Ciara McNamara, Artist Programs intern at TAC, got together with current AIR 16 resident Faviola Lopez-Romani:
Ciara: What kinds of concepts do you apply to your art?
Faviola: I like to place understandings of pluralism at the forefront, thinking beyond existing binaries. Covalent relationships are central to my work in their reciprocity. I ask how we can be more covalent in our practices and artwork. I like to touch upon other forms of kinship that exist beyond human kinship, kinships that are not necessarily tied to physical places like a nation.
Ciara: Your art exists through different forms like dyes and video, could you talk to me about why you choose these forms?
Faviola: I think in all these forms I’m really interested in investigating the structure of spaces and how a space comes to be. I try to work with quotidian media, things that I consider to be “the architecture of my daily life.” I have understood that in being concrete, steel, or existing in digital spaces, such as social media, or government databases, textiles has structured that architecture and narrative of our lives.
Ciara: Do you find that the color in your video art and in your natural dyes are interrelated?
Faviola: Absolutely. Especially working with green screens, you are given this textile [green screens] that is literally transcending spaces, so it helps you to transport into those other spaces. I think of the weather presenters, they have this green screen behind them but they are completely transported into a different space beyond the television studio. And at some point in the process of composting video, you also start painting to help create the illusion of these new spaces. During this process, color grading became very exciting for me; I fell in love with all the gradients of color that can constitute a singular face. I also remember someone once saying to me that the reason natural dyes are so pleasing to the eye is because of how their waveforms refract light, which is different from synthetic dyes. I think this is when I started to understand natural dyes as a way of representing space.
Ciara: Do you find that your interest in chroma keying influences your practice of horticulture?
Faviola: Yes, so Mock Mystique–my video piece of the desert floral in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens–was really the first time I became fully immersed in the plant kingdom. In that video, I investigate plant taxonomies through this illusion of a global desert presented by the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s desert greenhouse. These plants of the global south have existed for centuries, then all of the sudden the practice of taxonomy was created and these plants are Europeanized and given Latin names. In the video, although it is a snowy winter day beyond the greenhouse, there is an illusion that there is a desert in the middle of Brooklyn. It makes me think, what makes it a “desert”? Is it the simulated arid environment with Prickly Pears, or is it the little plaques identifying them by their Latin name? How do these labels influence the way we see this world?
At some point, I just had a really intense interest in color. It is very joyful for me. At the same time, plants and their taxonomy is so fascinating. It's a little insidious, how Europeans came to “the new world” and “discovered” its flora and fauna. I grapple a lot with who gets to decide the perspective of the natural world and the power dynamics of this authority. There came a moment when I felt that the next step for me would be to start growing my own plants. I began growing my own natural dye plants because my relationship with colors is very important to me. I first started working with avocado dye.
Ciara: How did you first encounter horticulture?
Faviola: It was definitely a combination of my video work, Mock Mystique, plant taxonomy, and feeling like I needed to expand my relationship with color. That is all of my avocado-dyed yarn on the shelf with different pHs. [Faviola motions to the different dyed yarns, soft purple-y brown and pink tones, light and dark. When I sniff inside the bag, the yarn has a faint earthy smell of boiled avocado pits].
Ciara: How did you first encounter dyeing and knitting as art?
Faviola: I never liked the fresh-out-of-the-tube colors, I always thought very low of that. It was very important for me to spend time mixing colors, and to understand where those colors were coming from. When I was working with oils in school, I spent more time mixing colors than I did painting. It’s really fun mixing colors, it's so joyous. I soon realized the importance of reclaiming color for myself, and creating “my own colors”; this represented a reclamation of the language of color from the Western art institutions. Really, natural dyes came to represent a relationship that I have with color.
I love to eat avocado toast, it's my favorite breakfast food. I collected avocado pits from eating so many avocados. The pink colors of the avocado dye are so beautiful, and when I look at the dyed yarn, it reminds me both of the delicious avocado toasts, and also of the process of dyeing and the delicious smell from boiling the avocado pits. It is an all encompassing experience for me.
Ciara: Where do you grow your plants and create your dyes?
Faviola: I have a bunch of grow bags in my garden. [Faviola shows pictures of bright marigolds, indigos, and cosmos.
When the pandemic began, I had just graduated from The New School, and I felt so disconnected from nature after being in a city for so long. It was around April of 2020 when I signed up for a seed share program where members were offered seeds of edible plants to grow. Not only were they giving you seeds for staple foods like carrots and lettuce, but they were also giving you culturally relevant seeds, so if you requested the Latinx package, they’ll give you chilies, beans, star anise, and marigold seeds. I was really excited for all the seeds but especially marigold, having known of its natural dye tradition. At that time, gardening became a form of world building at a time of great uncertainty. Slowly my garden shifted from producing mostly food to being an urban dye garden.
I use a book to press my marigolds and cosmos for eco-printing [Faviola has me touch the dried and pressed cosmos flowers she has in her studio space].
Ciara: What are some of the larger influences on your art?
Faviola: As a young adult, I began experiencing feelings of alienation. Growing up, in Western Queens, I was surrounded by a great deal of cultural and linguistic diversity, so when I went on to college, it was really quite a cultural shock to experience being one of very few BIPOC students in my classrooms. This was really the first time I really encountered the American suburban middle class and its ideology. That is why I really want to think about things being more pluralistic rather than existing only in a binary. We are in a very globalized world where movement has been occurring forever, so it is important to emphasize the plurality of identity.
I really connect with relational aesthetics, an art movement focused on social interactions rather than the physical artwork or artifacts. One of my favorite relational aesthetics pieces is by Rirkrit Tiravanija. In Untitled 1990 (pad thai), he set up a cart to cook and serve pad thai in a gallery. The artwork itself is the event of bringing people together to eat as a sort of “performance”. Tiravanija showed the art piece again more recently at Moma PS1, but this time offering participants two versions of a green curry recipe. One version used specific ingredients from Thailand and the other version used ingredients from a big box supermarket like Key Food.
The piece is one of my favorites for many reasons, it decentralizes the artist from being the sole creator of a piece, instead highlighting the collective labor of communities in creating our culture. It is a way to discuss the frustrations of living in a diaspora, trying to replicate the feelings and sensations of home while questioning authenticity. It is hard to say one version of the green curry dish is less authentic than the other just by tasting it. For me, trying to make artwork that does not rely so much on an artifact, especially as a BIPOC artist, is a way to remove the fetishization attached to art objects.
For Proyecto Comunitario del Maíz, I have participants twist corn husks, picking up wherever somebody leaves off to create one singular chord. Last year, I was traveling for a family wedding in Germany where many friends and members of my Peruvian family would also be in attendance. Some of us are Peruvians living in Italy, in the United States, and in other countries in Europe. We were all coming together for a wedding after not seeing each other for so many years. I thought that the project would be a really beautiful exercise to do with my family in that setting. It seems that fennel tea is popular in Munich, so I dyed the corn husks with the dried fennel from tea to represent the occasion. I thought the project was a great way to connect a lot of people who have the same root. I am currently looking to go visit my family in Peru in time for this year’s corn harvest season and have them participate in adding to the Proyecto Comunitario del Maíz cord. I would then love to bring corn husks collected from this trip to my family residing in Central America and also have them participate in adding corn husks to this same cordage. Some of the corn husks are dyed with avocado pits, flor de jamaica, red corn, purple corn, and indigo from my dye garden.
Ciara: Why did you choose to do a residency at the Textile Arts Center?
Faviola: During my time as a youth educator at Textile Arts Center, I’ve had a lot of time to experiment with different types of textile practices. I consider these years of experimentation and learning how to teach these practices in stimulating and engaging ways as the “play-period”. This residency offers me the next step in practice as an artist and educator to devote time and space to closely engage with the materiality of textiles to entwine it into my research interests. More recently, I have been doing a lot of research on the formation of diasporas. I am excited to shift away from the polarity of the global North and the global South, which is very prominent in textiles.
There is a general lack of intellectual property of craft and textiles, but this is especially so for textiles of the global South, which has led to an egregious tradition of cultural appropriation.
I have been thinking about the global South as being a place where a lot of ideas originate and are stolen, such as in the case of modernism, but at the same time wondering how to avoid adhering to the logic of the Enlightenment’s notion of property that severs possibilities for plurality.
When labor is unrecognized, that is when people are exploited, which is a big reason I incorporate crediting labor into Proyecto Comunitario del Maíz. I have all my participants write their names and contact information down in a little hand bound book so that when the work is ready, I can send them an invitation to its debut within an artistic institution and with their names alongside the piece.
Faviola (she, they, ella, elle) holds a Bachelors in the Arts in Culture & Media Studies in the Context of Contemporary Music with a Minor in Fine Art from the New School. They have traveled across Latin America to learn Pre-Columbian forms of world making, such as backstrap weaving traditions of Chinchero, Peru and the botanical dyeing traditions of the Central Mexican Plateau.
Through education and media representation, Faviola actively supports the access, visibility, and creation of non hegemonic forms of knowledge. Since 2020, Faviola has imparted their textile knowledge to various New York City communities, teaching at the Textile Arts Center, Voces Ciudadanas, Black Girls Sew, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and within the New York City Department of Education. Faviola works documenting the work of Iquiti Textiles Mexicanos, a collective of artisans defending the labor and heritage knowledge reflected in handmade textiles in the context of the mass produced textiles of the Mexican tourist industry.
Additionally, Faviola provides post-video production support towards documenting the work of Las Curanderas: Teatro Para Curar el Susto of Comalapa, Guatemala. In 2024, Faviola participated in Arquetopia Honors Residency: The Challenge of Sustainability, Embodiment & the Problem of Color in Puebla, Mexico. Faviola is currently growing the el proyecto comunitario de el maíz/the community maize project, an ongoing investigation on the Latin American Diaspora, methods of domestication, and the intellectual property of craft, with the intention of connecting sites of diaspora.
About the AIR program:
TAC AIR combines studio access with a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, and regular critical dialogue, providing residents an opportunity to learn and explore the textile medium, and an alternative to traditional higher education programs. The residency culminates in a group exhibition produced and hosted by TAC. Since 2010, TAC AIR has graduated over 100 artists and designers whose work continues to further textile art within the fashion, fine arts, design and art education fields.