduation?

One of the most wonderful things about UCA are the faculty-student relationships. I’m at a moment in my career, as I begin to apply to graduate programs, where I am infinitely grateful to know that my former professors (and former chair) see my successes as their own. Surprisingly this is not always the case at larger universities and art schools, and is one of the wonderful things about the art program at UCA. In my experience, I had a very supportive relationship with a professor who encouraged me not only in my studio practice, but also as I spear-headed student org initiatives, even giving up space in her classroom for quite a large research project, (Thank you, Sandra!) I cannot understate how instrumental her support was in my development as a student and as an artist. I also recall the importance of the department’s visiting artist program which facilitated contact with art professionals from the art centers of the country. One of these talks led to a relationship between my student organization and a group of artists and arts workers in New York that opened doors not only for myself, but also for my peers in different and reverberating ways.
Lastly I should mention that because of the scholarships I received from UCA in my last semester, I was able to complete several fully-funded internships in New York City over four months. I would argue that this is the strongest feature of the program. I interned with two gallery spaces and one and half artists. To this day I continue to have strong relationships with the people who run those spaces. In fact, I feel very lucky to have been able to count on one of my gallerist-mentors for her strong support of my arts programming fellowship application with the Wassaic Project.

Do you have any advice for UCA Art and Design students as they work on completing their degrees, and for after they complete their degrees?

Some advice I would share with UCA students that has served me well is to travel– even if the goal is to return. It’s important to travel for residencies, for internships, and to create a web of friendships with artists and arts workers whom you admire. Your sincere enthusiasm in your practice, and excitement to connect over common conceptual interests with gallerists and curators, is enough and perhaps more important than an elevator pitch. And lastly, you must always be applying to opportunities, and many, many of them at a time! This is the bread and butter of being an artist and though it may not be easy, there is plenty of grant money, fellowships, and stipends for artists in this country to dedicate themselves primarily to their practice. That being said, unpaid internships and other unpaid opportunities are rife, and access to opportunities is often limited to bigger cities. Truthfully, you will find the playing field is often quite uneven in the art world, though not impossible to overcome. I’ve had the opportunity to be on a few application review panels, and I’m happy to share that even those applications that get rejected become familiar faces. You may not be a fit for one thing, but you may stick in the mind of a reviewer for another. While I was at UCA, I founded and directed a professional development student organization (the BFA Crit Club) to answer these kinds of questions, especially because imagining the future as an art student in the south comes with its own challenges. The mission that inspired the BFA Crit Club continues to be dear to me. My inbox is open to UCA art students who are interested in chatting further.