Sumie García inaugurates 𝕃𝔸𝕊 𝔻𝔼ℝℝ𝕆𝕋𝔸𝕊 at LTRL

Navigating through medieval navigation charts, landscape abstractions, colonial truths, and islets emerging from the ocean floor, artist and filmmaker Sumie García presents us with a provocation: how to start looking for an inexistent island ? How to represent a ghost territory? Through photographic exercises with embroidery, video, and still images, the artist repeatedly confirms that if maps hold any certainty, it is that there is none.

Sumie García's work has been exploring the mythological, imaginary,  mediatic, and colonial apparatus of Bermeja Island; a phantom islet represented in various historical documents that place it over 100 kilometers northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula. Despite finding a spot on maps, its absence has been speculated to be a cartographic error, a conspiracy theory involving the CIA dynamiting this land, or the island sinking due to the melting of the polar ice caps.

Amid these speculations and the folds of visibility and invisibility, Las derrotas emerges; a series of exercises that appeal to the ghostly nature of the territory, but also to the possibilities of the image, its representations, and the narratives in which we find ourselves trapped. Using the aesthetics of 14th and 15th-century port cartography, Sumie creates cloud-islands, wind-islands, wave-islands, tracing routes to search for a territory that refuses to appear not only because it is nowhere but because it is inhabited by ghosts that remind us that islands may or may not happen; that maps account for a very fragmented view of reality, and that the worlds we inhabit are more fictional than real.

However, the defeat Sumie proposes implies a double reading beyond the failure that maps imply. In maritime navigation, the route intended to be followed is traced, but the actual course taken, due to currents, winds, or instrumental errors, in Spanish is called a derrota (defeat). Thus, these images become a sort of political and poetic quest without a fixed course. A spell to find lost territories; places lost on the inescapable coast of a distant island.

Accepting defeat is to follow the route as someone who has lost their way and lets themselves be carried by the tide. That route is also destiny, a ritual practice where image and embroidery invite us to conceive other kinds of islands.