Artist’s Statement
Temporary Spaces reflects on the monarch butterflies’migratory journey and how this process compares to historic migration of indigenous people of the Americas. The monarchs’ extensive journey spans three to four generations to complete their route from the northern United States and Canada south into Mexico. The first generation will spend time in Mexico, forging ancestral memories into their own cellular structures. The route is mapped within them and will guide the next generation home.
They migrate so they can save their species, and they travel in communities, building temporary spaces and moving along freely, just as the indigenous ancestors did before colonization. Their migratory journeys were inscribed within their own generational code, spanning continents and millennia. Later, when lines were drawn and national boundaries were imposed upon them in their own lands, those ancestors experienced a profound disruption very much like a genetic mutation: they no longer traveled freely to areas that sustained their existence. They were held by borders that were not their own making and experienced an unease at the most spiritual and cellular levels of their beings. So many indigenous people today carry that burden forward in their own lives.
This installation illustrates clusters of butterflies flying or resting. Each butterfly represents over two hundred thousand Zapotecs who continued the migratory journey and are now living and working in Southern California. Migration, mutation, adaptation, and transformation are always in constant play.
Artist Biography
Porfirio Gutiérrez is a Zapotec American textile artist based in Ventura, California. He uses traditional knowledge of dyes and materials and reinterprets Zapotec weaving language to create pieces that speak to his creative vision of the complexity of the Americas today. Gutiérrez’ expertise is based on a family legacy of weaving practices and ancestral knowledge of nature and seasonal cycles. Through his practice, he asks us to rethink narrow definitions of contemporary art and indigeneity. While in Zapotec there is no word for “artist” as an occupation, Gutiérrez is celebrated with this title for reinterpreting Indigenous textile techniques and motifs through the lens of artmaking today.
Learn more about Porfirio Gutiérrez’s work in this video