Vegetal Narratives with Tatiana Arocha
(Imprinting, Frottage, and Plant-Pressing Workshop)
Octubre 13, 2023, 5-8pm
The workshop is currently at capacity - if you would like to be added to the waiting list please email us@canalprojects.org
Liana’s first public workshop invites the artist Tatiana Arocha, whose work reveals a process of communing with plants through a personal lexicon of textures resulting from rubbing, photographing, preserving, and tracing the forest’s bark, seeds, and leaves. This process has been enhanced by her conversations with indigenous people who possess ancestral and contemporary knowledge of the local ecology. In this workshop, Tatiana will share her research on the coca plant, which began in 2008 and will guide us through techniques present in her work, such as frottage, imprinting, and plant pressing.
Tatiana Arocha (1974) is a Colombian artist based in New York. Her art practice explores the intimacy between people and land, rooted in personal memory and her immigrant experience. It centers on community through public art interventions and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Arocha’s works often bring to life and reconstruct the vulnerable tropical forests of her homeland, addressing the ecological, emotional, and cultural losses caused by extractive economies and colonial practices. By interweaving historical and contemporary technologies, Arocha’s unconventional process and craft express her layered relationship with nature and cultural transformation.
Liana Collective will host a space for knowledge exchange with Tatiana Arocha and open to artists, herbalists, native thinkers, researchers, and the general public interested in being part of an experience of plant-human transferences. Through collective creation and dialogue, the participants will be encouraged to perceive terrestrial narratives and challenge Western perspectives on nature, striving to convey the expressions and knowledge of plants. Participants will explore the language of the coca leaf and other medicinal herbs by feeling them and leaving their imprints on paper. This space will bring a conversation about the plants’ agency, their relationship to healing practices, and elements such as smell, texture, color, and contrast while experimenting with printed compositions and pigments.
Tatiana Arocha (1974) is a New York-born Colombian artist. Her art practice explores intimacy between people and land, rooted in personal memory and her immigrant experience, and centers on community through public art interventions and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Most often, Arocha’s works vivify and reconstruct the vulnerable tropical forests of her homeland, confronting the ecological, emotional, and cultural loss caused by extractive economies and colonial practices. In weaving together historical and contemporary technologies, Arocha’s unconventional process and craft express her layered relationship with nature and cultural transformation.
She has held residencies at Residency Unlimited, The Lower East Side Printshop, LABverde, Sinfonia Tropico, and The Wassaic Project. Arocha has received funding from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and City Artist Corps, and was the recipient of the Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission and the FST StudioProjects Fund.
Solo exhibitions include Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, BioBAT Project Space, Queens Botanical Garden, and site-specific installations at BRIC, Brookfield Place/Winter Garden, MTA Arts, Goethe-Institut Kolumbien, and Hilton Bogota Corferias. She has participated in group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Wave Hill, BRIC, The Wassaic Project, ArtBridge, KODALab, and The Clemente.
