Undoing the Limit of What is Due

Notes on the work of Nayadet Núñez Rodríguez

Quinchamalí is a Mapudungun word that refers to the plant of the same name, so called by the Mapuche people and used as a lawen (remedy) for healing wounds and other ailments. It also corresponds to the name of a town located in the Ñuble region 30 km southwest of the city of Chillán in Chile. This territory has been marked by different moments in history. Before colonization by Spain it functioned as a cross-border space between Puelmapu (eastern land, today Argentina) and the Ngulumapu (western land, today Chile) where different products were traded, then it was disrupted by the “conquest of the desert” in Argentina and the misnamed “pacification of the Araucanía,” episode in which the Chilean state advanced into the Mapuche territory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulating the current territory of Chile.

In this region, a black ceramic technique has been developed for many years, engraved with white drawings characteristic of Quinchamalí. The roots of this technique are linked to the ceramic pieces produced before the Mapuche people, recognized for their utilitarian function      and the cross between animal and human, resulting in pieces that today are known as pitren pottery. This ceramic tradition is also historically associated with women who have passed on the knowledge from generation to generation.^[1] In his memoirs, Pascual Coña (1927) comments: “Some of the ancient women were very skilled in the art of pottery; they made various pitchers, jugs, pots, plates, cups: all kinds of earthenware vessels.”

Quinchamalí is a Mapudungun word that refers to the plant of the same name, so called by the Mapuche people and used as a lawen (remedy) for healing wounds and other ailments.

The unique character of Quinchamalí ceramics lies in the variety of processes, which amount to      16 different stages. From the search for the raw material to modeling, burnishing with river stone, polishing, drawing, gluing, firing, smoking, and finally to the application of white colo^[2] on the drawing, everything is produced by hand. In the middle of the first half of the twentieth century, Quinchamalí gained prominence in relation to folk art or the concept of “craftsmanship,” being recognized by Chile as a living treasure in 2014. Quinchamalí is currently experiencing the profound effects of neoliberal and extractivist policies associated with the idea of the modernization of the rural world and the indiscriminate exploitation of resources, mainly associated with the pine and eucalyptus forestry business. This has strongly impacted the social dynamics and productive processes that take place there and, in turn, has provoked an unprecedented migration of young people leaving their villages to work in the big cities. The ceramic trade has also had a major impact on the continuity of this technique over time. This, added to the degradation of the land and the carried out by the country’s large paper and forestry companies and their pulp mills, set up at a short distance from the clay extraction sites (today altered by toxic fumes that prevent its collection by artisans).

The work of Nayadet Núñez Rodríguez is part of the rescue of the traditional ceramic craft of Quinchamalí. Coming from a family of women dedicated to ceramics for five generations, the artist takes her heritage as a starting point to reflect on images that problematize the body, memory, and tradition, leaving behind the rigid idea associated with this craft as a traditional one that has passed from generation to generation without variations. The artist focuses on issues that refer to the “feminine,” using processes directly linked to the territory and its history, and adopting not only the unique aesthetics of ceramics, but rather all of the method and skill inscribed in the ceramic process. She takes earth as a starting point, mixing it with the water      that hydrates the material to turn it into a moldable paste, then when this is structured and formed, air comes in to play its role in drying the pieces. Accompanied by a coloring process before firing and smoking, the process is slow, rigorous, and involves a constant conversation with the landscape and patience with the tempo.

The pieces produced by Nayadet in recent years have gone a step beyond the representations classically associated with Quinchamalí ceramics. In 2018 she made the piece Autorretrato [Self Portrait] where she presents us with her pregnant body, simulating a typical jug, a gesture that deconstructs the traditional image and appropriates it through her narrative. This piece was made in collaboration with Marcela Rodriguez Romero, her mother and an artist of this same technique, an important point for considering the value that Nayadet gives to the tradition linked to women in her family. In her work, the traditional guitarrera is stripped, wears a mask, or changes dimensions.

Trans, transvestite, fem, or dissident bodies and identities are altered in the traditional narrative, proposing other possibilities of representation that historically have been left aside.

Recently Nayadet’s work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile in the context of March 8 of this year to commemorate International Women’s Day, where she presented the project Lo popular emancipador 8M [8M, the Popular Emancipator] curated by Gloria Cortés Aliaga. The exhibition presented three ceramic busts made in the traditional technique of Quinchamalí placed in the hall of the museum in connection with works from the museum’s collection such as the white Venus; the two portraits correspond to Berta, great-grandmother of the artist, who was also a midwife. About the exhibition the curator points out:

The constant reaffirmation of the Westernized stereotype of the white Venus, surprised in her individuality and intimacy, is thus confronted and contained by historically subalternized corporealities in the process of creation of emancipatory, rebellious images, of self-alteration of life, of subjective and micropolitical intensities.

Her work allows us to escape the place that historically corresponded to the craft of ceramics, made by women and associated with a task bound by tradition and a specific time.

In Disforia [Dysphoria] (2022) a trans piece is presented, dismantling the binary structures of representation in the sculpture arranged by and in relation to the European canon of neoclassical sculpture. The artist comments on the work:

The third piece that is at the Museo de Bellas Artes is called Disforia and has to do with bodies, how one is born, how one feels, how one feels identified with one’s body. Here I want to be empathetic with people and not to have an opinion about other people’s bodies. The work calls for that, to reflect and empathize with other people.

Some years earlier Nayadet produced images that dislocate the idea associated with the feminine or women’s bodies, in the piece Transgéner [Transgender] (2015) where she shows a body misaligned with the canonically established representation, dissolving the border of what is considered folk art. Her work allows us to escape the place that historically corresponded to the craft of ceramics, made by women and associated with a task bound by tradition and a specific time. Her work updates the narrative, the reference; it allows for the elaboration of new representations of the feminized, bodies, the canon, and what should be. Her work is not only the end result in the polished black piece, but the processes involved in each step, the memory of her family, the tempo of the clay, which intervene all the time in her work.

Her visual approach gives us her own vision of a territory that resists, despite all the disadvantages that inhabit it, undoing the limits of what is allowed.