Tania Candiani

In Los ojos bajo sombra (The Eyes Under the Shadow), it arises from the production of the grana cochineal and its historical relationship with the Canary Islands. The title comes from a text from the beginning of the 20th century that narrates the work of Canarian women workers in the fields and the value of this raw material at the time. The cochineal is an insect domesticated in Mexico and other places in America that parasitizes on nopales. The adult females reproduce in the nopal leaves, which are subsequently extracted, dried and crushed to obtain the red pigment. Called in the Nahuatl language nocheztli (blood of tunas), the dye is used to stain different materials such as ceramics, and especially textiles and paints.

The obtaining of the cochineal is carried out mainly by women, who build a relationship of care and protection with the parasite. Insect females cared for by human females and cultivated in a cycle of production and reproduction. Thus, the pigment comes from the living, from its relationship with other species and with the violence of its grinding. As in other pieces such as Camuflaje or Molienda, Candiani addresses the notion of the collective work of women and the working conditions that they establish in what she calls the “choreographies of labor”. The female presence and her workforce as a productive tool are essential to understand the manufacture and preparation of the pigment.

The scarlet cochineal was imported from America as early as the 15th century and was an important source of income for the Spanish crown, along with silver and gold, which earned it the nickname “red gold”. The colony’s exploitation routes intensified in the following centuries, fostering commercial import routes to Europe and abundant migration flows. In the 19th century, grana was widely introduced to the Canary Islands, as the island’s climate favored the planting of nopales. Faced with the crisis of sugar and vine crops on the islands, the production of grana represented an opportunity for the rise of the textile industry in Europe and the subsequent fascination with dyes.

The literal presence of the pigment in this piece evokes commercial exchange since colonial times and the dispossession of the territory. The red-tinted abstract maps point out the violence of those colonial borders and the political force represented by the rescue of this raw material. As a new way of inhabiting cartography and history, the fabrics become scars of a camouflaged story that emerges proposing new textures and readings of the place.