Hellen Ascoli: Ya Te Vi
Hellen Ascoli
Ya Te Vi // I Already Saw You
Proyectos Ultravioleta, Frieze London
October 2019
When Volcán de Fuego erupted in June last year, just outside Antigua, Guatemala, ash rained on nearby towns for days. It covered every surface, filling the fissures between the cobbled stones of Antigua’s narrow streets, and remaining there for months after the disaster. Artist Hellen Ascoli had moved from her home in Guatemala to Madison, Wisconsin the year before. From that distance, both conceptually and geographically, she received a letter from her friend and colleague Camila Fernández, describing the ash, everywhere. It covered Fernández’s scalp, settling into her hair with its itchy dryness, appearing under her nails when she scratched it away. The volcano’s eruption was a humanitarian crisis, and images of despair made their way into the international news. The lingering physical feel of the volcano, for those who live near it and for those who survived, however, was more difficult to capture.
Ascoli and Fernández’s correspondence became a Volcano Litany, in which they reflect on the sensory experience of being in the shadow of something that might erupt at any moment. The Spanish Ya Te Vi (I already saw you), Ascoli says, “turns your stomach in different ways than I saw you. It’s about a kind of lurking paranoia, a feeling of being watched.” It is also about looking for someone just out of reach. It is a sensation she associates with the geography and the political context of her home country. It is a sensation she connects to the loss of a beloved brother. And, it is a direct quotation: Ya Te Vi cites a textile from the highlands of Guatemala that Ascoli found while doing research in the Cooper Hewitt collection.
Ascoli studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with her MFA in Sculpture in 2012. She is a trained weaver and was Director of Education at Guatemala’s national museum of traditional textiles and dress, Museo Ixchel, from 2014-2017. She discovered the Huehuetenango textile in the Cooper Hewitt collection while developing a research archive of information and images related to the backstrap loom, its weave patterns, and its use across Latin America. Patterns and their history are especially difficult to find, but are shared and copied among weavers, creating a community relationship to design and practice that is understudied outside of those communities, both for reasons of its relationship to functionality and to the gendered and collaborative space it inhabits. In the exhibition catalog for Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (2017), curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill describes the historical erasure of women from art movements across Latin America. “All these movements allow for some form of erasure or fitting of women into existing parameters,” Fajardo-Hill writes. “Abstraction in particular is comfortable because of its apparent neutralizing or absence of gender issues. Among the stereotypes that have defined women artists in Latin America is that of their very ‘invisibility,’ a tacit conviction that they are not good artists and therefore do not exist.” And this, Ascoli adds, is within the canonical movements already integrated into the history of art. While weaving has been an important influence for artists who work in abstraction, its specific concerns, processes, and designs remain outside, unknown, understudied, and often dismissed.
With the Tate Modern’s recent reconsideration of textile designer, weaver, printmaker, and educator Anni Albers, however, the significance of weaving—understood on its own terms—for Modern art is also ready for new scholarship. In her essay, “Close to the Stuff the World is Made of: Weaving as a Modern Project,” published in the Albers exhibition catalog, Briony Fer acknowledges the significance of Peruvian textiles on Albers, while centering weaving narratives in international mythologies and literatures around knowledge-production: “Weaving stories dating back to classical mythology have fueled Western metaphysics and literature, but mainly they speak of things other than the actual practice of making textiles - of memory or forgetting, of finding and loosing oneself and much else,” Fer writes. “This focus on technique - not just in the narrower sense of a repertoire of specific skills for the weaver to learn, but on weaving as a process entirely dependent on the instrument or apparatus that is the loom - is a powerful vantage point indeed. It is the means by which weaving’s vitality is sustained rather than lost in the present.”
In her presentation at Frieze London, Ascoli includes woven work that continues her concerns about bodily perception, landscape, and research. For En donde el movimiento empieza y acaba II (Where movement begins and ends II), she collaborates with Karl Williamson to mechanize a textile that she has constructed from two types of weaves made, respectively, on the backstrap loom and the foot loom. The installation bears a circular relation to a place, she observes, thinking about how a place can hold both intense relationships and complicated feelings. You can love a place and also need distance from it. The textile formally signals the shape of volcanic landscapes with their sharp triangular peaks, and the pleated folds of a woman’s skirt. In the second case, Ascoli is thinking of mother-daughter relationships, of hiding behind a mother’s skirt for safety, but also how often we renegotiate a relationship with our parents. Williamson has designed a motor that moves the fabric folds in a randomized pattern. “You’re constantly watching for something to happen,” Ascoli says. The interior fabrics (the plaid triangles) are foot-loomed, in the tradition of Guatemalan cortes or skirts. Behind these triangles, the black fabric dotted with white lines is made from two lengths of fabric from the backstrap loom, each measured to the dimensions of the weaver’s (Ascoli’s) body. The difference in the two is in the measure between their threads; the warp-facing backstrap loom produces a thicker textile, in which the interior threads are never seen. On the foot loom, in contrast, the threads are held at a distance by a piece of the loom, allowing the interior threads to show through. It is both a material and a metaphorical meditation on closeness and distance.
In Ya Te Vi (I already saw you) and Ya Te Sentí (I already felt you), Ascoli cites the Huehuetenango textile (“I’m not weaving Donald Judd,” Ascoli says. “I’m weaving weavers.”), but also builds from previous performance and sculptural work that take touch and sensory encounter as their subject. Her 2017 exhibition with Jay Sullivan at Concepción 41 in Antigua, My Body is Here, My Body Isn’t There included a collaborative performance in which the two walked in circles in the Capuchinas Convent, with a call and response of questions about presence and absence. “Are you here? I am here,” they call out to one another, “I see you, I feel you. Do you feel me?”
El que siempre está lejos (Those who are always far) is a garment—a dress with a collar and gloves attached to its head—woven from silk and linen. Ascoli has spent years studying proprioception and forms of knowledge from the body. Her installation in the 2015 Bienal de Paiz, Encuentro (Encounter) offered a woven cocoon in which visitors could wrap themselves and roll on a woven floor surface. The piece was about finding the edges of the body. She is concerned, she says, with how landscape shapes one’s perception – not only metaphorically, but also physically. For the biennial, Ascoli filmed a video of herself rolling in the cocoon, on a plateau in the Cuchumatanes mountain range of Huehuetenango. That landscape has been a particularly important one for Ascoli: in 2017, she returned there with a backstrap loom woven textile scaled to her body. Holding the weave as a kind of conduit, she reached to the sky. In Guatemala, the Day of the Dead is celebrated through the tradition of flying enormous handmade kites: to touch the sky is to reconnect with beloved family and friends who have passed. Her 2017 exhibition I awoke early to comb the world at Proyectos Ultravioleta included textile installations, sound work, photography, and modified objects, all considering touch as a way of understanding grief and allowing it space, through the bodies of both the mourner and the person lost. El que siempre está lejos enacts this same gesture of reaching upward to the sky, trying to touch someone who is gone.
In Nuestro punto de referencia (Our point of reference), Ascoli and Williamson have built a bureau to the scale of Ascoli’s body. The felt-lined drawers are filled with the objects of her craft and research: gloves, combs, ashes, a letter, scissors, vessels, kitchen utensils. These are the objects from which the artist learns, but they are also intended to evoke the knowledge gained from tactile experience. The combs point to Ascoli’s exhibition I awoke early to comb the world, as they do to her extensive collection of combs and to her constant untangling of threads for weaving. A small container of ash from Volcán de Fuego sits inside the dresser, and another drawer is filled with ash and thimbles. A series of photos taken by Williamson show Ascoli’s eyes, mouth, and hands covered with this ashy substance, and returning us to her ongoing Volcano Litany:
“Today I have decided to return to those volcanoes that never expire,” she writes.
“Those shared volcanoes,
Those that invade our homes with ash,
That leave dirt under our nails,
Our point of reference…
Those that refuse to answer us even when we demand it, screaming at the sky
Those that answer when we no longer want to listen
Those that explode when we forget them
Those that remind us change is the only constant
Those that always see us…”
Eje (Shaft) is a close-up black and white photograph of Ascoli’s mouth, her lips slightly parted. In her mouth, we see a gridded drawing taking the place of teeth. In the unexpected Dada-like intervention, her mouth becomes the site of the weaver’s pattern. Woman’s work, shared through story and spoken knowledge, is the grid from which Ascoli weaves. Our point of reference, that is to say, has always been our body and what it learns when it touches the earth, when it is covered by ash, when it reaches for sky.
—Laura August, PhD
Hellen Ascoli (Guatemala City / Madison) is an artist, weaver, and educator. Her interdisciplinary projects encompass these discourses; looking at embodied practices and material culture as a way to understand her surroundings.
Ascoli completed her MFA in Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, and has had exhibitions, both individual and collective, at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Concepción 41, Sótano 1, and Galería Sol del Río; and at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX and Conduit Gallery in Dallas, TX. Her work has also been included in the Paiz Biennial in Guatemala City , Videobrasil in São Paulo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara.
She has taught at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, worked as Director of Education at the Museo Ixchel of Indigenous Dress in Guatemala from 2014- 2017 and contributed to the design of the mediation programs for Paiz 19th and 20th Paiz Bienal. Currently she teaches at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.