Tania Candiani

In an iteration of the exhibition, Sangre de Nopal, shown earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (MCASB), three artists of Mexican heritage explore the inextricable relationships between land, labour and body woven together over the centuries in textile production and exploited by colonial powers, in this case by the Spanish conquest of Mexico, illustrated in the story of cochineal.

Based in Mexico City and rooted in specific geographies and territorial histories, Tania Candiani’s works engage with the pigment’s pre-colonial origins and its transformation through colonial systems of extraction and trade. They reflect on cochineal as a living archive—one that stains the skin, permeates the fabric, and carries the resonance of historical and cultural memory. The pieces investigate the act of dyeing as both a physical and conceptual gesture, revealing the entanglements between body, land, labour and ancestral knowledge.

Part of Learning from the Land at The Whitaker.