Universal Tissue

PUBLICATION: Donna Huanca: Obsidian Ladder
PUBLISHER: Marciano Art Foundation
DATE: February 2021
URL: https://www.amazon.com/Donna-Huanca-Obsidian-Jamillah-James/dp/099922154X

Excerpt/

In theorist Donna Haraway’s elaboration of a “thick present,” she imagines an ethical timescale in which space is held within the contemporaneous moment for both past struggle and a conscious responsibility for future life. In her appeal that we “stay with the trouble,” she states that it requires “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” Donna Huanca’s installations have a similarly “live” quality that cannot be attributed solely to the fact that her works include performers. Rather, through mindful collaboration and an immersive environment, Huanca attempts to bring the viewer into a potent “thick present” that builds constructive bonds in real time and real space.

— “Universal Tissue” in Donna Huanca: Obsidian Ladder, February 2021