Critical Text:
A passport, a rosary, a miniature lucky cat, an umbrella, a point-and-shoot camera, cans of food, leather wallets, purses, and bags all heaped onto a bamboo raft. For her exhibition Migrant Belonging(s), multimedia artist Nicolei Buendia Gupit presents a collection of cast objects that represent the travels of people from across the world who have uprooted and relocated their lives to Italy. Collecting stories of interview subjects from Albania, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Lebanon, the Philippines, the United States, and Vietnam, many left situations of political and economic instability with the hope of seeking jobs and better educations so that they could reinvent themselves and aid the families they left behind. In coming to Italy, Gupit notes, their motivations resemble those of the generations who have migrated to the US, as Gupit’s own family did, in pursuit of the American Dream—a subject that has formed a core theme of her artistic practice. For Milanese viewers today, the subject of migration, will likely recall the refugee crisis of the last decade—the largest in history according to the UN—when millions fled wars in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa to land in, or pass through Italy, including through Milan’s Central train station, which came to resemble a refugee camp during the mid-2010s. The new life that awaits is unknown and often described abstractly in terms of hopes or dreams, yet these dreams condense into materiality taking the form of necessities like luggage, talismans that secure safe travel, documents required to breach borders and open doors, sentimental objects dense with memories of family and friends, and eventually there will be the objects one acquires in a new place in the process of building a home. It’s the objects of transit that Gupit represents in Migrant Belonging(s), but her work shows that while material may be concrete it is not entirely stable. Their meanings are just as subject to displacement as the bodies of those who carry them.
The objects that Gupit presents are casts that resemble the types of things that her interview subjects brought with them from home. She coats the wallets, documents, and knick-knacks in silicone to create molds from which she slip-cast the final products in a clay that looks as light and ephemeral as the paper that it is infused with, but that retains a resolution that allows the texture of their details to remain legible, which in turn makes the significance of objects feel near, like a memory that remains fresh. Yet, Gupit then enhances their details by rubbing the objects with dry pigment and acrylic wash thereby producing monochromes that appear time-worn and faded like old photographs. One of the things that Gupit repeatedly heard in interviewing her subjects is that their belongings took on new meaning in the contexts of their new realities. For this reason, Gupit has come to describe those objects in their new cultural contexts as “bad copies” of themselves. The paperclay replicas that she sculpts create this effect of dysfunction as they literalize the process of reproducing an original into a secondary likeness whose ability to transmit the essence of the original are intensified by the indexicality of the mold and the one-to-one scale. One can imagine the uncanny experience of holding a ghostly object that resembles an old wallet that fits perfectly in the hand, but that doesn’t hold the currency one formerly used to buy the necessities and delights of everyday life, and that indeed, cannot even be opened because it is a solid object-image rather than the functional equipment of personal convenience.
While the objects that Gupit replicates index the specific experiences of individuals, one of the things that is remarkable about them is that, in their everydayness, they resemble the types of things that might belong to nearly anyone residing in our globalized world. The work presents an impression of continuity more than of difference. The objects don’t signify origins as much as mobility. The bamboo raft carries the objects away from the relative safety of train travel and evokes the risk that has led to the deaths of thousands at sea. Yet, the fates of the migrants that Gupit’s work conjures are broad and variable, including both the lost and the prosperous. As an accumulation they take the form of the scatter and the pile: non-compositional strategies that minimalist sculptor Robert Morris likened to the sweep of a landscape in which the ground takes precedence over the figure. In the case of Migrant Belonging(s), the imminence of this landscape, set as it is upon a conveyance of liminality, shows that belonging is both grounded and fluid, defined in dreams and contingent on material relations of cultural negotiation.
Written by Lily Woodruff