The basic elements that potters use are clay, water and fire. The successful combination of the liquid with the earth allows us to model the clay. Fire physically transforms matter, vitrifying your body and making it resistant. There is no ceramic without fire, it is the final act in every ceramic process.
There is a fourth intangible element that is always present in every ceramic piece and that is mixed together with clay: memory. There is no ceramic without a past, without a cultural load. The clay keeps the memory of the hands that kneaded it. All peoples carry their memory in jars; your culture.
The baked clay has historicity, it builds a story through time that allows us to reconstruct the past; for how a potter modeled a bowl, a handle or decorated a vessel. In this way, the ceramic culture of a people builds a story, a symbolic material code that connects us with atavistic memories of our own history.
The basic elements that potters use are clay, water and fire. The successful combination of the liquid with the earth allows us to model the clay. Fire physically transforms matter, vitrifying your body and making it resistant. There is no ceramic without fire, it is the final act in every ceramic process.
There is a fourth intangible element that is always present in every ceramic piece and that is mixed together with clay: memory. There is no ceramic without a past, without a cultural load. The clay keeps the memory of the hands that kneaded it. All peoples carry their memory in jars; your culture.
The baked clay has historicity, it builds a story through time that allows us to reconstruct the past; for how a potter modeled a bowl, a handle or decorated a vessel. In this way, the ceramic culture of a people builds a story, a symbolic material code that connects us with atavistic memories of our own history.
Ceramics are related to life in agriculture, organizing and building sedentary community around the fire and the food stored inside their pots. The morphology of each pot is directly determined by its content, it is not the same to transport water, chicha * than to cook jerky * or corn. But ceramics also have a direct relationship with death, as it is used to bury their dead in specially shaped and decorated vessels to contain that being that left the world of the living. A ceramic trousseau always accompanies this trip to the world of the dead. Cooked earth buried in the fertile earth as a natural and primal shroud.
All this cultural baggage and historicity is present in the Chané Tutiatí aboriginal community of Campo Durand del Chaco Salteño. The women are the only ones in charge of preserving this memory with their hands, the extraction of clay, the preparation of the clay, modeling, gathering firewood and the cooking is entirely carried out by them alone. This process is done silently, stealing time from the work overload to which women are always subjected, therefore, it is important to highlight the need to value this profession as a profession that carries immense cultural value, highlighting and preserving the feminine character of this pottery production.
The Orembiapo Maipora potters of the Tutiatí community make sculptural ceramic objects with great technical mastery as a form of economic sustenance, especially the animals of the mountain. And they are familiarly linked through the memory of their grandmother Leticia Mariquita, who transmitted the ceramic trade to them. In this making of clay, an enormous aesthetic enjoyment is manifested where productive time, conceived from contemporary capitalist thought, loses importance and displaces the initial commercial meaning of the object. At that moment of creation, they become absolute masters of time and artistic joy, although these objects are not perceived by their authors as "art" because as indigenous women they are excluded from this Western category. That joy and infatuation with their work leads them to generate unique works of great purity and visual power.
The same thing happens to the Orembiapo Maipora as to all ceramists, that the more we model, the more we connect with the earth and that material dialogue puts in value inherited knowledge. They knead the clay remembering and questioning their past, recovering from the current "material culture" the historicity of their people. Going through the memories related to the creation of certain objects, their forms and functions, gives the present new meanings, renewing the imaginary of being a woman and indigenous today.
Latin America is a very unequal territory, where colonial paradigms are still present in our ways of bonding and looking at the environment. Argentina is a country that does not think of itself as “brown”, it is a country that denies the native peoples that inhabit its territory, making the voices and culture of these nations invisible. Argentina thinks itself white and European, a descendant of transatlantic ships that monopolize language and discourse, given who may be the creators of meaning, the division into categories of "art" and "crafts" is at the service of this European aesthetic hegemony.
Working in a grouped way with and as part of “Orembiapo Maipora”, unified by our ceramic trade and annulling pre-established artistic categories or paradigms, allowed us to reflect transversely on our stories as women within the same space and time. This led us to dialogue and experiment, creating collaboratively during long working hours. Inquiring into individual memory and the identity of this common territory and leaving the unidirectional ethnographic gaze that exposes the other "poor and indigenous" as an immobile object of study.
As cultural actors and artists we must be aware of the privileges we have in order not to reproduce colonial models and cultural domination in our practices. We must rethink our ways of doing to invent new forms of artistic construction which are based on loving practices and caring for the other, taking into account the complexities of our mestizo identities, assuming our own errors and cultural limitations.
Question with our bodies in the territory our own understanding of art, in order to understand each other, establish bridges from trust and female sisterhood, begin to link in a different way, from the awareness that changing the world itself must be collectively, united , taking the differences as strengths.
Burning by approximation
Photographic record of the process of making a traditional ceramic piece from the Chané Culture.
Alicia, a potter from the Tutiatí community (Campo Duran - Salta) extracts clay from the vein located in her territory with her machete. The traditional modeling is by hand, mixing the colored clay with ground brick.
The painting is done on a white clay base with slips of clay stones from red to black collected in the Capiazuti river.
With firewood collected from Mount Alicia, he teaches us the traditional open-air cooking, with the direct fire technique on a grill reaching approximately 850ºC. The process lasts approximately 3 hours.
Registration: Andrea Fernández
The photos of this publication were taken by: Andrea Fernández, Milagro Tejerina, Claudia Reynoso and Florencia Califano
* Chicha: American alcoholic beverage made with fermented corn or peanuts
* Charqui: Meat salted and dried in the air or in the sun so that it is preserved.
Acknowledgments: Bernard Gerrien, NGO Juanita Moro; Cristina Romano, Marcia Schvartz, Renata Kulemeyer, Claudia Reynoso, Pablo Curutchet.