River Claure: Playing as a Strategy for Imagining Identities

C&AL: You use the Aymara concept chi’xi, which translates as indeterminate color or gray, to refer to that kind of space where cultural hybridity occurs. Your work opposes the idea that indigenous cultures remain fixed as objects of the colonial gaze. You create new images, appropriating the tool the colonizers used. Tell me about how you give meaning to these ideas in your work.

RC: Chi’xi means gray, but it also refers to the way to make gray. When they make their aguayos (handwoven fabrics), traditional weavers join colored yarn creating the illusion of a third indeterminate color. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui was the first to use this concept in cultural sociology. She talks about cultures that are contradictory, but at the same time complementary, and that is what interests me, the variegated, things that coexist in the same place at the same time but are disparate. That is an interesting term for thinking about cultural hybridity, and I think that fantasy can render those heterogeneous identities visible.

In my practice, photography itself is secondary, highly utilitarian and marked by the capitalist logic of mass production and retribution. I think a lot about the construction of the image, and I make that visible through sketches. The camera allows me to record them.

C&AL: Can you tell me about the role that play and fiction have, respectively, as process and as visual strategy in your work and how you became interested in those strategies?

RC: Photography carries a very heavy burden in relation to truth, but my work does not address those debates. Play interests me a lot. For me, it’s a space where the emotional meets what is rational and visceral. We have a very modern idea of what it is to be thinking beings, but in reality, I think that we are senti-thinking beings and playing is a way to reconcile feelings and emotions with reason.

Playing in part shapes children and they learn through it. As adults, we maintain a certain rigidity toward play, and I think that we need to unlearn those molds that we have imposed on ourselves growing up. I believe we need to learn how to play.

C&AL: Tell me about your process working with communities.

RC: The communities I’ve been working with are communities with whom I identify. I have been engaging Andean communities with my projects and currently mining communities. The way I incorporate them in my projects is very simple: I talk a lot. Working with communities is a long process of dialogue, earning their trust and being honest about my intentions.

C&AL: What are your plans for the future?

RC: Right now, I am finishing a second big project. The project has to do with former mining towns in Bolivia, where post-industrialism has left its mark on the landscape, where the landscape has been damaged and where the identities of the mining communities have been damaged. I reflect on mining extraction and its cycles, through which the mineral is depleted, and how those cycles impact communities and how their quality of life is depleted. Compared to the first project, it has some more negative and sordid emotions than all the fantasy, play, etc., of the first project.

River Claure is a visual artist from Bolivia who uses imagination and play to reflect on identity and otherisation through photography and video.

Raquel Villar-Pérez is an academic, art curator, and writer, interested in post and decolonial discourses within contemporary art and literature from the socio-political Global South. Her research focuses on the work of women artists addressing notions of transnational feminisms, social and environmental justice, and experimental formulas of presenting these in contemporary art.

Translation: Sara Hanaburgh