Breaking gro und
The New Mexican
Agreat nylon net suspended from the ceiling, as though being offloaded by a crane from a ship at port, droops from the weight of its cargo: a colorful mix of hundreds of cloth bundles, most of them no larger than a child’s backpack or duffle. Stories inscribed on the bundles describe perilous journeys and tales of the homes, people, and personal belongings that were left behind in times of war, persecution, and disaster. Some express hope and gratitude. Each one of the approximately 450 bundles represents a refugee.
Leavings/ Belongings, an installation by artists Harriet Bart and Yu-Wen Wu and created in partnership with New Mexico-based immigrants and refugees, i s about the people who survived displacement by crossing oceans, mountains, deserts, and continents to make new lives for themselves in unfamiliar lands. It runs through Jan. 17.
Along one wall of the installation, you can see a few dozen photographs of them: small, anonymous portraits of smiling women proudly holding the bundles they made in workshops led by Bart and Wu. The two artists began the project last year. It included making the cloth bundles with local and regional refugee populations. In Santa Fe, they worked with Mujeres de Adelante Women’s Cooperative, an immigrant group dedicated to supporting homeless women and their families. In Albuquerque, they worked with the
Refugee Well-being Project at the University of New Mexico, which pairs undergraduate students with refugee families to encourage community support and mutual learning.
“We met with Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi, and Mexican women,” says Bart, 78. “There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for the project. Yu-Wen and I went to the university and gave a talk about our project with women and men from the various countries to see if they wanted to participate. I don’t think anyone felt any pressure.”
Leavings/ Belongings, which is in SITE Santa Fe’s SITElab gallery, is a comprehensive artwork with multiple components, including the sculptural installation, text, photography, and video. It grew out of a 2016 project that was originally developed for the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Bart, who lives in Minneapolis, and Wu, who lives in Boston, were invited to do a large-scale work on the theme of walking.
“We didn’t want to talk about walking as meditation, exercise, or pleasure,” says Wu, who’s in her early 60s. “We wanted it to be about walking as a necessity. That’s when we started honing down on the fact that we wanted to talk about the global refugee crisis. In that particular installation, we had a 40-foot video and six tons of rocks.” The rocks were arranged as a landscape, and each one was inscribed with numbers to represent the people who’ve been displaced globally. “At that time, there were about 60 million. We know the number’s gone up. In the statistics of all this, we really saw that women and children were extremely vulnerable. We really wanted to bring that to attention and awareness with Leavings/ Belongings. We started making arrangements to meet with various groups of women refugees in our own communities.”
The project began in their respective cities, where they enlisted members of Chinese, Southeast Asian, Somali, and Hmong populations, to make t he bundles. Each bundle is hand- sewn from a many different fabrics — some of it donated and some of it belonging to the refugees with whom they worked — then inscribed with statements by each participant, each one free to express themselves in their native tongues as they saw fit. The bundles were made in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque workshops over the course of a weeklong artist residency. They comprise the sculptural component of the project at SITE.
Bart and Wu were guided in t heir efforts by American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Wherever,” from Out of Silence, 1994.
Wherever we walk we will make
Wherever we protest we will go planting Make poems seed grass feed a child growing build a house Whatever we stand against We will stand feeding and seeding Wherever I walk I will make.
In the back of the two-room SITElab, another net slopes downward from the corner where two walls meet, spilling a heap of bundles onto the f loor. Why a cargo net? “You know, there’s a lot of traveling involved in displacement,” Bart says. “This is a message about transporting: ideas, concepts, people, hopes, dreams. Somehow they get here, but how do you demonstrate the travel in a contained space and suggest the idea of shifting your life from one place to another?”
On another wall, adjacent to the second net, a 16-minute high- definition video work by Wu, Tell Me, plays on a loop. It’s a poetic, impressionistic video of the sights and sounds of nature, interspersed with close-up imagery of fabric being torn, written statements in English by refugees, and the occasional appearance of red thread running from one side of the screen to the other, from top to bottom, or from corner to corner. Together, these components form a literal and abstract representation of the refugee experience.
On the opposite wall is a set of small mirrors that hang at different heights, though mainly at about the eye level of an adult. They’re deliberately sized at around 6 inches by 3 inches to match the anonymous photographs in the first room. Look in the mirror and see your reflection. The arrangement triggers viewers to pause and consider whether these refugees are so different from themselves. The refugee crisis is a global crisis. The reasons are myriad. Any one of us could be a refugee, too.
But when you’re a refugee, whatever you start out with — perhaps a change of clothes, your shoes, your passport and other identification — isn’t always likely to survive the journey. On one hand, the bundles represent all that you can carry. On the other, they represent what was lost along the way. And that’s not all.
“The bundles are symbolic of their hopes and dreams, symbolic of what they’ve left behind, symbolic of what they hope to achieve when they’re here,” Bart says. “I think that’s the big takeaway. When we listen to these women, they all hope for peace. They’re here. They’re going to work to raise their children. They’re incredibly resilient.”