Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa
SELECTED REVIEWS AND CRITICAL TEXTS
Sonnenborn, Katie. AA Bronson’s School for Young Shamans. London, UK; Frieze Magazine, Issue 116, June-August 2008.
Curator Bill Arnheim describes Bronson’s practice as the ‘interweaving of tantalizing pleasures and profound trauma’, themes that resonate throughout the younger men’s work. Particularly impressive was Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa’s Masturbating in the Fatherland (2007), a provocative film in which scenes of the artist masturbating with a carrot are intercut with footage of his musician father singing a Guatemalan folk-song. Pride and enjoyment are evident in both scenarios, colliding brilliantly.
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Bronson, AA. Artists's Favourites. Vienna, Austria; Spike Art Quarterly, Summer 2008.
A friend who knows these things said: »oh, when I walked into that back space, I could feel it, someone had been at work there.« Naufus’ sculptural intervention into the collective environment took the form of a ring of tree branches on the floor, encircling the room, each covered in brightly colored gum balls. On the wall: a video, Masturbating in the Fatherland, in which the artist’s father, iconicly Guatemalan, plays guitar and sings a love song, interspersed with scenes of Naufus fondling carrots, and inserting them into his rectum. Performance Art, of a sort, in two modalities: the relic, and the documentation.
*1978 in Guatemala City. Lives in Guatemala City.
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Warren, Arcan, Tears Melt Like Water: Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa’s Installation. Vancouver, Canada; brunt magazine, Fall 2008.
Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa's installation is made up of three things: paper, salt and poetry. The artist adds to this a statement, stuck on the gallery wall: "In Children's Tears Laid Out To Dry, I explore emotional and public responses to the loss of children, and specifically to recent kidnappings and trafficking of children in Guatemala." His artist statement would call up the pathos of the oppressed and a specific Central American villainy and so one would know what to expect from the installation: the artist will rely on the audience's desire to create solidarity with the represented sufferers; they will want to build bridges of empathy between these distant children thereby guaranteeing the North's foregone conclusions regarding the war-torn and strife-worn Other America. But there may be something else at work in this installation. It seems to be found in how the elements refer to their methods of construction.
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Warren Arcan, Observable Bodies: Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa's My Navel, My Great-Grandfather. Toronto, Canada; FUSE Magazine vol 30, no 3: 38-3, 2007.
November in Saskatoon, in -26° weather, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa presented his performance “Nu Muxux, Nu Nim Man/My Navel, My Great-Grandfather” in Lori Blondeau’s backyard; she’s the director of Tribe Inc., an Aboriginal arts collective that develops independent spaces for the presentation of new Aboriginal art works.
Ramirez-Figueroa’s stated intent with this piece was to embody the range of forces at work in his life: he’s a Guatemalan exile living in Canada; he’s Mayan and Spanish; he’s a postcolonial subject and a queer subject; a contemporary artist researching his family and his folkloric culture; he’s a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For “Muxux/Navel” he returned to Guatemala and did extensive research into Mayan-Quiché dance-drama and into his Great-Grandfather’s role as a dancer and, later, as the dance sponsor.
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Irene Loughlin (In conversation with Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa), Life In His Mouth, Death Cradles Her Arm, Vancouver, Canada; SLITS Catalogue, Western Front, 2006.
In the performance Life in his Mouth, Death Cradles her Arm, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa motionlessly supported a bundle of ice wrapped in a blanket that represented a child. The ice slowly melted through contact with the heat of his body. Water seeped into his overcoat during the melting process, and eventually dripped onto the plastic floor. The work contained an operatic quality, in that Ramirez-Figueroa stood as a solitary, central figure within the performance space, his body illuminated by a single light bulb. He gazed down at the bundle in his arms for the duration of the performance. The work explored the concept of pain, and in particular, the emotional consequences of loss.
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Loughlin, Irene, The Sun is Crooked in the Sky, My Father is Thrown over my Shoulders. FADO Centre for Performance Art. www.performanceart.ca /idea/figueroa/essay.html (posted 2006, and accessed July 31, 2007)
Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa's performance The Sun is Crooked in the Sky; My Father is Thrown Over My Shoulders, is an intimate investigation of the process of duration in the creation of performative acts. Over one hundred sleepless hours, Ramirez-Figueroa worked through actions, quiet contemplation, and active interpersonal dialogues while engaging a fluid gathering of viewers. Within the work, Ramirez-Figueroa meditated upon "a genealogy of absent white fathers", and the socio-political condition of "whitening" inherited from the colonial process in Guatemala. The performance was an attempt at developing a visual language for and of the self, as a means of arriving at a particularity of meaning found in the body. By attaining a definition of the self through the language of performance art, the power inferences of the "super ordinate culture" are challenged.
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Gandhi, Unnati, Performance Art: 100 Hours with Naufus. Toronto, Canada; Globe & Mail, 2005
Ramirez-Figueroa is on a mission to explore his personal history: A genealogy of absent white and "whiter" fathers, the Guatemalan war he was born into, the abandoned children he was surrounded by, racial discrimination, transformation. And he has dozens of metres of muslin, a bag full of milk powder, a dead tree, some water and a whole lot of time to do it.
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Gledhill, Randy. The New Exhibitionists: Performance Art in the 21st Century. Canadian Art, 2005
Another evening at Gallery Gachet, plastic doll parts and pig fat are rendered on a portable hot plate, then mashed with lipstick into a pigmented creme. Toxic smoke and putrid fumes pollute the air. The rising Vancouver star Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa self-consciously strips naked to strategically smear the red gunk onto the rotund flesh of his inner thighs, armpits and stomach, behind his knees and onto the inside of his elbows. After squeezing himself into a new suit of white long underwear, he proceeds to force the pigment through the material by writhing, rolling, rubbing and dragging himself across the floor. After great physical effort, the pristine white cloth becomes stained bright red in all the right places and the artist transforms himself into a comically frightening grotesque. For a finale, he unbuttons the suit's back flap and inserts a long plastic tube to blow cigar smoke up his ass. While he doesn't succeed in farting smoke rings, he does become quite dizzy in the process and falls down exhausted. Figueroa merges humiliation and provocation into a stark spectacle that provokes uncomfortable questions of sexuality and identity.
Or has he also wrapped a narrative about Vancouver's infamous serial murders in his bizarre persona? When the artist smears the red paste over his body, is he stigmatizing the victims? Himself? And what about the alleged cover-up of shocking police ineptitude? Is everyone really just blowing smoke up their asses? Bravo to a brash new artist for a brave new work.
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Calvo, Ernesto, Video Art in Central America: Precarious Archeology of a Short and Personal History. Amsterdam, The Netherlands; ISEA-WEB, 2005
Another recurrent theme in some of Central American video art is that of migration. (...) Artists, like (...) Naufus Ramirez residing in Canada, presents playful and at the same time ludicrous performances related to migration (Skin Changer, 2002; Original Banana Republic, 2002; Doing Other People's Cleaning, 2003); and the Panamanian (...) Humberto Velez (El Guachiman, 2001), who has also referred to the traumas and stangeness of the migrant's experience.
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Calvo, Ernesto, Algo Sobre El Contexto Audiovisual Centroamericano. Havana, Cuba; Memoria Boletin, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, 2004
(...El) ámbito de la memoria, que traspasa lo corporal, lo político y lo cultural, está inscripto también de diversas maneras en obras como Doing other people’s cleaning, de Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, El guacimán, de Humberto Veléz y Ultimo round de Viernes, de Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso, en las cuales las escisiones de la memoria, lo migratorio o lo nostálgico, se rehacen en un flujo de imágenes y elipsis metafóricas. Así, cuestionando, visibilizando y/o problematizando todos esos dilemas.
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