An Interview With Rachelle Mozman Solano
It’s impossible to separate the history of Latin America from that of the United States. “Latin American history is American history because of U.S. policy and because of interventions,” artist Rachelle Mozman Solano says.
Her work, such as the Venas Abiertas series, is an exploration of these overlapping histories, but also of her own family’s account in Central America and the United States.
Recently, I spoke to Mozman Solano to learn more about her practice.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for concision and clarity.
California marks the limit of geographical progress of civilization, 27x32 inches, pigment print, 2021. Photo courtesy of Rachelle Mozman Solano.
How did Venas Abiertas come to exist?
My series Venas Abiertas is very much influenced by thinking about Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America book on U.S. Policy and history with Central America at the border. It really grew out of my interests and obsession with politics and also the experience of Central Americans and Latinos in the U.S.
A lot of my work begins by doing a lot of reading and collecting texts that stand out to me, that I felt that I could then describe through images. Each picture really begins with text and then drawings. And then I make what really are performances for the camera on sets that I create. There's a lot of collage happening on the set, and then there's collage happening after I've made the photograph. So a picture like California Marks the Limit of Western Civilization is a cutout of a redwood tree.
I feel like this series, more than others, is also an attempt to give a history lesson to a U.S. audience. And right now, I'm working on a book of this work in which the titles will be then sort of displayed under the pictures when you lift them up. It's really about a history that is present but not seen, not visible, and I’m trying to make it visible.
Panama, where your family is from, is at the core of your work, so naturally, you have found a way to collaborate with your family in your work. Can you talk about your working relationship with your mother?
My mother is a very consistent collaborator. My book Colonial Echo combines two works—Casa de Mujeres and La Negra—which is based on my grandmother. It combines the photographs that I made with my mother, plus an interview with my mother and her mother.
It really focuses on the familial and also the cultural obsession around physiognomy—specifically around the inheritance of physiognomy and race and how this sort of colorism creates a societal hierarchy and also a rejection of our Afro-Caribbean roots, which is so Panamanian. I created a narrative of two twin sisters—one lighter and the other a domestic worker––and they're all inhabiting the same home, but the women are all played by my mother. To make them, we traveled a lot to Panama and a couple of other countries in Central America, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
The interview kind of spoke to that. Some parts focused on how I felt my grandmother would respond to my mother's questions. You know, “What about this aunt?” And it would always start with, “Oh, this aunt had hair that looked like it was Indian,” so it was always sort of in the front of her mind—the question around race and how a person would be perceived.
The second chapter is really about my mother and grandmother’s immigration experience. They first moved to the small town of Woodstock, Virginia. It is a very small rural town.
“All you have to do is read one page of any book about the history to just feel incredibly devastated by, you know, wiping out whole populations, extracting all the resources, deforestation. ”
What was that like?
It was scary for me at that time. I mean, it was the ‘70s, but now we're sort of back in the same thing. I knew it was very KKK. It was very well known because my cousin was growing up with my grandmother and his friend's father was in it, so that was always kind of there.
I'm thinking about this because of Trump’s recent declaration to “retake” the canal. Did you see his speech about this?
I heard excerpts the next day and a lot of analysis because I couldn't watch the whole thing.
I thought he had dropped it after they got some concessions from President Mulino, but Trump has reiterated his intention to retake the canal.
I think this is about what they were being charged for having ships cross the canal. I've been paying attention to Panamanian news, too. There's a lot of great reporting of independent people, strangely on Instagram. Because the journalism there isn't so great, as you might know. But there's some really great people who have been doing a lot of reporting, and I think it's really about forcing the Panamanians to lower the cost of ships. And also, have you seen the immigrants that they are sending to the hotels?
It seems like a negotiation strategy for various things, like having the privilege to go through, for reducing fees, and for outsourcing detention camps. And they're getting all of that. But that's why I was surprised that Trump reiterated the claim. I don't know if it's just for ideological purposes here, but he wants more. Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, is so ridiculous. He's giving in to everything as Trump demands more and more.
That's not surprising that he just wants more and more. It's a continuity of the extraction and the strong arming of the region.
Many of your images convey an effect of sadness to me, a sadness in relation to our colonial history perhaps?
Oh, really? I've never had someone say that. So I'm gonna think about it. I guess the work has a foundation that is political. The work is also equally about family ties, family relationships, and love. So there might be a lot of real feeling in the work. It's really not trying to shy away from feeling. I don't know that I see it as sad, though. But I completely hear what you're saying, and I'm gonna think about it.
I think that especially for the Venas Abiertas photographs, they are really interested in the body and thinking about how our history continues through the body and through gesture. They’re talking to many paintings that are very much about gestures in the body and stances that are supposed to reflect and project power or important moments in history, but it's a European one. And these are really thinking about using the body in a way that's almost similar to Manet's working with the body. I’m thinking about gesture but critiquing a history that is really a hidden history––hidden from our U.S. view and education.
So few people know how interconnected we are, particularly with Central America. It was known as Middle America for most of the last century. And there is tremendous sadness in that history. All you have to do is read one page of any book about the history to just feel incredibly devastated by, you know, wiping out whole populations, extracting all the resources, deforestation. That image, in particular, is about the redwoods. But I was really fascinated in learning that the same redwood conservationists like Stanford and all these people we know about through their institutions were the biggest eugenicists. They saw the redwoods as grand and connected to God. But they were also really interested in making women of color infertile and were actively doing that.
Popular images portrayed populations either as undisciplined savages to U.S. interests and hegemony or as children who needed guidance, 23.5 x30 inches, pigment print, 2024. Photo courtesy of Rachell Mozman Solano.
Your models wear long dresses that seem to signify a time in the past, and thus a history.
I also used to sew a lot. I still do. I'm really interested in how clothing is such a signifier. It just represents and points to a period. So all you have to do is put on a long skirt and then you're suddenly in another era. And then you can then talk to the significance of that. In one, my mother was really funny because she was like, “You're making me into a colonizer.” And I started laughing because I thought it was so funny. She had never said that to me before. In my mind, it was how the French, when in Panama, thought that by putting water around the plants, they would avoid malaria, like the mosquitoes. But it was just breeding them more and more.
I know there are many different elements in your work, but it does seem oriented by history, by a historical consciousness. And one of the things you said is you had been reading some histories, some Galeano.
I've been reading Emperors in the Jungle. That book is so crazy. I had no idea. I'm also reading this newish book about the marooned enslaved people that were hiding in the forest and mixing with the tribes in Panama. It's called African Maroons in Sixteenth Century Panama. It's fascinating. That's the book I'm using to base the work that I'm making now in Panama. That book is blowing my mind because it’s transcriptions from Spanish historical texts in Seville. So you're reading how the courts were treating these people, and it's crazy. Basically, these marooned populations, like King Bayano, they forced the Spanish to give them their liberation.
I'm making this book as I shared with you, and I might put a bibliography in it because it's helpful for people. It's an artist book. It's a very limited edition, just 100. We're going to sort of partly hand-make them. We're gonna glue in the photographs. It's gonna be beautiful.
Do you think about your audiences when your work is going to be in the National Portrait Gallery in the U.S. or even MAC Panama? I find it very difficult to consider addressing specific audiences, because they will have so many diverse starting points and background knowledges. It feels as if a consideration of the audience will compromise the work, and diminish your ability to function. You might become consumed by worry that the audience will come to certain conclusions, or they're going to read it the wrong way, or they're not going to understand.
Do I think about my audience when I'm making work? That's really hard. If I did that, I don't think I could. For example, how the Panamanian audience reacted to Casa de Mujeres, the work with my mother, that work never would have gone anywhere there. No one bought it. Maybe it went to one show somewhere. I can't remember. There are so many different art world audiences. In Panama, the work wouldn't have gone anywhere. But here in the U.S., people responded in a way that was surprising. I had a woman come up to me and tell me that I had no idea what I had made, that it was just so profound for her. And that was incredible because it meant something to her that is outside of the artist's control. I think about that a lot because sometimes I'll make work people don't respond to or I can't get it shown. I do think that art is not always for now. Art sometimes is for the future.
Maybe she saw her subjectivity.
Exactly. And I think that this book took a while for people to understand. It came out at the onset of COVID, but people weren't understanding it. It was also the end of Trump's first presidency, in 2020. It was a couple of years later that people started to really understand it. To quote my publisher, he was like, “People get it now, somehow. I don't know what happened.” And he also said, “You're always three years ahead.” Which is very funny, but I don't know what that means.
“All the work that I make has formal consideration, but it’s not what motivates the work. ”
Well, it sounds like you cannot ignore the audience entirely, because it affects where you're shown and how you're shown. But do you think about the audience when you're in the process?
I think some people work really differently and aren't making work that's political at all. But my work does have a political core, and I think it's a lot easier when you're not making work like that to get it shown in certain kinds of spaces.
This is one of the arguments Arlene Dávila makes in her book about Latinx art: that Latinx art, especially Chicano art, is seen as political at its core, and therefore, lesser aesthetically.
There's also the whole phenomenon of Latin American artists and their educational training as artists tends to be very formal. And some of that is the influence of Indigenous art. And some of it is just that they're thinking about selling because of the needs of the market. You could say it's that they don't have the luxury of having an academic job that supports a career that gives them freedom. I have an academic job, so I don't have to live off of sales of my artwork. Some of my friends in Panama, one or two of them, are lucky enough to live off of sales, but they can't make work that's overly political. They have to hide it in form because they wouldn't sell otherwise.
All the work that I make has formal consideration, but it's not what motivates the work.
