FST StudioProjects Fund

IN THE STUDIO WITH TATIANA AROCHA

2022 FST StudioProjects Fund recipient, New York-born Colombian artist Tatiana Arocha (b. 1974) welcomes us in her Brooklyn Navy Yard studio to discuss her rooted and multi-layered relationship to the bio-political and vulnerable landscapes she grew up with in her native Colombia.  

edited by Myriam Erdely, January 2023

Thank you for showing me your studio, what a wonderful place to work!

My studio is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When I arrived in New York, I used to go with one of my close friends to photograph buildings and architectural spaces around Brooklyn. One of those places was the Navy Yard, and ever since then, I dreamed of having a space there. When I moved in, it looked like a crime scene from a movie. There was this ugly drop ceiling, all stained and broken. I removed it all, and now I have this incredibly high industrial ceiling that has a round window. In the winter, the sun starts coming through there around 1 pm and it hits my desk, warming me up.

After receiving a grant from the FST StudioProjects Fund in 2022, which was created by Frederieke Sanders Taylor, in order to help artists defray the cost of their studios in New York City, how has the FST StudioProjects Fund grant changed your practice? 

Since receiving this grant a few months ago, it’s already had a significant impact. It has allowed me to advance on my new body of research for my current project. It’s incredible to feel like I can focus on one goal and make a lot of progress so quickly.

You are deeply rooted to Colombia and it permeates in your artworks, is it an important influence for you?

I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, but I was born in New York. My parents had been living in New York for 9 years before I was born, and when my father completed his studies, I was about 1 year old then, we moved back to Colombia. Later, I came back to New York and have been here for 23 years. But all my family is still in Colombia, so I continue to be very connected with my roots. I’m moved by the complexity of my country. It has so many layers of history, socio-political issues, and armed conflict, but it is also one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. It has extensive varieties of forests, plants, and animals, and this diversity also manifests in the diversity of knowledge about the land that people have. I love learning about the relationships that Colombian people have built with the land. I’ve been working with different communities throughout Colombia and witnessing how people have been working incredibly hard for many years to protect the land and achieve peace in the country.

Can you tell me more about the types of materials you use?

My fieldwork is a process of communing with plants that includes drawing, rubbing, photographing, preserving, and tracing the bark, seeds, and leaves of the forest. Over time, I have built up an index of forms and textures, a new and personal visual lexicon. These experiences are further enriched through ongoing conversations with indigenous people who have both ancestral and contemporary knowledge of the local ecology. Through witnessing their relationships to the land and their more-than-human kin, I see their cultivation of forests as a process for learning and creating ecosystemic, social, and spiritual relationships across generations and species.

Could you share with us what you are currently working on?

I’m researching the history of the coca plant and learning of its erasure from knowledge from colonization up through the “war on drugs” that I lived through and continues today. It has been systematically “satanized” like so many other powerful plants, but coca is essentially a superfood, and most people know nothing about it. It has so many positive uses, nutritional value, and cultural importance, and this knowledge still lives within indigenous communities. With this research in mind, I’m working on a series of prints while at the Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop. I’m exploring how to create art without access to the coca plant. I have 10 small leaves that I’ve collected throughout the years from Peru and Colombia and replicating with a soft-ground etching technique. With these prints, I’m recreating my memory of watching Abraham, a Bora Muinane person, and my child Joaquin toasting the leaves to make mambe, a mixture of coca and yarumo that is the traditional way in which many indigenous peoples from the Amazon and other communities consume the plant.