Carlos Castro Arias with HereIn
Mythstories, ArtBO Art Fair, Bogotá, Colombia, 2019.
[Image description: An installation view of a gallery with three multicolored tapestries on two dark red walls. The tapestries are hung from metal rods with decorative ends. An ornate gold chair and brown and white coffee table with a book on it sit in the middle of the gallery.]
HereIn talks with multidisciplinary artist Carlos Castro Arias about his Mythstories series. Begun in 2017, these large-scale works weave contemporary news media into the medium and aesthetic of medieval tapestries. Castro lives and works in San Diego, Tijuana, and Bogotá.
HereIn: Mythstories seems to exemplify some of the fundamental strategies in your practice.
Castro: In my work I’m interested in the preconceptions that we have about certain histories, myths, and objects that we can review and recontextualize. I’m not interested in creating images. I’m more interested in reusing, recontextualizing, and changing the meaning and the use that objects and images have.
HereIn: What kinds of histories and myths are you drawn to?
Castro: I started with myths from Colombia because I’m from there, and it’s just fascinating to see all these crazy things that have happened in the last forty years in Colombia. I’m interested in myths that are recent. Now that I live here in the U.S. and we are so close to Mexico, I’m also investigating myths from Mexico and the U.S.
The Creation of the Unicorn, 2017, tapestry, 4 x 6 ft.
Castro: This piece depicts drug lord Pablo Escobar having a unicorn made for his daughter Manuela by putting a horn on a pedigree horse. The image resembles the medieval tapestry, The Death of the Unicorn. Escobar's men look like medieval characters but are using Adidas shoes. The entrance of Escobar's farm Hacienda Napoles is also featured.
[Image description: A multicolored tapestry. Seven people in medieval dress stand around a fountain in a garden filled with animals. A figure on the left is recognizable as Pablo Escobar. In the center of the garden is a unicorn. A person in a hat with a Nike Swoosh logo on it holds the unicorn’s horn, while blood drips from its head. In the upper left corner of the image is an archway, through which buildings are visible. On the archway, letters spell “Hacienda Napoles.” A plane rests on top of the structure, which is recognizable as the entrance to Escobar’s farm. All people in the Mythstories tapestries have medium-light skin.]
HereIn: What do you mean by “myth”? Are these entirely invented stories or interpretations of specific events?
Castro: For The Creation of the Unicorn, the image came to my mind when I went to The Cloisters in New York and I saw the medieval Unicorn Tapestries. I was with a friend and he said, “Didn’t Pablo Escobar have a unicorn?” [Escobar supposedly gifted his daughter a unicorn for her birthday. He is said to have bought a horse and stapled a cone to its head, after which it died from an infection.] And then I was like, boom!, I should do something about that.
The Narco Arc, 2018-19, tapestry, 6 x 4 ft.
Castro: This tapestry resembles the biblical myth of Noah's Arc. It features Pablo Escobar filling a plane with all kinds of animals to create a zoo at his farm in Colombia. The myth is that Escobar was able to bring hundreds of animals in a Hercules plane and all of them coexisted in harmony during the journey to Colombia. Many of these animals escaped from the farm after Escobar's death and are currently living in the wild and mingling with native species.
[Image description: A multicolored tapestry. A plane rests on the ground in a landscape with lush vegetation and mountains in the distance. Two goats, two unicorns, and two hippos walk on a wooden ramp out of the back of the plane, while animals such as giraffes, camels, sheep, and deer, among others, roam the grass. Birds fly through the air and sit on the plane’s wings. In the lower left corner of the image, a figure recognizable as Pablo Escobar stands next to a person in a hat with a Nike Swoosh logo on it. Both are in medieval dress.]
Castro: Then I started to think of other myths in Colombia. We also have the myth about Pablo Escobar that he created an ark. He had a zoo in Colombia but he brought all those animals in a single plane from Africa. It reminded me of Noah’s Ark. So all these myths have a resonance with something related to the past.
The Creation of a Paramilitary Army at the Guacharacas Farm, 2018-19, tapestry, 6 x 4 ft.
Castro: This work features Colombia's former president Alvaro Uribe and his brother, who are believed to be the founders of a para-military army on their farm. The piece represents a battle between guerrillas and paramilitary that resembles a medieval war.
[Image description: A multicolored tapestry. Figures and animals fill a landscape. On the right side of the image, a mass of people, some in armor with swords, engages in battle. On the left side of the image, figures recognizable as Álvaro and Santiago Uribe look out at the battle. At the bottom of the image, a person holding a chainsaw moves toward the crowd. At the top of the image, the figure of Christ descends from the sky and points a finger at Álvaro Uribe. Across the uppermost edge of the image, a floating banner reads, “CREATURAE BLOQUE METRO SUI DEFENSIONEM IN VILLA GUACHARACHS.”]
Castro: We have a former president, Álvaro Uribe, he’s still a very important politician in Colombia. There are hundreds of stories from people saying he created his own paramilitary army to protect his farm. Because of those kinds of armies, a huge war happened in Colombia. Since this guy is so powerful, all those stories are covered up. Everyone knows he had this army, but he’s still a politician. There are myths here in the U.S., like Area 51. People think [the government is hiding] aliens in there and people are trying to break in.
So it’s about things that maybe are true. Is this a myth? Is this an interpretation of things that are being hidden from us? I once heard someone say that myths are even more real than history because they have the opportunity to repeat themselves over time. I don’t know if that’s true, but it got my attention. When I exhibit the Mythstories people come to me and ask, have you heard about this myth? Someone was telling me the other day about Heaven’s Gate [a UFO cult whose members died by mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe in 1997]. This person told me that there are still people practicing this religion, and the myth is that after members killed themselves, they are communicating with God. They still have their website, they still have followers, so for them they did the right thing. The myth is that they are in heaven now. I am interested in this thing between history, myth, and rumor.
Walk on El Voto Nacional Neighborhood, 2018-19, tapestry, 4 x 6 ft.
Castro: The El Voto Nacional neighborhood in Bogota was one of the main places for drug use and distribution in Bogota. There are many myths about this terrifying place; one of them is that drug dealers used to have a crocodile hidden in a basement that was fed with people who had debts or were accused of betrayal.
[Image description: A multicolored tapestry. People in medieval dress populate a town square, with a red and white floral pattern in place of the sky. In the center of the image, a person walks with a crocodile on a leash. Around them, demons and animals interact with people, while three angels float in the sky. A plume of white smoke rises from a building on the left side of the image.]
HereIn: Walk us through the process of making these works.
Castro: They’re fun to make. First, I have the idea of the myth. I actually have a person in Colombia, he’s a historian, so he finds myths for me and then he gives me these ideas. I start finding images. I browse through art and history books, I also go to libraries and research on archives and documents to get the right reference; I see weird things like a medieval alien and then I connect it with myths about aliens. It’s finding images and connecting the dots. I create everything digitally and then I have it woven.
HereIn: That process is fascinating to me because in your work you’re thinking about myth and how it has to do with constructing different ideas of the truth. That feels incredibly relevant right at this moment. In the United States— politically and culturally— in the last couple of years the public conversation around truth, what truth is, and how “truth” is deployed has become urgent. So much of that happens digitally. Digital media is a medium for constructing myths, and can also serve as a shroud for those who’ve constructed these different myths to hide behind. So there’s a kind of parallel between your process and how some of these myths are created in our day.
Castro: That’s related to a lecture by the Stanford professor Sam Wineburg I went to a couple of years ago called “Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone).” So why study history when you can just go to your cell phone and find whatever? Wineburg’s thesis was very interesting because he was saying that there are people choosing what they want to be remembered. For example, a corporation puts posts up online and they can hide real stories if they want to. They can hide anything, depending on the interest of the company. They can erase archives or they can direct information to the top of the search results.
It also makes me think about the pandemic. I had never heard about a pandemic in the early twentieth century that killed more people than the First World War! But now, because we are suffering a coronavirus pandemic, we are remembering. What is chosen to be remembered?
The Death of El Comandante, 2018-19, tapestry, 4 x 6 ft.
Castro: This tapestry features an image of the former president of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chavez, in his dying bed. People in Venezuela say that Chavez practiced sorcery and that he was always accompanied by witches that advised him in all his decisions. The myth about the death of Chavez says that he was killed by a magic spell cast by a Cuban witch.
[Image description: A multicolored tapestry. An interior scene is centered around a man recognizable as Hugo Chavez, who lies on a bed in the middle of the image. Four people in medieval dress surround him, making gestures of grief. Demons move toward Chavez, while an angel turns away from him, toward the upper right corner of the image. On the right side of the bed, an old woman in an orange cloak holds two fingers up toward Chavez. A skeleton figure holds a spear and an hourglass. Smoke billows from the image’s outer edges.]