Spectres Chismosos
2024
As I begin to unravel my own collection of fabrics, a gathering place emerges. Fibrous motifs start to situate themselves, as wall, as floor, as comfort, as sightline. Finding familiar faces in familiar forms they fold into each other creating a continuous line linking repetition with repetitions with craft with craft. Seven spectres assemble themselves, precarious in their materiality and willing to disappear at a moments notice.
"A tidal wave of vivid textiles has washed up onto the concrete floor of the gallery space. Shrouded spectres rise to greet us and related remnants are summoned to the scene. Folded squares of cotton levitate in the air. Swathes of textured colours interspersed with kitschy printed compositions of lurid cartoon cowboys. Their comforting creases have been draped above us on clothing lines and loom over our every move. Stacks of breeze blocks and cement coated connective tissue remind us to avoid drowning in the deluge of fabrics. At this very moment, Francisco Berlanga is hosting a social gathering that we haven’t officially been invited to, but must remember to attend. The" - Maya Rodrigo-Abdi
Buscando Domingo
2023
As familiar forms begin to materialise and tether Francisco Berlanga to his identity, repetitions of handcrafts, translations, and textiles become spectres of representation in Buscando Domingo. The Gallery becomes a structure to absorb these representations, allowing them to accumulate and multiply. As they gather, their patterns begin to morph, embroidery becomes print, stitch becomes suggestion, thread becomes threshold, and weaving becomes wall. Boundaries begin to form, containing and partially concealing space. Haunting requires a place, and perhaps this structure might offer belonging to ghosts so they might isolate and identify new cultural aesthetics.
Speculative Creachers
2022
a series of hauntings enacted by Francisco Berlanga and Natalie Chan that confront myths of Canadiana as entities intervening with the landscape. We take on ghostly personas as a way of exploring how cultural identities can become unsettled. The ghosts came about as an expression of how colonial structures can often place immigrant identities into a state of limbo. Growing up as second generation immigrants –from Mexico and Hong Kong respectively– we were often seen as not “from here” despite being born here, attributed to a culture that often felt distant. This lent itself to an uneasiness and constant need to justify ourselves by proving our “Canadianess”. However, as we learned about the histories of the land and our settler role within them, our identities became even more unsettled, becoming spectres that use “Canada” as a site for speculating distance between a perceived “home” and a concept of foreignness
We haunt this realm by: climbing mountains to spot a potential horizon of Mexico, entering the sea to embody passage from here to Hong Kong, braiding grass into handles and pulling north on the continent to bring Mexico closer, reassembling found fragments left by Chinese workers on Canadian beaches into new vessels. Our actions are small gestures towards immeasurable tasks, they attempt to cross immense distances as an offering in exchange for understanding. We are uneasy silhouettes perched on the vanishing point waiting for a knowledge that may never give us peace.
