Wounded Territory
Leticia Pardo
High Fire Clay
Variable dimensions
Wounded Territory
work by Leticia Pardo
November 11 – 26, 2023
Opening Reception
Saturday, November 11th
4 - 7 P
Final weekend for viewing –
Saturday and Sunday
12 – 4 P
Wounded Territory
Leticia Pardo
High Fire Clay
Variable dimensions
In her book Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the US/Mexico border as an open wound that is still bleeding. Expanding on this metaphor, this installation, composed of groups of ceramic tiles, reflects on territories divided and oppressed by borders and by those who impose them.
The tiles presented in the space have been made by massaging clay slabs to create forms that evoke landscapes, mounds or anthropomorphic forms, grouped together to form territories – understood here as lands that were originally part of a whole, topographies of collectivity that share wildlife, peoples, languages and cosmologies. Entangled with this idea of continuous geographies is the idea of our individuality, and the body as the smallest territory that we inhabit.
Responding to the architecture, the arrangement of tiles generates an invisible grid, suggesting a notion of continuity and allowing the viewer to construct the landscape beyond the physical space where the installation takes place. This grid also acts as an element that grounds a conceptual play between different scales: the geographic territory, the architectural space and the human body, suggesting that one module might represent a scaled down portion of a landscape as a fragmented map, or an enlarged depiction of a minuscule area of skin or body tissue.
Despite our physical distance or proximity to borders, Wounded Territory invites reflection around the ways in which oppressive systems impact us at individual and collective levels, and poses the question: how are we perpetuating them in the societies that we participate in?
Wounded Territory
Leticia Pardo
High Fire Clay
Variable dimensions
Leticia Pardo is a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City, based in Chicago, whose practice lies in the boundaries between architecture, research & art. Her work reflects on stories about migration, place-making and citizenship across borders, and how these manifest in the built environment. Her background in architecture and exhibition design largely informs the way in which she works as an artist. Pardo’s most recent work ponders on the impact of political borders in our cities and societies – in recent explorations and trips to cities along the US/Mexico border, she’s captured impressions, fragments, photographs and stories related to the presence of a dividing wall in an originally continuous territory. Leticia has also largely focused her work on documenting ways of placemaking by the Mexican community in Chicago through her ongoing project, Greetings from Chicagoacán.