University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Limit/Less: the migrant body in context

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Limit/Less: the migrant body in context

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Content 1

Limit/less – the migrant body in context
by
Julia Orquera Bianco

A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
August 2018

Copyright 2018 Julia Orquera Bianco
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
- Introduction: the migrant experience in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
- Objects and installations: materiality and labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
- Ai Weiwei: modernization, uselessness and the final question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
- Works with Furniture and another found objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
- Still Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
- Atmosphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
- Performance in the 1960s in Argentina, Alberto Greco and the vivo-dito . . . . . . 19
- Dance Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
- Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
- List of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
- Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

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ABSTRACT:
Migration is a global phenomenon that is constantly affecting the configuration of cultures
and histories worldwide. Massive movements of bodies create diasporic spaces where new
identities are negotiated.
The experience of migration has the potential to be seen and thought through art. I am
particularly interested in how this experience affected the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and
Argentinian artist Alberto Greco. They have been deeply influential in my practice and I believe
that the fact that both these artists migrated from their hometown had a strong impact on their
practice. I believe this is similarly reflected in my artistic practice. I will focus on Ai’s work with
repurposed wood from houses and temples and Greco’s many vivo-dittos, analyzing how history,
culture and place/displacement synthesize and dialog in their artworks in a complex way. I will
then compare and contrast their work with some of my latest pieces.
I propose to approach the topic of migration by examining this phenomenon as a corporeal
and embodied one. My goal is to address this issue from two different but complementary sides of
my current practice: sculptural objects and video performance. My intended approach is
fundamentally connected with the idea of a body in context, a body that experiences migration.

INTRODUCTION: the migrant experience in context
Movement is ingrained in my family history. As is the case of many families in Argentina,
mine was formed at least partly by immigrants. My grandparents on my Mother’s side arrived
from Italy in 1956. On my Father’s side, my grandmother ran away from an abusive marriage in
the 60s, travelling from the province of Misiones down to Buenos Aires. In this way, movement
4

becomes a fundamental part of my lineage, a cycle I have renewed by my own geographical
displacement, first to Mexico and later to the U.S.
The act of moving from my hometown in search of better opportunities, the experiences
that migration brought to my life, the challenges they involved, and the resources that I had to put
into action – material as well as knowledge-based - brought me closer to my family, gave me a
deeper understanding of my lineage, as well as the opportunity bring solutions to the problems that
presented to me using strategies of survival similar to those that both my grandparents and
grandmother used in the past.
Migration not only changed the way that I experience the world as an individual, but it also
changed my artistic practice. Understanding the place that craft played in the history of my family,
seen through the lens of everyday life, and in my life experience as a migrant, propelled me to
change my media from drawing to object-making, sculptural objects and installation, establishing
a deeper, more conceptual relationship with materiality and labor.
Movement in my family has another definition beyond migration: it became a way of
transforming space – from foreign and individual to familiar and communal - through the act of
dance. As a tradition initiated by my grandmother, reinforced by my mother’s profession as a
dance teacher, and perpetuated by most of my relatives on my father’s side, dance has been
something that my family learned and enacted together. Because of this, I was inspired to use
dance as a tool to explore my own experience as a migrant in new spaces, using my dancing body
as a direct, unmediated device.
In the next pages I will delve into these matters, tracing the trajectory of these practices
within my art, as well as the work of two additional artists who have deeply expanded and
influenced my practice: Ai Weiwei (China) and Alberto Greco (Argentina). By juxtaposing their
5

diverse practices with the conversations I have had with their works, I have expanded my
perspective about my current and future work and ways of approaching migration, the body,
movement and labor.

OBJECTS AND INSTALLATIONS: materiality and labor
My transition from Argentina to Mexico in 2013 brought a series of challenges. I had a
very limited amount of material resources, which not only impacted my everyday life but my
artistic practice as well. On the one hand, the basic struggle to find employment and a means of
survival forced me to rely on every resource I had in terms of skills and knowledge; requiring me
to dig deep into what I knew and what I knew how to make. On the other hand, the scarcity of
resources available at the time taught me to value materials that are not necessarily identified with
traditional art practice - common materials that I could easily get ahold of - materials that were
low-cost or free. I started walking around the city of Puerto Vallarta, as a manner of drift (term
that I will explain later), picking up discarded materials from the street. The quality of the materials
I found were the inspiration of an evolution in my practice, from traditional drawing into object
making and later installation. With my embrace of the materiality of found objects, I awakened to
a deeper understanding of the charge that every material has - in terms of its histories, political
implications, and as carriers of multiple meanings that can be specific or universal according to
their framing within a culture, a spatial context and time.
At the same time, I came to realize that the act of making something out of what was
otherwise deemed disposable waste related directly back to my grandparents’ experience of
migration. One thing becomes something else through labor, a disruptive form with transformative
power. I feel this is extremely powerful because it speaks not only about a basic way of connecting
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with the outer world: in terms of its performativity, the act of making is a process wherein a body
interferes on another body. In this sense, labor can be thought as embodied practice/activity.
Collecting, and then crafting and repurposing objects through my own labor, became
specific strategies in my practice, and in the past two years I have deepened this practice by
systematizing certain modes of collecting and exploring different crafts related to my family
history. The act of crafting, in my case, comes in the shape of laborious work. This kind of work
allows me to establish a conversation with the manual skills that have been transmitted to me from
members of my family, as well as to replicate, in an amateur manner, other skills that have been
denied to me (for instance, my father refused to teach me about plumbing, construction and other
manual labors he did for a living). By performing these tasks, for which I lack skill or knowledge,
I am able to break the silence between the past and the present, to fill a gap of space and time in
my relationships.

AI WEIWEI: modernization, uselessness and the final question
When I first approached the work of Ai Weiwei, I did not have a clear idea of his personal
history, but I was intuitively attracted to his pieces made of wood. When I began to research about
his life (his history of migration in and out of China, e.g. in and out of context/s), his experiences
resonated with my interests and goals in my own work.
Ai seemed to have always inhabited a space in between: being an outcast in China during
the first 20 years of his life, given his father’s banishment from Beijing due to political reasons,
leaving his home country to study abroad, not succeeding in his career as artist for years, and
finally moving back to China and finding the visual vocabulary that would ultimately define his
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artistic practice. He was able to understand the relevance of his migration retrospectively, since at
the beginning of his career he expressly payed no interest to China and rejected the use of materials
and iconography related to his home country. It was after spending time in the U.S., and then going
back to China, that he understood the importance of the past and the place, the potential of these
two elements in his story.
His exploration on migration and cultural in-betweenness became a consistent theme in his
work from 2000 onwards. My interpretation of his work as a mediation on migration comes, in
part, through a close reading of his choice of materials. In many of his post-2000 works, the
materials used are identified as recycled elements of the past
1
: the remnants of ancient Chinese
buildings and temples torn down, centuries old furniture and ceramics. Through the use of these
materials the notion of utility comes into play; considered by society as no longer of use, they
would otherwise be cast aside or thrown away
2
. We find examples of sculptural objects and
installations where these materials become visible in works such as Kippe (2006) - a sculptural
compact block made of Tieli wood from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)
and iron parallel bars (fig.1), Fragments (2005) - a group of ironwood pillars and beams from
dismantled Qing dynasty temples (fig. 2), and Template (2007), built for Documenta 12 Kassel out
of wooden doors and windows from destroyed Ming and Qing Dynasty houses (1368 – 1911) (fig.
3). At first these materials are simply collected, without any premeditated intention of what they
might eventually become. As he explains: “I always have the materials first. […] Sometimes they
sit in the studio for years before I decide how to use them. I have always been fascinated by
materials. I collect things without knowing what I will do with them, and then suddenly there’s

1
Karen Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Bernard Fibicher, Ai Weiwei (London: Phaidon Press Inc., 2009), 107.
2
Ibid.
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enlightenment.”
3
Collecting these materials becomes part of a larger system of production in the
work of Ai, a system in which time always plays an important role. Obsolete architecture is
generally selected and bought from antique and furniture dealers. The prevalence of these types of
materials is consequence of the urbanization that China has experienced over the past 30 years.
For example, from 1990 to 1995, during the Beijing real estate boom, floor space under
construction surged by 750 percent. In the rush to modernize China, ancient structures were torn
down and replaced with brand new houses and apartment buildings
4
, radically changing the
landscape of Beijing
To produce his installations, Ai teamed up with a highly skilled group of assistants,
applying a range of traditional and culturally specific craft techniques
5
. The piece is conceived as
the result of this specific, skill-based, collective mind. Fragments of a Temple (2006) is an
excellent example of technique, (fig. 4); an installation made of fragments of pillars and beams
from ancient dismantled temples, originally located in the South of China
6
. As Ai comments:
“Fragments of a Temple isn’t exactly my design, but that of the carpenters who have been working
with me for eight years. They considered what I would have liked to do […] and the result is more
interesting than what I would have designed myself”
7
. The freedom assistants were given to make
specific artistic and technical decisions regarding the work, which in this case took approximately
six months, has been one of the strategies used by Ai in his other artwork. The team of eight
carpenters employed old-fashioned techniques to balance the complex structure, resorting to a

3
Ibid, 89.
4
Aviva Shen, “Past and Present Clash in Ai Weiwei’s ‘Fragments’”, Smithsonian.com, May 16, 2012,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/past-and-present-clash-in-ai-weiweis-fragments-
96502760.
5
Smith, Ai Weiwei, 56.
6
Ai Weiwei and Anthony Pins, Ai Weiwei – Spatial Matters (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 45.
7
Ibid.
9

mastery of the theory of joints, experimentation and rigor
8
. They resorted to the ancient technique
of inlays and pegs: the wooden beams are held together by wooden pegs that must fit together
perfectly, without the use of nails or any other support system. The result is an intricate structure,
where every piece is fundamental in terms of balance, weight and stability.
Looking to the past in search for building techniques that have become obsolete is another
way of challenging the notion of uselessness. Inlays and pegs, like those used in Fragments, are
rarely used to build anymore and have been replaced by modern, faster construction techniques.
In addition, when put into context many of these useless materials and techniques can arguably be
termed Chinese. One could think then that nostalgia plays an important role in the work of Ai.
However, as Karen Smith mentions, “preserving his cultural heritage or paying homage to the past
is not Ai’s goal”
9
. Nostalgia is not the motivation for his work - challenging contemporary living
conditions is. He is interested in the politics of cultural heritage - what remains useful and what
becomes useless. This is true not only in his choice of materials (discarded pieces of ancient
temples and pieces of furniture that have become out of date but ironically remain as examples or
inspiration for the design for modern construction), but also in his use of traditional skills that had
been rendered useless to modern society. In this sense, China offers a wealth of local materials
and resources that have become integral to the execution of Ai’s work
10
. It is the specificity of
these two elements – materials and crafting techniques – and the relationship between them where
it becomes clear that Ai’s work revolves around notions of what it means to be Chinese in China
today. The past disrupts the apparent smooth flow of modernity and pulls us to that area in between,
where we question how one carries their heritage, how far gone is the past, and what is in its place.

8
Ibid., 47.
9
Smith, Ai Weiwei, 62.
10
Ibid., 53.
10

Works with furniture and another found objects:
In analyzing my own work, I have discovered certain patterns. However, I do believe that
every part of the process is always affected by a drive, in terms of materiality as well as in terms
of process. In the next few pages, I will discuss my approach to my most recent work in an attempt
to better define these patterns and my system that, I believe, started intuitively.
As mentioned, my work changed in terms of materiality and format during my first
international migration to Mexico. My first works were made during the first few months in a
small town on the Pacific coast of Jalisco. This series is called Terrenal and comprises five
drawings carved and painted on wooden blocks that I found on the rooftop of a small hostel where
I used to work (fig. 5-6). After that series, and the passing of my grandmother in 2015, I made an
installation project called Trapitos al sol and the series of doormats called Bienvenidos. Trapitos
al sol is a series of “papel picado” made of garbage bags, in which women are depicted performing
domestic tasks (figs. 7-8). In the case of Bienvenidos, these doormats of my own design were
handsewn in patchwork out of clothes I found on the streets of Puerto Vallarta, the second place
where I lived in Mexico (figs. 9-10). This shift from drawing on paper to carving, and then to cut
outs and sewn work, took place within a short period of time, partly as a response to one
fundamental circumstance; the lack of monetary resources to make artwork in a more traditional
manner. This pushed me to a situation where, in order to make work, I had to resort to free or low-
cost materials. The search for these resulted in a ritual of sorts. I call this ritual the drift, harkening
back to the surrealist tradition later theorized by Guy Debord in 1958’s Internationalle
Situationniste #1: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a
technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. The term also designates a specific
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uninterrupted period of dériving.”
11
Dériving around the city became a way to get to know this
foreign place as well as a method of finding materials, initiated ideas for different types of pieces.
When I moved to Los Angeles I kept this drift and made it a fundamental part of my artistic
practice.
Unlike Ai Weiwei, my method of collecting materials considered useless is more related
to a scavenger hunt on the streets of my neighborhood than a mercantile transaction. In this sense,
our approach to materials could not be more different. Collecting is limited by what is available
and free on the sidewalks and alleys, and subject to other factors such as access to transportation.
Sometimes the time between the discovery of an object laying on the street and its arrival to my
studio can be months. Resourcefulness (waiting and asking for help) has become part of this
process, and reflects back on certain aspects of migration that are still relevant to my experience
here in Los Angeles.
I have always felt like I am living in a space in between (a different one from Ai’s, more
symbolic than geographical), but by being a student of a highly privileged institution - while at the
same time struggling every day to pay my bills - both experiences are part of my daily life. This
reality is not as far from my first experience as a migrant in Mexico, where I could barely sustain
myself. However, my everyday reality leads me to navigate both worlds simultaneously. Not
without doubts or internal conflicts but with strength and resolution.
I select the pieces that eventually become a part of my work in response to this drive I
describe above. I have found no further explanation for the specificity of the materials and I do not
wish to assign them an explanation that will surely fall short of the richness or be unfair to the

11
Guy Debord, “Définitions”, Internationalle Situacioniste, no. 1 (June 1958): 13.
12

process and the product. I can however say that I am interested in materials that I feel have a
potential to become something else through an intervention. I am not interested in objects as ready-
mades, my intervening and disrupting the materials is important for my work. This addresses the
next phase in the production of work, which is one of transformation through labor.
Ai applies a certain amount of ancient, sometimes forgotten or obsolete techniques in order
to make his works of art; in contrast, I resort to my own knowledge of making, relevant to my
family history and legacy and, therefore, one with which I have a certain level of familiarity or
intimacy. And while Ai’s assistants utilize techniques that they are experts in, I have preferred to
explore those that I have not yet mastered (and might not ever) instead of those in whose realms I
am comfortable. My latest work, then, challenges my own knowledge and speaks to my ability to
be flexible, not only in relation to resources, but also in terms of techniques.
The materials used to make my work go through different levels of transformation. The
way I achieve this is through the use of manual and physical labor. I do not resort to external help
to produce my pieces, it is important that I am the one applying the labor, and not someone else.
In this sense – again – Ai’s work and my own could not be more distant. The reason why it is
important that I am the one applying the labor is because craft and labor have become the strategies
that I use to invoke my family’s presence in the work. This started with my practice of hand sewing
and has evolved to different kind of tasks, such as drilling, assembling and grouting. I have noticed
a shift from easier or more comfortable tasks to more uncomfortable and therefore more
challenging ones. This feeling of discomfort and the challenge that my latest pieces have brought
with them have a correlation with a way of being in the world of in-betweenness, where I cannot
and will never be too comfortable because of its intrinsic instability. The migrant experience
exposes the fragility of these ideas of comfort and security, and thus challenges me to become
13

more flexible and embrace discomfort, challenge, even fragility. In addition, since I feel that labor
is the language through which I communicate with different members of my family, the comfort
or discomfort of the task also depends on who I am in conversation with. To exemplify this, I will
explore two different pieces I recently created.

Still Life:
This sculptural installation comprises three elements: two chairs, one on top of the other,
connected through braided twine, forming a sculptural object. These two chairs rest on a piece of
tiled floor whose sides are crumbling away. Finally, a text on the wall reads: “Sin fin yo habría
caminado contigo.”
12
(figs. 11-13).
I conceived of this piece shortly after coming back from Argentina, having not been there
for four years, since I left for Mexico. I spent a month with family and friends, and while it is true
that reuniting with them was an overall happy experience, it made me realize how complex and
limited communication can be and how difficult it is to be part of a family. The limits of
understanding each other lead to a growing distance and silence. Already in Los Angeles, while
making this piece, I realized how the happiness but also the silence between myself and my close
family and relatives were two of the many sides of being in a family, deeply impacting me.
I found the bathroom tiles during a trip that I made with my immediate family to the
Atlantic coast not long after arriving to Argentina. My brother and I went to pick up wood to make
fire for an asado, and I found the tiles laying on a corner where people throw their garbage. I
collected some bringing them back to Los Angeles with me, without a clear idea of what I was

12
“Endlessly / I would have walked with you”, translated by Jordi Doce.
14

going to do with them. The first week after returning from Argentina, I found the chairs on a
sidewalk two blocks from my apartment. The text came to me while looking for books at a library
in Buenos Aires. I knew I wanted to use these elements for work at some point, but I had not
thought about using them together. I started braiding the chairs together, with the intention that
each braid would connect both chairs. Braiding has become one of the actions that I perform (either
on myself or on objects) that has a resonance for me since through this action I bring different
elements together. In addition, by braiding my hair or the twine, I replicate an action that involves
care. In general, braids are made to someone’s hair by someone else. They are made for many
reasons, some of which are preventing getting knots on it, avoiding getting lice. During elementary
school, braids are usually made to children by their mothers. Therefore, this act can become a very
powerful expression of care and love. The fact that I have nobody to braid my hair or whose hair
to braid speaks to the absence of my family, and this same strategy can be found in other forms in
other pieces, such as Lecciones de baile, about which I will talk later.
While braiding the chairs I realized I thought about family bonds and relationships, and it
was then when the idea of the piece of tiled floor came to play. As previously mentioned, my father
works as a plumber and installs gas systems and appliances. Through the years, I have seen him
redo all my relatives’ bathrooms or kitchens. Tile work, grouting, was a major part of these
renovations. When I asked him to teach me how to make this and other kind of works, he refused,
arguing that it was not “women’s work”. By using the tiles I had brought from Argentina I decided
to make a piece of tiled floor with which the chairs could establish a “conversation”. Unlike Ai’s
craftsmen, I was no expert in grouting and had no one to resort to, so I decided to apply my intuitive
knowledge and make it in an unprofessional way, embracing that process. The result is a very
irregular and precarious piece of tilework that looks as if it is crumbling apart.
15

The last element that comprises this piece is the wall text. I come from a family of
storytellers, and words are important to us. One of my primary concerns in coming to the U.S. was
my fear of losing part of who I am by ceasing to use my mother tongue, Spanish, as my primary,
everyday language. I insert text in Spanish in my work as a way of maintining my voice. The
phrases I use are hand drawn with graphite pencil straight on the wall, which is my way of inserting
myself and the tradition of drawing in the work. The texts that I use are either mine or fragments
of lyrics or poems, since music and poetry are other ways of telling stories to which I am intuitively
drawn to. Even when the original text is in English, I translate it to Spanish, as is the case of the
fragment of poem that I used for this piece.
During my last weeks in Buenos Aires, I encountered an anthology of poems by Paul
Auster. I opened the book and “Still Life” was the first poem I read:

Snowfall. And in the nethermost
lode of whiteness,
a memory
that adds your steps
to the lost.

Endlessly,
16

I would have walked with you
13
.

My heart sunk. I realized there was something about the hopelessness present in that poem
that is also present in my own work, as well as in my relationships with my family and in particular
with my father. Paul Auster is one of my favorite writers; his work oftentimes revolves around the
absence of his father and the complexity and ultimately failure of the attempts of building a family.
At the time I knew that I would put this poem to use in a future project, and the opportunity arose
while making Still Life.
There are many layers to a story, and there are many layers to a piece of artwork.
Explaining my reasons and methodology is not enough to justify the existence of a piece like this
in the world. After all, I work by following a deep drive. This applies to materials as well as to
aesthetic decisions and to the amount of visual and written information I disclose. The reasons
why I make work like this piece are always personal and resort to my experience as a migrant and
the relationship with my family, in the hopes that it will resonate in the hearts of the audience.

Atmosphere:
After my first experience with grouting, which was mainly small scale, amateur and
intuitive, I decided to make another piece that involved this kind of labor; a piece where I could
maximize the action of grouting in terms of time, size and strain. I was in need of material to be
grouted, and while in my drift I found two large mirrored-closet doors laying on the sidewalk not

13
Paul Auster, Poesía completa (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2012), 108.
17

far away from my apartment. I had never worked with mirrors, and I was aware that it was going
to be a challenge for me, since mirrors are objects that are so laden with meaning and the material
often invites cliché. I decided to break the mirrors and with the shards make a “tilework”. I was
aware beforehand that the finished piece would look decorative since I was trusting the
randomness of the breaking to dictate the final shapes of the pieces. I embraced chance.
Throughout my process, I documented the cleaning, the breaking and the grouting of the
work (figs. 14-16). I found myself wondering about Ai’s ideas about authorship, and especially
ownership, in regards to Fragments. He chose to have no say on the design of the installation,
instead giving the raw materials to his team and letting them decide what and how to make the
piece, along with very vague instructions
14
. In my case, I chose not to delegate any part of the
process. And this is because I consider the process, and my presence in it, to be the most relevant
part of my work, even more important than the finished product. Through my work, I try (one
could say, hopelessly) to re-connect with my family, and in order to achieve this goal, I utilize
craft and labor as strategies. The idea of replicating actions performed in the past by my relatives
works as a manner of acknowledgement, recognition, homage, of the work and of those who
performed it in the past. For this to happen I need to embody these actions myself, since it is
through performing these tasks that I deeply understand their challenges, their times, and therefore,
their profound impact in my life and in the life of others. The memory of my father redoing our
bathroom and kitchen comes to mind. Only after making this piece am I able to understand more
deeply the sense of recognition that comes along with this kind of work, what gifts these
reparations provide me.

14
Weiwei and Pins, Ai Weiwei – Spatial Matters, 47
18

As I continued developing the artwork, I separated the pieces of mirror and set up canvas
and plastic on the floor of my studio. The criteria to organize the design was intuitive; I began by
spreading the bigger pieces, and then formed islands (or families) of smaller pieces around them.
I was interested in exploring all the possibilities of both the materials and the process, this is why
I decided to leave areas free of mirror where the grout could rest alone. I decided that the work
would be as large as the pieces of mirror allowed it. I used all the mirror that could be saved from
the breaking and when there was no more I cut the edges of the canvas and the plastic close to the
edges of the mirror. The approximate size of this work is eight by six feet and rests on the floor
(figs. 17-18).
The process of grouting was long, painful and grueling. The surface to be grouted was
fairly large and the work required me to be on my knees the entire time. Again, the figure of my
father (and all those who came before him) became present in this action. The act of grouting
functions as an inter-generational performance due to its indisputable power to invoke my father
and my grandfather on my mother’s side (who built his house from its foundations after migrating
to Argentina) and therefore the reclaiming of a legacy of labor, making it mine. At the same time,
owning this craft by making it up, every time less intuitive and more professional, speaks to my
refusal to accept as truth my father’s assessment of the “things that girls do” and do not do. I am
against designating genders to labor; it simplifies the complexity and richness of these tasks to a
mere binary that has already shown itself to be obsolete and useless. I therefore claim my right to
use any kind of labor I see fit and respond to my father’s stereotyped mindset by making a grouted
floor.
19

I wrote a short phrase on the back wall of the installation. The phrase is a translation from
lyrics of a Joy Division’s song, Atmosphere: “no te alejes en silencio”
15
(fig. 19). I listened to this
song during the week when I started this installation, while I was trying to grasp what this piece
meant in the larger scheme of my works. I found that this phrase works as an unfulfilled wish and,
in a way, also a prayer. I installed it at approximately two feet from the ground, driven by the
image of my father as a plumber, installing flagstone in a bathroom, thinking about what can we
see when we are on our knees.
I utilized lighting to create an atmosphere inside the studio, aiming at making the work as
immersive and inviting as possible. The resulting piece of “grouted floor” is a reflective puzzle
that invites the viewer to walk onto it, allowing for the possibility of other breaks in the mirror
(fig. 20). It has been the most time-consuming, challenging and uncomfortable pieces I have made
so far, and I believe this is only a reflection of both the larger and smaller, more intimate issues
that this piece addresses. However, through this work I felt that my silence about my father as a
male, absent figure that I constantly try to re-imagine and save from oblivion, was broken.

Performance in the 1960s in Argentina, Alberto Greco and the vivo-dito
In order to understand Alberto Greco’s performance work, I feel compelled to address
certain fundamental differences between the art produced in the European centers and that
produced in Latin America, specifically in Argentina, since the early 20
th
century. This is relevant
in first place because, while it is true that during 20
th
century Argentinian artists would study in
the main European art centers, mainly Paris, and migrate the trends and ideas back to Argentina,

15
“Don’t walk away in silence,” translated by Julia Orquera Bianco.
20

the work produced by Argentinian artists formed in Europe would result in an appropriation but
also an adaptation of these trends, addressing local issues. As Ana Contursi explains, “[Latin
American] Avant Garde movements from beginning of 20
th
Century do not result directly
comparable to the historic European Avant Gardes, since they emerge in very different contexts.
The Latin American Avant Garde [is] on the way of institutionalization and concerned about the
legitimation of their artisticity and originality, and for the identarian recovery of their roots,
devastated by the colonial policies of the center.”
16
This concern connected with identity and
novelty is noticeable especially during the first half of the 20
th
century.
The concerns, and therefore, the topics and formats, of the second Neo Avant-garde
changed according to the political climate in Argentina. These movements, within which we can
find Alberto Greco, are born during the second half of the 20
th
Century, after World War II and
within the context of dictatorships and repressive policies on the side of destabilized states.
Contursi explains that the tension given the struggle between totalitarian brutality from the right
wing and all the emancipatory imagery spreading like a virus all around Latin America fostered a
fertile environment for experimentation and provocation as a means of resistance
17
. These new
Avant Garde movements were strictly urban and took over the streets to generate new scenarios.
The artists from the Argentinian Neo Avant-garde would emerge in the early 60s, initially from
the Instituto Di Tella, and part of their production revolved around the generation of spontaneous
actions and happenings, interventions in the urban landscape that counteracted and protested the
totalitarian regimes. The most important movement that would emerge from these actions

16
Ana Contursi, “Political persistency of artistic dissent: About the neo-avant-garde conceptualism of Alberto Greco
and performativity of his Vivo Dito,” Revista Laboratorio, no. 15 (December 2016), 7. Translated by Julia Orquera
Bianco.
17
Ibid., 8.
21

solidifying this trend consolidated in Tucumán Arde, an art and activism collective that actively
and openly denounced and fought against the dictatorship in place
18
.
In the case of Argentinian artist Alberto Greco, there is little room for distinction between
his life and his work as an artist. Multidisciplinary at heart, he is distinguished by his constant
movement from Argentina to Europe, which resulted in an intense conversation with European
production through his work. As one of the figures of the traveler artist, it was impactful to me to
learn that part of Greco’s decisions in regards of his intermittent stays between here and there seem
to be related to acting on and reclaiming his homosexuality
19
. During the Peronist regime, for
“dignity and healthiness purposes”, a series of edicts prohibited the so called “deviated” to gather
in bars, houses and public places. In Buenos Aires they were not allowed to vote or have visibility
or opinion. It was a disease that had to be fought against and punished
20
. The years of Greco’s
exits from Argentina conspicuously coincide with moments were homophobic campaigns and
persecutions carried on by the Church, the Federal Police, and the Army took place. I see a parallel
between Greco and Ai Weiwei’s experiences of migration since these two artists left their home
countries to escape an environment full of censorship and repression; environments that
fundamentally denied their ability to fully embrace who they were. Thus, they both went out in the
world in search of freedom. Migration in the experience of traveler artists like Greco and Ai seems
to be connected to a yearning to thrive as free human beings, leaving the economic critique as a
secondary concern.

18
José Fernandez-Vega, “El fuego y las formas: una estética política para la neovanguardia de los sesenta.”,
foroiberoideas.cervantesvirtual.com - http://foroiberoideas.cervantesvirtual.com/resenias/data/41.pdf.
19
Marcelo E. Pacheco and María Amalia García, Alberto Greco - qué grande sos! (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte
Moderno, 2016), 36.
20
Ibid.
22

Within the discourses of Argentinian art, Greco is a clear example of the passage from the
modern to the post-modern, with his singular version of live art proposed through his vivo-ditos,
that started in 1962, chalk in hand, on the streets of Paris. These actions comprised signaling
through circling and signing people and objects on the streets (figs. 21-22). Months later, he
composed a “Manifesto” which he glued on the walls of Geneva, and soon after that, he filled the
streets of Rome with graffiti that proclaimed the new “Aventura de lo real”
21
(fig. 23). In addition
to taking his art practice outside the realm of artistic environments, the work is penetrated by
everydayness: the chalk, the posters, or the collages that put the vivo-dito situations in motion all
belonged to the domestic and popular sphere, in their materials as well as in their making.
Greco is revolutionary since he makes the public sphere his gallery, extending the cultured
practice of art making out onto the streets. What interests me the most about this artist is the way
his work and his life are so intertwined that it becomes difficult to establish a clear differentiation
between where one ends and the other begins. In the face of the art community, and inside the
system of contemporary art and its ways of visibility, the artist’s gesture of creating artwork by
merely pointing at it (“vivo-dito” means “live finger” in Italian) by circling it with chalk was
radical. In addition, these gestures clearly marked a position against the sublime aesthetical
experience (contemplation and retreat, separation between artist-work-audience) in favor of an
affection more linked with the positivity of humor, vitality and the experience in-situ
22
. This
specificity in terms of location, outside the validated art circuit, is connected to a drive to make
artwork from the everyday life. Greco’s “vivo-ditos” are an artistic practice that refuses to be

21
Ibid., 28.
22
Contursi, “Political persistency of artistic dissent,” 22.
23

contained by the logics of traditional museum and gallery displays, instead it appears in
communion with the political will to transform the environment.
These actions, started in 1962 in Paris, took place in different cities around Europe until
the designation made by Greco of Piedralaves, a town in the dry and hot province of Avila, Spain,
as international capital city of the “grequismo”
23
. While it is true that Greco’s actions may be read
only as a conversation with the cultured art scene, one might expand their view to think about these
as ways to reflect on an art of the social, a response to a history that is both personal and national.
Reflecting on the reasons why Greco moves constantly in and out of his home country is reviewing
the Argentinian social climate and acknowledging it as a historically violent and factious
community from the beginning, with a tendency to suppress “the other”
24
.
The activation of the gesture in the vivo-dito is an act that presents itself as irrefutable fact
because it bursts in the space and immediately impacts the subjects and the environment. Because
of their immediacy, there is an impossibility to fully circumscribe these actions in a category that
does justice to them. In describing these works, I tellingly find myself in a dead end due to an
undeniable tension between language and representation. The semantic aperture that a gesture such
as the vivo-dito facilitates ultimately results in a loss of perception of what is truthful; what is real
and what is unreal coexist with no boundaries and no quantitative or sustainable differences.
What strikes me the most in the gesture of Greco’s vivo ditos is how they translate a wider
and more complex situation and, at the same time, function as extensions of Greco’s life and
specifically of his drifts. The artist’s ideas formed in Buenos Aires, within the circles of atheist

23
Pacheco and García, Alberto Greco - qué grande sos!, 27.
24
Ibid., 34.
24

existentialism, derived from the writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
25
. These writings
and meetings with like-minded artists and intellectuals deeply influenced his view and his work.
In addition, being porteño (the word “porteño” designates the people born within the confines of
the capital city of Buenos Aires; the translation is “from the port”, since Buenos Aires is a port
city) means being immersed in a constant and careful observation of reality that results in a
cynicism that is criollo by definition. All these are cultural, almost genetic components of being
porteño affecting Greco’s approach to his work, in particular his vivo-ditos.
Previously I mentioned Debord’s definition of the drift. Both Debord and Greco are very
similar in their passion for underlining their drifts, of their incessant nomadisms
26
. Greco belongs
to the tribe of night walkers that created Buenos Aires’ artistic scene. The yearn for freedom and
the existential pain pushes him to never stop in the same place
27
. This is how the vivo-dito becomes
not only a gesture that speaks to the art world, a way of incorporating and confusing art and life,
but also serves as a reflection of his own movement in terms of being a porteño and a constant
migrant, exposing the push and pull that begins with the individual and extends to his art practice.
The vivo-dito is the search for an answer.

Dance Lessons:
Looking in retrospect, extending my art practice to my own body came as a natural
consequence of a longer and larger process of questioning the limits of traditional art materials
while simultaneously exploring different formats and materialities more directly related to the

25
Ibid., 29.
26
Ibid., 112.
27
Ibid., 42.
25

themes and situations I intended to address. This was accompanied by my personal experience of
gaining more awareness of my own body through exercise, something that I feel has radically
changed the way I relate to my body, and in extension to other bodies and the world outside myself.
One of the thoughts that came to mind is how absent the body is in my own work as an
artist, and this led me to question how the body is made invisible in everyday life. The body seems
to be a machine that, as anything associated with utility, denotes its presence almost solely when
it stops working. In painting, the trace of the body and the human hand was systematically erased
from the work until the Impressionist movement, where the trace of the brush and therefore, that
of the hand becomes a tool for constructing an image. I was interested in exploring how to move
away from representation to embody the experiences I wanted to communicate. Time and
hardwork helped me to understand that manual labor could operate as a way of embodying the
experience of migration, as well as a way of bringing the body back to my work. To make the body
present and relevant again through the trace, either through sewing, braiding or grouting. Labor
has the potential to leave traces of a human body’s actions in the object and the space, and I chose
to push myself, and my work, in this direction as far as I could.
With time I realized that one way of making the body present in my work could be through
performance. This came as a revelation and as result of a long thought process in relation to a
family story. I always say that my grandmother on my facther’s side was the core of my family.
Yolanda arrived to Buenos Aires in the 60’s, having run away from a violent husband who kept
everyone in isolation and fear. She took great care in creating a new, small universe for herself and
her children to thrive. She was busy, and kept her four children busy as well, by putting into place
many types of activities. One of them was dance lessons. The family became assiduous attendees
26

of peñas and both my aunt Lydia and my father ended up in a dance company before even finishing
highschool.
The other element of this story is my mother. The youngest daughter of an Italian
immigrant family, my mother was put to work doing house chores as soon as she could walk and
talk. Only Italian was spoken in their home, isolating my mother during her first years of life. One
of the few ways of socializing she found, being as she was an overprotected child of immigrants,
was dance. My mother started taking dance lessons at age two, and by age ten she started teaching
dance to kids. Serendipity brought my aunt Lydia to my mother’s dance lessons, and my aunt
introduced my father to my mother. They were 20 and 19, respectively.
All this is to say that I come from a family of dancers, with the tradition continuing in both
my siblings and cousins. Argentinian folk choreographies are my families forte, and dancing these
used to be a fundamental part of every celebration without distinction. My stubbornness at first,
and negligence later on, meant that I never learned these. I am one of the few relatives that does
not know how to dance gato, escondido o chacarera. My grandmother Yolanda kept going
religiously to the “Sociedad de Fomento” twice a week to take dance lessons and stay for the peña.
In many occasions I promised her I would accompany her, but my shyness and a painful self-
consciousness never let me fulfill this promise.
After a relatively long period of physical and mental deterioration, Yolanda passed away
in September, 2015 in Buenos Aires. This was a specifically rough time, financially speaking, of
my stay in Mexico, and I could not travel to Argentina to say goodbye to her. I could barely talk
with my closest family. Her death caused me a pain that even today is hard to gauge or alleviate,
mired in an irreparable sense of guilt. To cope with her death, I meditated on her legacy, everything
27

that she taught me, everything that she told me during the long, nostalgic fiddled afternoons of
mate, and stories about my family. And this fomented a radical turn in my work.
I can now see how natural a turn it is for me to consider performance as one of the ways to
speak about my experience as a migrant. I conceived the idea for Dance Lessons as a way to fulfill
the promise made to my grandmother, as well as to repair certain aspects of the communication
with my family that had been neglected for two years. The project consisted on learning how to
dance an Argentine folk choreography, the zamba, through videos that members of my closest
family provided of their own performance. The process of learning took two months. Having no
dance skills of my own, translating what I saw into space turned out to be a very complex task. In
addition, being in constant and direct contact with the music that filled my childhood kept me in a
sensitive and receptive state, where I would ponder not only the project as it is but the life of my
family, and the importance of family bonds.
I documented the complete process of learning how to dance, making a seven-minute
documentary called “Dance lessons”. For the final video performance, I decided to dance on the
rooftop of the building where I live, in Mid-City, with an exceptional view of Los Angeles, easily
recognizable to those who live in this city (figs. 24-25).
The choreography I performed belonged to zamba, which is a slow rhythm performed by
couples, generally for courtship. The lyrics speak about love, but also about estrangement and
nostalgia. One of the most famous Argentinian zambas, “Luna Tucumana”, reads as follows:
Yo no le canto a la luna
Porque alumbra nada más
28

Le canto porque ella sabe
De mi largo caminar
Ay lunita tucumana
Tamborcito calchaquí
Compañera de los gauchos
En la senda del tafí
28

My decision to learn to dance zamba was inspired by this song, which I learned during the
early years of my childhood, because songs are another way of telling stories, and being an admirer
of poetry, I am particularly drawn to music, and I pay special attention to lyrics. They have weight
in my life. While in Los Angeles I came back to this song from my childhood and soon realized
its meaning had expanded and spoke to me in new ways, connected with my experience as a
migrant. This was a fundamental discovery for me and deeply impacted my work from that
moment on.
By dancing this choreography on the rooftop of the building I inserted my body into this
foreign context, invoking the figures of my grandmother and my close relatives through my
performance. The dance becomes a ritual to build an imaginary bridge and works as a hopeless
attempt (but an attempt nevertheless) to bring my family and myself together. The act of dancing
alone reinforces the hopelessness of the action and speaks about the aspect of loneliness present in
my life and in my work as an artist. It is in this sense where I find that my work, as well as Alberto

28
“I do not sing to the moon / just because it lights and nothing else / I sing to her because she knows about my long
walk / Oh, little moon from Tucumán / calchaquí drums / friends of the gauchos / on the paths of El Tafí.”
Translated by Julia Orquera Bianco.
29

Greco’s, is an extension of my everyday experience, and from time to time the limits between life
and work become blurry. Intervening in the urban space, either through signaling with a chalk back
in Piedralaves, or dancing on the top of a building in Los Angeles, is moreover a way of affirming
a presence in a new environment, a gesture similar to spiking a flag and claiming a place in this
space and within the current conversations.

Conclusion:
The journey to understand my own practice has been long and, in some senses has just
begun. As artists we are asked to explain ourselves and our work. But if I were asked why I decided
to be an artist, I could only answer that I cannot live without making. I make work first and
foremost following my own drive, an impulse that cannot be contained. Therefore, there is a limit
to the explanations I can give about my own work. However, the experience of thinking about is
always fruitful; tying knots one by one, I can build a net that would provide for some clues, some
answers. Like a diorama, looking at my artistic practice can show productive once I have the right
perspective, distance and lighting. Some things can be better understood in retrospect.
Being far from Argentina and everything I knew as familiar, and all the situations and
experiences that it brought, made me stop at one point and reconsider everything that I lost,
everything that I sacrificed in order to pursue that uncontainable desire to make. Along with this,
I had to acknowledge everything I carried, everything I brought with me, deconstructing its
meaning and transforming it, repurposing it and expanding it through my artistic practice. And
while it is true that the past is important for me, because my acquired knowledge and my personal
history are the backbone of my work, I am not interested in a nostalgic approach to it. I believe in
30

the power of owning who I am and where I come from, my family legacy and the history of my
home country, knowing that understanding who I am changes with every experience in every
foreign place I live and constantly informs my work as well as my life.
My work is partly who I am. The stories I tell are born from personal experience. I make
this work in the hopes that it will resonate in others. I believe stories of migration are so diverse
and unique, and at the same time so universal, that they can easily be read and felt. I am uncertain
about what is the next destination in my life, but I trust that it will bring new experiences and
opportunities to speak about them in new, more expansive ways.

Julia Orquera Bianco – March 2018

31

List of figures:

Figure 1 -Ai Weiwei, Kippe, 2006. Ironwood from dismantled Temples of the Qing Dinasty, iron parallel bars. 182 x 286 x 104
cm.

Figure 2 – Ai Weiwei, Fragments, 2005.Table, chairs and beams from dismantled Temples from the Qing Dinasty. 500 x 850 x
700 cm.
32

Figure 3 – Ai Weiwei, Template, 2007. Wooden doors and windows from destroyed Ming and Qing Dinasty houses, wooden base.
720 x 1200 x 850 cm. Installation Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany.

Figure 4 – Ai Weiwei, Fragments of a Temple, 2006.Table, chairs and beams from dismantled Temples from the Qing Dinasty.
500 x 850 x 700 cm. Installation Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing.
33

Figure 5 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Terrenal 5/5, 2014. Color paint on wood, 29 x 20 x 4 cm.

Figure 6 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Terrenal 1/5, 2014. Paint on wood, 14 x 16 x 4 cm.
34

Figure 7 – Julia Orquera Bianco, detail of Trapitos al sol, 2015. Garbage bags, string. Variable measures.

Figure 8 – Julia Orquera Bianco, detail of Trapitos al sol, 2015. Garbage bags, string. Variable measures.
35

Figure 9 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Come in, 2015 from the series Bienvenidos. Hand-sewn pieces of found fabric, 80 x 60 cm.

Figure 10 - Julia Orquera Bianco, detail of Sunrise, 2015 - From the series Bienvenidos. Hand-sewn pieces of found fabric, 70 x
50 cm.

36

Figure 11 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Still Life, 2018. Chairs, twine, grouted tile and wall text. Installation. Variable measures.
37

Figure 12 – Julia Orquera Bianco, detail of wall text - Still Life, 2018. Installation. Variable measures.

Figure 13 – Julia Orquera Bianco, detail of piece of grouted floor - Still Life, 2018. Installation. Variable measures.
38

Figure 14 to 16 – Julia Orquera Bianco: cleaning, breaking and grouting of Atmosphere, 2018. Personal Instagram archive.
39

Figure 17 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Atmosphere, 2018. Mirror and grout on canvas. 13 x 8 inches. Installation USC Roski Spring
2018 Open Studios.

40

Figures 18, 19 – Julia Orquera Bianco, details of Atmosphere,2018. Above, grout work. Below: wall text. USC Roski Spring
2018 Open Studios.

41

Figure 20 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Atmosphere, 2018. Audience stepping on the installation. USC Roski Spring 2018 Open
Studios.

42

Figure 21, 22 - Alberto Greco performing his 'vivo-dito'. Right: recording of action, Madrid, 1963. Right: recording of his first
action circling Argentinian artist Alberto Heredia, Paris, March 1962. Courtesy Vanina Greco.

Figure 23 - Alberto Greco's posters, 1963. The posters read: "Alberto Greco, qué grande sos!" (Alberto Greco, you are so
great!). Translation from Julia Orquera Bianco.
43

Figure 24, 25 – Julia Orquera Bianco, Lecciones de baile, 2017. Video performance. Duration: 4 minutes. Los Angeles, CA.
44

Bibliography:
Auster, Paul. Poesía completa. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2012.
Contursi, Ana. “Political persistency of artistic dissent: About the neo-avant-garde conceptualism
of Alberto Greco and performativity of his Vivo Dito.” Revista Laboratorio, no. 15
(December 2016).
Fernandez-Vega, José. “El fuego y las formas: una estética política para la neovanguardia de los
sesenta.” foroiberoideas.cervantesvirtual.com,
http://foroiberoideas.cervantesvirtual.com/resenias/data/41.pdf.
Pacheco, Marcelo E. and María Amalia García. Alberto Greco - qué grande sos! Buenos Aires:
Museo de Arte Moderno, 2016.
Shen, Aviva. “Past and Present Clash in Ai Weiwei’s ‘Fragments’.” Smithsonian.com, May 16,
2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/past-and-present-clash-
in-ai-weiweis-fragments-96502760.
Smith, Karen, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Bernard Fibicher. Ai Weiwei. London: Phaidon Press Inc.,
2009.
Weiwei, Ai and Anthony Pins. Ai Weiwei – Spatial Matters. London: Tate Publishing, 2014.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Migration is a global phenomenon that is constantly affecting the configuration of cultures and histories worldwide. Massive movements of bodies create diasporic spaces where new identities are negotiated. ❧ The experience of migration has the potential to be seen and thought through art. I am particularly interested in how this experience affected the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and Argentinian artist Alberto Greco. They have been deeply influential in my practice and I believe that the fact that both these artists migrated from their hometown had a strong impact on their practice. I believe this is similarly reflected in my artistic practice. I will focus on Ai’s work with repurposed wood from houses and temples and Greco’s many vivo-dittos, analyzing how history, culture and place/displacement synthesize and dialog in their artworks in a complex way. I will then compare and contrast their work with some of my latest pieces. ❧ I propose to approach the topic of migration by examining this phenomenon as a corporeal and embodied one. My goal is to address this issue from two different but complementary sides of my current practice: sculptural objects and video performance. My intended approach is fundamentally connected with the idea of a body in context, a body that experiences migration.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Orquera Bianco, Julia (author)

Core Title Limit/Less: the migrant body in context

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 08/05/2018

Defense Date 08/02/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ai Weiwei,Alberto Greco,argentina,artist,braiding,contemporary art,grout,installation,Labor,memory,migration,Mirrors,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance,Sculpture,Twine,urban landscape

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Campbell, Andrew (committee chair), Bodie, Michael (committee member), Guirguis, Sherin (committee member)

Creator Email juliaobianco@gmail.com,orquerab@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-52261

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