Interview: Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, the Quipucamayoc Artist

By Madeline Trice

Artist, architect, activist, archivist—Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, the Quipucamayoc artist, has a practice spanning over twenty years and thirty countries. Based in Brooklyn and Miami, this summer Meyer is participating in the AnkhLave Arts Alliance 2024 Garden Project Fellowship and you can find her work exhibited in the AnkhLave House on Governors Island in NY. Read more about the fellowship on AnkhLave’s website, or visit Coralina’s personal site to learn more about her work.

(Trice) You describe yourself, amongst other things, as a Quipucamayoc artist. What are the qualities that you think distinguish you as a Quipucamayoc, and what does the practice mean to you?

(Meyer) Quipucamayoc is a culture keeper. I was struggling to reconcile my work across architecture, art, activism, advocacy, education and archive research with the crushing demands of student debt and the pressure to code switch across professions in my 20s. When I turned 30 I did a research fellowship in Peru at various archives and museums including Museo Larco, Museo de Sitio Machu Picchu, and spent time with my madre's comadre in Aguas Calientes. I had seen the Quipus in European museums but it wasn't until I experienced them in their endemic habitat, with Quechua language being spoken, that I evolved a relationship to my own Andean culture that had survived colonization. I began to define my civic engagement not only based on community organizing, voting as a US American and our global imperial power, but as a perpetrator of my own people's demise. The assimilation resistance work centered my practice when I see myself in my ancestors. The Quipucamayoc role felt like a divine and bureaucratic calling that aligned with my previous work. Quipucamayoc keeps the culture by contando: accounting history, counting families of origin, planning a city and offering a tactile map to navigate our cultivate the landscape. So when I encountered a Quipu bridge in Valle Sagrada, it offered a functional metaphor for culture keeping across genders, generations and geographies.

(Trice) Given the mission set forth by Ankhlave, how do you feel your art works to catalyze discussions about diversity and inclusivity?

(Meyer) The Mother Mold monuments and Foliage Obscura retablo installations are a spatial embodiment of work that evolved from a Linea Negra documentary photo series I created in 2007 examining the inception of ranking systems in American mythology through the biological accumulation of melanin dividing the pregnant body into hemispheres after my infertility diagnosis. The Linea Negra is the first pieta or collaborative mark between mother and fetus is a rebirth of one's biography. How can we purge internalized stigmas while restoring dignity and divinity to our families, our cities and our habitat? 

The Mama Spa Botanica project where the works are created, is a full spectrum culture workshop offering collaborative rituals with climate, reproductive health advocates and our neighbors to transgress structural violence in American mythology. Created by, of and for the melanated, vulnerable communities that nurtured us, the multisensory craft traditions pass on millenary survival traditions such as mummification, equatorial carnival altars, critical resource maps, agency building reliquaries and other matriarchal, self care craft heirlooms as an extension of community care. The workshop began in photography in 2007 after my infertility diagnosis, then evolved when I became pregnant in 2018. Reflecting the neon traditions vibrating in our native narratives, the care workers I had been collaborating with in Miami such as native species urban farmers, botanicas, doulas, policy advocates, Santeros, Manbos, historians and archivists were organizing in radical ways I had witnessed growing up with my integrated creole, Ital and Latin American family. The powerful matriarchal infrastructure that raised me, was evolving generationally to preserve life in our homes and habitat, while now making impact at a policy level. So DEI is simply a mainstreaming of the work historically redlined communities have always done to resist and survive. Revisiting the neighborhoods I grew up in from the Evergladesswamp to the urban jungles in Miami, I wanted to integrate all my practices: architecture, archives, advocacy and community building to embody our collective labor. The climate and fertility justice leaders I was working with reminded me that our environmental cycles have always been umbilical. For thousands of years, the resilience work of reclaiming intimate, refuse and casting our mementos into our image, has offered refuge within the sanctuaries of the Andes to Africa. Beginning with the South American Chinchorro mummies 7000 bce to the Paracas and eventually the Egyptian mummies in 2600 bce, the evidence of our trans cultural preservation rituals long preceded colonization. The collaborative process to make the work honors those legacies, while illuminating the syncretic preservation systems persisting in spite of conflicting man made and climate crisis.

(Trice) As the child of an immigrant family born in the United States, and a person of mixed-race and indigenous heritage, it’s impressive how strong of a connection you’ve been able to make to your cultural background. What has that journey been like for you? What advice might you give to people in similar situations who feel disconnected or alienated from their culture?

​(Meyer) In the US, assimilation is the assassination of our kinships, while syncretism is a critical bond for biological and biographical families to coexist. The distance between destigmatizing our inherited oppression and overlapping our resources as an interdependent society is where the process begins. I was 5 years old when my mother joined the ancestors , so reconnecting to my tierra madre became increasingly difficult. I was raised mostly by my abuela in Miami and tias globally. Colombia was at war in the 80s and 90s, so I was able to visit my tia Margarita (my mother's comadre) in the Valle Sagrada Peru. My other aunt in Jamaica continued my mother's Ital practices, so although I was partially living in the US, I was fortunate to have tias, abuelas and neighbors nearby to develop a critical consciousness. Positioning my American passport and mobility as a privilege, was a highly evolved perspective my family nurtured. It helped me navigate the daily violence in our Homestead Everglades neighborhood which sometimes felt like a war zone during Reaganomics at the epicenter of overlapping crisis: hurricanes, human trafficking and economic instability. 

As a mixed race, immigrant tomboy during the brutal post reconstruction era South, I sought refuge within the safety of a culturally expansive extended family system. Although I was ashamed of our poverty, my father had grown up in the Bahamas, and continued instilling the Caribbean diasporic and Ital values my mother had begun to teach us when we lived in Jamaica parts of my early childhood. Structuring our life around living with family members in other countries helped me develop a critical perspective of US foreign policy, and the internalized stigmas it places on its own citizens in the form of assimilation. Developing my queer biographical family structure alongside my matriarchal biological family support system, strengthened my confidence back in the US. The cyclical traumas of poverty and climate pulses in South Florida nearly destroyed me, but I was able to cultivate an interior psychic landscape that would entertain me while I was cleaning houses with my abuela, doing landscaping with my dad or defending myself from beat downs at school. I understood the value of creating, rather than consuming media because we didn't have a TV. Now my daughter's screen time is structured to develop her own critical perspective of consumer media and simply be bored enough to begin solving her own problems. 

In the Mama Spa Botanica dignity training workshop we begin the Ethnic Ethics conversations by exploring family origin stories—even if the person has no biological family. By addressing the critical value of a participant’s support structure, their survival rituals and inherent knowledge systems, we can strengthen the vitality of and relationships to their neighbors, habitat and local resources. Transferring knowledge while sharing physical space is the most powerful form of resistance we can develop within our kinships.

(Trice) From skyscrapers to sculpture art, your portfolio spans some vastly different media and styles. Looking at some of the hotels and other buildings you’ve designed and at artworks of yours such as the “Mother Mold Monuments,” at a glance your architectural design and artistic practices seem so aesthetically divergent from one another. How does your approach to either differ and how are they the same to you? How do you think your art and architecture influence and inform one another? 

(Meyer) I build architecture to survive and make art to remember how. The practical skill benefits of being an architect, understanding scale, project management and the impact policy or urban design has on our daily lives is central to my evolution as an artist. Formally, the expanse between minimalist mausoleum skyscrapers and carnivalesque, botanica retablo installations is vast. The systemic, bureaucratic approach to building is in direct contrast to the tender touch of casting pregnant, vulnerable bodies in their most entropic, fertile state. They are both however, historic preservation processes. So as a Quipucamayoc, I'm mending the broken bonds between the built world and the spirit. The work I'm developing with AnkhLave on Governors Island is a reliquary of this expanse. 


(Trice) You use a lot of recycled and repurposed materials in your art. What’s your process for sourcing materials for these projects? Does the choice to use construction materials relate at all to your career in architecture?

(Meyer) Yes. If buildings are our geo-political and socio-economic tombstones, then reclaiming domestic construction materials and intimate or environmental waste, is a form of narrative nesting informed by our cultural history.

(Trice) Your profile on your website mentions that during your childhood you sailed to over 25 countries. What was this experience like? What prompted it? Do you think your relationship to the ocean influences your work?

(Meyer) On my dad's Caucasian side, I was fortunate to grow up with a diverse range of economic and political perspectives as a child: from sailing with my Marxist separatist uncle across the Atlantic and Pacific, to sailing with my social capitalist uncle in the Caribbean to meeting my conservative Republican family in New England. Sailing the swells of political tides by leaving the US regularly with my mixed race family offered an escape from the swollen belly of the beast in America emotionally, while it was practically a cost effective and safe way for our blended families to be unhoused. 

The realities of psychic survival at sea, pale in comparison to the social constraints inflicted upon the spirit on land. The dignity training I experienced by learning astral navigation is a vital compass for developing the intellectual framework for the workshops. The sea emerges formally in the works constantly as a site of ancestral apparition. My 2023 solo show at the Colonial FL Cultural Heritage Museum in Miami harnessed the potential of a 1000+ year old archive and its voyage across the Caribbean Sea. The sanctuary installation is an apparition of our enslaved, yet unvanquished loved ones returning to teach us how to float above the redlines and tidelines in Miami. The sea regularly appears in the work as a datum line, a navigational tool for public mourning. The reliquary I'm developing for the AnkhLave Garden Project draws from both the Caribbean diasporic community at sea and the Manhattan Harbor at Governors Island.

(Trice) Reading through the artist statements for your various works and looking at the many organizations through which you’ve engaged in direct action, it’s clear there is a strong sense of ideology and intention behind your work. How would you describe your mission as an artist and an activist, and how do those ideals carry over into your work as an architect?

(Meyer) Advocacy, policy making, protest is a resistance ritual, vital to our cultural survival. They say Chibcha, my mother's indigenous ancestral language is dead, but my daughter's name is Zaita. Her name is the ombligo del mundo, or beginning of time and the origin of the world in Chibcha. The inception of my work is first tactile, it smells, it elicits an immersive, healing sensation when you walk into the retablo sanctuary installation. 

The risks we take as advocates, activists as LGBTQIA+ and community organizers of color in Florida, dwarf the aesthetic “risks” the art world claims to talk in progressive elite institutions. The scale Avant Garde activists are up against is incongruous to the media depictions of our communities. 

To translate self care as an extension of community regard into practice, I'm translating urban design, policy scale tactics to the tactile workshops in order to reframe our inner dialog as a cutlass against climate and fertility crisis. By evolving institutional architecture to be a permeable form, the workshops build civic agency by reminding participants that we are constituents and owners of the public buildings that surveillance our neighborhoods. By translating architecture scale thinking to a collaborative setting with our embodied experience, I'm cultivating a moral obligation to our shared fertile habitat. 

The Mama Spa Botanica workshops engage policy makers, advocates, allies with the vibrant psychic interiors of our domestic survival routines, including the excluded LGBTQIA+ immigrant and melanated folks who have long developed matriarchal sovereignty in our families. The workshops often range in age from 7-75, across generations, gender, geography and status so it is imperative to continue passing endangered wisdom forward.

In my recent installations at Greenspace Miami 2022, and Artists Alliance Cuchifritos Gallery for the Immigrant Artist Biennial NYC, I created site specific interventions in commercial sidewalk storefronts. The Foliage Obscure retablo installations are apparitions of our matriarchal, intimate and domestic sovereignty. Greenspace Miami was across the street from Jimmy's Diner where major policy deals have historically destroyed our LGBTQIA+ melanated and immigrant mixed neighborhoods. US1 is Miami's Broadway, so the monumental scale pregnant belly of Ital Griot Doula Nicky Dawkins (my Mama Spa Botanica collaborator) portrayed in the rhthym of a Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror, responded to both the sidewalk passerby and the speedy stretch of cars between the adjacent pornographic billboards, storefronts, human trafficking motels and the politically violent Jimmy’s Diner history. 

"Double Consciousness Infinity Mirror" (Doula Nicky Dawkins) Security mirror, surveillance mirror, solar car tint, advertising photo vinyl, neon LED, PVC mirror, storefront window

​It was a disemboweling experience to fight to keep the work from being censored by the institution who was terrified of the liability. Thanks to curator Zee Lopez, who fought with me to get the work installed, we were able to make a critical urban intervention into an extremely conservative climate. One of the highlights of that architectural photographic installation process was when a white pregnant woman and her husband pulled up in a BMW after seeing the massive portraits and asked if the venue was a fertility clinic. Her question revealed one of the rare glimpses of vulnerability in the supremacist systems that mirror our cultural anxieties and the way they violently impact our flesh- beneath the color line. Disantis had created a reproductive health desert with the closing of North Shore medical and the impending bankruptcy/closure of 50+ hospitals and clinics in the region. The legislation to approve C sections outside the hospital setting was directly felt by not only the target melanated and low income community, but by white women as well. The wealthy white woman was likely pregnant and struggling to find reliable care in Miami, and saw an enormous series of pregnant photographs of a pregnant black woman on the facade of a building. Nicky's towering image was a mirage of what our cities would look and feel like if they were built in our image. With black women dying at 6-11 x rate of white women birthing in Miami hospitals, the woman must have thought, if it's safe here for this black woman, then it must be safer for me. The double consciousness Infinity Mirror distracted cars driving by the epic image of Doula Nicky. Witnesses on US1 sidewalks and streets slowed down when they saw themselves reflecting infinitely into the depths of Nicky's image. By illuminating deadly statutes with monumental statues, we are building a matriarchal resistance movement on every block, in every corner of American civic life. Eventually we will disrupt more than traffic to impact deadly legislation.

In my Abra Studio interior and architecture design practice, I'm building sanctuary in spite of supremacy. The architecture and urban design scale work is a minimalist, abstract portrait of our commercial, assimilated selves; whereas the collaborative art installations illuminate our collective identities constructed from our inner constitution.

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