CALA Alliance is pleased to present the inaugural exhibition, Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores. This solo exhibition showcases new work produced by the artist as CALA Alliance’s first regional artist in residence. Through prints, mixed-media works, and copper plates, Aranibar-Fernández weaves together themes of labor, extractivism, feminism, capitalism, and colonialism. The exhibition will be on view through March 31, 2022.

A focal point of the exhibition is the large-scale map, El desplazamiento y las flores (2021). Featuring floral textiles that reference Indigenous women from the artist’s native Bolivia, Aranibar-Fernández’s layered project highlights the global south as a border-less terrain.  Draped behind the cartographic rendering, the artist traces trading routes through strings of beads, a reference to power and currency. Both the hand-sewn map  on opaque tulle and black beaded routes on fishing line hang from copper pipes. 

Copper serves as an essential material for Aranibar-Fernández. She employs the material in different forms, both as a structural device to hang her work as well as a medium to render aerial views of active mines. Through its various uses, the artist makes a connection between the natural material for which Arizona is best known and the destructive history of mining in this state and around the world. 

The title of the exhibition, translating to “the displacement and the flowers,” echoes the movement and migrations of both bodies and natural materials. Referencing the merciless mining and extraction of the earth, Aranibar-Fernández highlights the ongoing threat of colonization, genocide, and displacement faced by Indigenous populations in Bolivia. The works on view here chart these various displacements, mapping a global web of interconnection and responsibility.

Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: El desplazamiento y las flores is organized by CALA Alliance Executive Director & Curator Alana Hernandez and is made possible with institutional support provided by the City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture. This exhibition, a part of CALA Alliance’s Residencias Artísticas, is supported in part by an award from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.