Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza, Wearable Codex

[00:00:05]We're in the Getty Research Institute, part of the Getty Center at the top of the hill overlooking Los Angeles. This particular work is by Beatrice Cortez and Rafa Esparza, and it's called Wearable Codex. It was an intervention into a larger exhibition called Reinventing the Americas Construct, Erase, Repeat.

[00:00:26]>> So, codices are the pre-Hispanic artifacts created in ancient Americas.

[00:00:33]>> So, this is different than the original codices. There are only a few that survived. Most of them were burned, and as a result, they are deeply treasured objects. Some of them are by indigenous people, but some of them are written by indigenous people under the control of the Spanish once they arrived.

[00:00:52]>> That would be the case of the Florentine Codex. So, that's a codex that was created after the conquest.

[00:00:58]>> And these are beautiful works of art.

[00:01:00]Not only do they contain extraordinary amounts of knowledge and information about a culture that is largely lost, but they are beautifully made on amate paper, which is bark. And so, what we're seeing here is very different.

[00:01:11]>> These are images that mostly come from all these different codices that we were talking about. So, you will see the Codex Borgia or the Florentine Codex, and these are glued to this fabric.

[00:01:22]>> So, the question then is why did these two artists feel the need to create this object and then to perform it within this exhibition?

[00:01:31]>> This exhibition was about those illustrations and prints that Europeans created, and most of the time giving a very stereotypical view of what the Americas were. Rafa and Beatrice came and talked to me after seeing the show, and they told me that there was something lacking in the show, which was indigenous knowledge. I think they felt upset because some of these images portrayed the indigenous and the local people many times as savages. They ended up deciding to put together a performance inserting this indigenous knowledge into the exhibition with this wearable codex.

[00:02:09]>> Both of these artists have built a career around reinvestigating, resurrecting, taking seriously indigenous knowledge. So, I'm imagining that I'm there as a viewer trying to deal with the complexity of the content that I'm looking at already. And then the idea is that these two artists are literally going to perform this codex through the space reinserting ancient knowledge into a exhibition that is largely devoted to the way that Europeans saw people in the Americas.

[00:02:41]>> Yes, it was inserted as you say the idea that this is knowledge we already had before you arrived. Here we see an image from the Florentine codex which are medicinal rocks. Again, thinking about indigenous knowledge and how much they knew about the plants and they knew about how to cure different illnesses.

[00:03:01]>> And that idea of ancient knowledge is also evident in some of the painted images that come from calendar pages.

[00:03:07]>> During pre-Hispanic times, people had vast knowledge about the calendar and the stars and the cosmos and so there are different references in this codex about that knowledge.

[00:03:18]>> I do want to be fair to the exhibition and to you as the curator. You understood just how difficult and complex and one-sided this material was.

[00:03:29]So, you actually had already invited a contemporary artist, actually a member of an indigenous group in the Amazon in Brazil to create his own intervention in this exhibition. And then good deal of the exhibition was taken over by his work literally erasing, drawing into, reconstructing some of these original images which stood side by side with the originals.

[00:03:52]>> His name is Denilson Baniwa and I was very clear that I couldn't show all these materials that were so problematic without inserting also the voice of indigenous people.

[00:04:02]>> And now this wearable codex is itself a part of the collection of the GRI.

[00:04:09]>> We decided to acquire it because it relates not only to the exhibition, but also to the works that we have in the collection. By acquiring this wearable codex, we're inserting this script into our own collections and I think that was important.

[00:04:23]>> And in this way, these codices remain a part of a living culture.

[00:04:28]>> Yes, and I always think that it's important to take something that we have in our collections that might be from an earlier period and then move it into the contemporary time and it shows how art keeps evolving.