BY featured artist: Saskia Jordá
Saskia Jordá, Raíces (Roots), 2019, felt, thread, cotton yarn, and plaster feet, dimensions variable. Photograph by Airi Katsuta.
Saskia Jordá / SEPT 2020 / Issue 1
In this work, I cast in plaster my grandmothers’ feet alongside my own feet. I lost one of my grandmothers this summer, but the cast was made last year when both of my grandmothers were still alive. Their stories are defined by the steps they have taken from one country to the next in search of a better future, pulling their lives up by the roots, or “raíces.”
My maternal grandmother, who was 86 years old at the time of the cast, left the island of Saba in the Dutch Caribbean for Venezuela in early-1950s. My paternal grandmother, who is currently 95 years old, left Spain for Venezuela in the mid-1950s. I left Venezuela as a teenager in the mid-1990s, and my grandmothers followed in the past decade, leaving behind once again their adopted homes.
Saskia Jordá, detail of Raíces (Roots), 2019, felt, thread, cotton yarn, and plaster feet, dimensions variable. Photograph by Airi Katsuta.
The piece of music that comes to mind in relation to my own work is by Sona Jobarteh’s Mamamuso. Although I don’t have any ties to West Africa, Jobarteh’s music, and the way she plays the Kora, really moves me. “Mamamuso,” a piece about her grandmother’s influence on her music career, feels very special.
Saskia Jorda was born in Caracas, Venezuela and works with site-specific installations, drawings, and performances that map the tension between retaining one's identity and assimilating a foreign persona. “Having relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States as a teenager, I became aware of the layers of 'skin' that define and separate cultures—one's own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one's dwelling place—all these protecting the vital space of one's hidden identity.”