If These Chairs Could Speak

The 3,000-year-old tradition of celebrating the dead begins on Saturday.

Got any plans?

November 1st is Día de los Inocentes and dedicated to deceased children and adolescents. November 2nd is Día de los Muertos which honors deceased adults.

Ehh? We’re celebrating death?

Yep. But first..

I talk and think about the state of my inner world a lot. I talk and think about the state of the outer world a lot.

It’s one reason this newsletter exists.

Creators reflect society, possibly to give meaning, and certainly to bring awareness about humanity’s state of affairs.

We also crystalize ideas in physical form. We predict and we affirm what we aspire to be for ourselves and the world. We tell the tales of the moment too.

We ask the viewer to get hyper present. To loosen their grasp of their rigid thoughts and ideas.

We ask them to transform parts of their soul.

Even when our work doesn’t resonate with them, they anchor to a thread of a possible existence that can be followed later, when their consciousness is ready.

Creators ask hard questions. We don’t always live lightly.

This issue looks at three creators who ask you to level up, in different ways.

Doris Salcedo, Terra Goolsby and Rachel Horn are creators who request your full presence and a respect for life (and a well lived life).

Gmail shortens emails in awkward places. Read online It’s better.

Let's tackle the most weighty subject first, the role of horror in art.

It's 1998. You're in SoHo. Sun's out, it's a bright chilly day. The champagne buzz from your extended brunch at the new brasserie, Balthazar, lubricates your stroll to the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

All is light and hopeful.

Once there you find yourself in front of a wooden wardrobe filled with concrete and things that look an awfully lot like clothes.

Doris Salcedo turned a piece of furniture into a tombstone, and you're the unwitting mourner.

That's how it happens, gravity descends and time collapses and you're pulled into the war-zone of Colombia, while standing in Soho.

The wardrobe is sealed with concrete to memorialize the concrete used to fill mass graves in Colombia. Those are clothes! Clothes that will never be worn again and belongings that will never be claimed.

Born in Bogotá in 1958, Doris Salcedo grew up watching her country tear itself apart- guerrilla groups, military forces, drug cartels, and paramilitaries turning everyday life into terror. Furniture becomes evidence and homes become crime scenes.

"My work is based on experiences I lack," Salcedo says, which sounds like artistic humility until you realize she believes in her radical creative responsibility to tell the tales of the darker side of humanity.

Salcedo spent years collecting witness statements from victims of Colombia's ongoing conflict. She sits with mothers whose children disappeared, with families whose homes were destroyed.

She transforms their testimonies into objects that hold the weight of their loss.

Her work becomes a vessel for grief.

In 2007, Salcedo did something that made the entire art world reconsider what political art could be.

At London's Tate Modern, she carved a 548-foot crack directly into the museum floor, an actual fissure that visitors had to navigate over.

"Shibboleth" forced every person to walk the divide between Global North and South, to feel the instability under their feet that millions live with daily.

Museum-goers complained about tripping, about the discomfort it caused, which was exactly the point.

In 2003 in Istanbul, she stacked 1,550 wooden chairs between two buildings to commemorate lives lost in political violence.

This precarious tower created a bridge between structures, each chair representing someone who would never sit down to dinner again.

The installation lasted a few hours before being dismantled.

Brevity, loss, tragedy were immortalized only by telling the tale over and over.

"The important task for an artist here is to try to give society tools of mourning," Salcedo explains.

Her work makes grief tangible.

Salcedo allows us to grieve, whereas ancient Mesoamerican cultures would have found this approach puzzling. Mourning and honoring may not be the same thing at all.

Reaching back to the Aztecs, Toltec, and Nahua people, mourning the dead was considered disrespectful.

These civilizations believed that death isn't an ending but a transformation.

The departed don't disappear, rather, death is a continuum. The dead were still members of the community and kept alive in memory and spirit.

During Día de los Muertos, they temporarily return to Earth.

Along came the Spanish in the 16th century, who overlayed their religious observance, Allhallowtide, (a time to remember the dead, including martyrs, saints and all faithful departed Catholics) onto indigenous death rituals.

Today’s Día de los Muertos is a hybrid that honors ancient wisdom and its’ colonial counterpart.

The result is a holiday that treats death like a family reunion rather than the eternal question.

Families build elaborate ofrendas, altars loaded with marigolds, sugar skulls, the favorite foods and drinks of the dead, and personal mementos that bridge the world of the living and the departed.

That brings us to Terra Goolsby, an Austin multimedia artist.

What happens when your ancestral inheritance is complicated?

What if what you receive isn't always what you want - when trauma arrives alongside gifts and that trauma needs healing? How do you create art that holds both the beautiful and the broken?

Terra asked the same question when a family member's genetic diagnosis sent her spiraling into conversations about what gets passed down through generations, the beautiful and the broken alike.

“I began to think about legacy and what we as families, groups, communities, and society need to purify and heal versus what we need to protect and preserve.”

Terra’s Totems exhibition at Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum was born from these questions.

She combined multiple cultural traditions, mythology and symbolism and translated those through the material and allowed those to speak.

“I chose to use the totem as a form because totems ask us for connection and community. Just as a fetish object asks to be held or attached to the body and idols ask for a sacrifice, totems ask for companionship. This is why they symbolize a family, tribe or group.”

She chose Mictecacihuatl, aka “Lady Micte”, the Mesoamerican goddess who presides over death and uses the bones of the departed to create the next generation, transforming endings into beginnings through fierce maternal alchemy. Lady Micte parties like the best of them at Día de los Muertos celebrations.

Terra uses clay as the material because it’s “of the earth” and is laden with memory. Trauma, hope, fear, humanity’s meaning is imbued in clay at an atomic level. “Even the plates we eat from, the soil that grows our food, the ground that receives our bodies, hold meaning.”

Exactly like the clay vessels that hold offerings on the altars of Día de los Muertos.

And to arrive full circle, Terra is the name for Earth in Latin.

Predestined? Maybe so.

She wove in fabric from her mother's clothing, got her kids involved in the fabrication, and discovered that totems demand community the same way ofrendas require the whole family to show up.

While Doris' work holds trauma and Terra's totems process legacy, our next Designer asks the question: How do you want to live right now, in this moment?

A Sunday surprise. I bounced around the city on Sunday with good friends, gazing at gorgeous houses on the AIA Austin tour.

First stop, I ran right into Rachel Horn, Designer, at Casa Colibri, a stunning residence that turns inward and provides contemplation while relishing nature.

Oh my.

Game on, Rachel.

She's an American designer raised in San Miguel Allende, Mexico, who brings the art of being 1,000% present to life through her interiors.

My eyeballs were gleeful, even grateful, with admiration of her work.

I wish I could have taken pictures for you. There are a few available from the AIA site but this house has presence beyond what a photograph can capture.

Rachel is a one-of-kind interior magician.

Her work has charisma and her art is the creation of soul in a space.

All the pieces are talking to each other. And talking to you.

"Sit down here, lovely. Let me hold you."

"Tell me about your day, friend."

Her work invites you to surround yourself with meaningful stuff (that does not mean it has to be expensive).

Choose with intention and choose things that speak to you.

Her message is the opposite of Doris' sealed wardrobes and topsy turvy chairs.

It’s "Sit down, and we'll have dinner together, here, now. Be fully supported in this moment."

Live an intentional life in every way.

Ravel Architecture set the stage and are damn fine architects too.

There are contradictions in this issue and no tidy resolutions.

Doris shows us that some wounds must stay open until justice arrives. Terra teaches us to transform what we inherit while honoring what we preserve. Rachel demonstrates the art of choosing life fully, right here, right now.

And Día de los Muertos reminds us that death and life aren't opposites; they're dance partners.

As creators, we're asked to hold all of this at once: the grief and the celebration, the trauma and the healing, the weight of history and the lightness of presence.

We don't always get to choose easy subjects or comfortable truths.

We show up, we make the work, we ask the hard questions, and we trust that somewhere in the contradiction, evolution happens.

The ancestors are watching. Make it count.

While catching up with Terra, I wanted to know if she encountered stumbling block or moments when she doubted her vision? And if so, how’d she convince herself to keep going?

Here is some of her advice to all creators.

1. When You Have to Say Yes Before You Know How

Trust that you'll figure it out as you go.

When you get an opportunity which may stretch beyond your current technical knowledge, say YES first, then build the bridge while you're walking on it.

The key is distinguishing between "I don't know how yet" (solvable) and "this goes against my creative vision" (not worth the compromise).

(Note that Terra initiated a proposal to Umlauf. She went to them. That’s inspired action)

2. Reverse Engineer To Meet Your Deadlines

Four months for a complex ceramic installation sounds overwhelming until you break it down.

Start with your deadline and work backwards: installation day, transport day, final firing, construction phase, design phase, material sourcing.

Build in buffer time for the unknown unknowns - ceramic shrinkage, hardware delays, and your learning curve.

2. Build Your Advisory Board Before You Need It

Don't wait until you're drowning to identify your lifelines.

Have your list of people and resources ready to go whose expertise complements yours - installation specialists, fabricators, other artists who've solved similar problems.

Nurture these relationships when you're NOT in crisis mode.

5. Reframe Anxiety as Fuel:

Channel your anxiety (instead of trying to eliminate it).

Anxiety means you care deeply about the outcome. Use that energy to drive research, preparation, and problem.

Create an emergency kit with your personalized protocols.

What music gets your blood moving? What breathing technique works for you? What physical movement breaks you out of mental paralysis?

4. The Expert Integration Strategy:

Terra didn't try to become an installation specialist overnight- she found Daniel Bough, who "green lit" her decisions and made installation "exceedingly smooth."

Know when to stay in your lane and when to bring in the cavalry.

Your job is to maintain creative vision while delegating technical execution to people who live and breathe that stuff.

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You can also email me here [email protected].

Déborah Holtz: Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Death and Life, A tribute to Mexico's most important holiday, this extraordinary and definitive volume documents the immense creativity displayed by this popular annual celebration.

Doris Salcedo, Fiona Hesse, Sam Keller : Doris Salcedo Salcedo's precise, economical installations suffuse domestic materials with layers of political meaning. Although her sculptures and installations have been inspired by her own biography (members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in Colombia), Salcedo's art appeals to universal feelings of grief, trauma, alienation and uprooting.

Barbara E. Mundy: The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association, 2016, The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Until….

Aleph Molinari & Anfisa Vrubel: Mexico City (publisher Assouline) With a history dating back to the fourteenth century, Mexico City blends indigenous pre-Hispanic roots with colonial architecture and Spanish-baroque influences. Iconic structures like Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum and Juan O'Gorman's Cave House proudly embody the city's rich history. Today, Mexico City serves as a vibrant backdrop for renowned filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Michel Franco. Discover a city of wonders, where history and creativity come to life.

Thibaut Mommalier, Franck Juery: Mexico City: The Extraordinary Guide, Explore the authentic side of Mexico City, with a richly photographed, intoxicating mix of history and the cosmopolitan present day. Perfect for an adventurous traveler—where The Rough Guide crowd meets the Wallpaper audience—this book is for anyone yearning to be inspired and excited by travel, and to find the less obvious.

I’ve put together a list that you’ll love of creators, artists, writers, technique, mindset, travel...dive in!

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