It is a performance about the visceral and spatial separation of my grandmother and her identical twin. Because of the dictatorship in Chile, in 1976, my grandma’s sister and her family were exiled to Canada, creating a duality in my family that is not only geographical, between south and north America, but also political, treated with deep care and understanding from both sides. My grandma, who stayed in Chile, had and has been married to my grandpa that was from the opposite party.

The work consists in wrapping myself in 47 layers of fabric and unwrapping my body as I divide this fabric in two. The division of the fabric will be made by hand, ripping it, through the whole duration of the piece that is approximate of 15 minutes. The sounds will be intensified with body microphones, and the first and last cut to the fabric will be done with an umbilical cord scissor.

PROCESS

When I started the residency at BAS, I had just been invited to participate in the South American Performance Art cycle in New York, and the only prompt was that the performances should portray politics in our lives, whatever the shape they take or had taken. Thinking about it I went back to what was my first conception of politics, and it took me to my grandma and her sister. I started by interviewing my grandma without knowing yet what I was going to do for the show, and after telling the story a couple of times, re listening to the recording, I was able to come up with the idea. A ripping of the womb, a separation that has been perpetuated through the years, and that even though they can meet again, and talk every day on the phone–which they do–it left one part of the family in the south, and other in the north of a continent.

carolina muñoz awad is a multidisciplinary artist, based in Santiago, Chile. She recently completed a MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design in 2022 in New York. Born in Santiago, she graduated from a bachelor and master’s in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in 2018. After architecture school, carolina worked in a couple of architecture studios, and then as a researcher for her former university and The National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development of Chile. In 2019, she started experimenting with materials and performance, trying to respond to personal questions that architecture could not resolve for her: How do we use our body in space? What does it mean to use space? And how do we perceive human presence? Muñoz has exhibited her work in Santiago, Albany and New York City. She has attended the Arts Letters & Numbers Residency in upstate, NY, and Belgrade Art Studio, online. monas cigotas (2023), her most recent work, was included in South-American Performance Art cycle in New York, at Grace Exhibition Space.