Photo: Filip Wolak
Your Concise New York Art Guide for November 2022
By Billy Anania October 27, 2022
Siblings mulowayi and mapenzi nonó identify as one artist in their immersive world-building project, Las Nietas de Nonó. Across the ground floor of Artists Space, the artist’s first solo exhibition gathers elements of performance, video, and mixed media into a journey of radical possibility. Several dreamlike “scenarios” occur in rapid succession across the gallery, guiding visitors through biodegradable installations and surreal workspaces. In this way, Nonó cleverly implicates us all as actors in this history.
Image: The New Yorker.
Goings on About Town | Art: Las Nietas de Nonó
By Johanna Fateman
The siblings behind this intriguing Puerto Rico-based duo, mulowayi and mapenzi nonóare, are best known as performers and community activists, and the sculptural vignettes, multimedia installations, and new film in their first solo exhibition, titled “Posibles Escenarios, Vol. 1 LNN,” collectively suggest an imaginative site for improvisation.
Podcast: Negras
Una producción de Colectivo Ilé para Radio Universidad de Puerto Rico April 11, 2022
Mulowayi y Mapenzi, Las Nietas de Nonó, comparten sobre cómo transitan sus negritudes desde el renombrarse, desde los alimentos y otros procesos colectivos. Celebran sus negritudes, además, desde el arte. Sobre sus proyectos artísticos y de rituales, también, nos hablan. Moderan: Angellie González Jorge y Jessica Gaspar Concepción
Photograph by Juan Carlos Malavé
Las Nietas de Nonó: Day-to-Day Utopias
By Inés Katzenstein April 1, 2022
mulowayi iyaye nonó and mapenzi chibale nonó find healing and liberation in creating art—and finding food—beyond the limits of traditional institutions.
Foodtopia: Después de todo territorio (2020-2021) (foto-instalación) Ecuador, Quito Photograph by Edgard Dávila Soto
Raíz
By Eduardo Carrera R. y Jorge Sánchez | Curadores de la exposición en el CAC, Quito. January 26, 2022
La raíz se concibe como un órgano de las plantas que crece en dirección inversa a la del tallo, o la rama, carece de hojas e, introducido en tierra o en otros cuerpos, absorbe de estos o de aquellas materias necesarias para el sostén de la vida. La raíz posee una potencia comunicadora. También se conoce como raíz al principio, comienzo o motivo de algo, al soporte o al inframundo de algún objeto o cuerpo. Estos órganos subterráneos son también utilizados en herbolaria, sanaciones, medicina y conjuros.
Foodtopia: Después de todo territorio (2020-2021) (foto-instalación) Ecuador, Quito Photograph by Edgard Dávila Soto
Raíz: exhibición colectiva en el Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito
By Terremoto January 19, 2022
Los conjuros se constituyen por una serie de palabras en combinación con el uso de determinados ingredientes y gestos. Lo mismo sucede en esta exposición. Un ejercicio curatorial que produce efectos sobre nuestra realidad y convoca procedimientos artísticos sobrenaturales que alteran narrativas, miradas, estructuras y, sobre todo, formas de sentir colonial(es) sobre nuestros cuerpos y nuestros territorios.
No More Tears 2021, Los Angeles, Photograph by Gina Clyne
Newsletter: Mass incarceration touched their family. Las Nietas de Nonó tackle its legacy in performance
By Carolina A. Miranda
In May of 1992, the month after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four LAPD officers of brutalizing Rodney King, and swaths of Los Angeles remained singed by the subsequent uprising, Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter wrote a missive to her colleagues at Stanford University. “No Humans Involved,” as her open letter was titled, was in response to a radio news report about how the police often used the acronym “NHI” (No Humans Involved) to describe cases involving people on the fringes of society: Black people and Latinos, sex workers and the poor.
UMBIGO MAGAZINE Dossier Ecological Self by Alice Bonnot. 2020
Ecological Self
By Alice Bonnot
One fundamental ecological concept is that of interconnectedness, the idea that a change in one part of the ecosystem will affect other components. This concept also applies to the interrelation between human and nature, between the natural and the unnatural. Scholars such as Timothy Morton1 remind us that humans are not separate from, or above, the-more-than-human world2. Humanity is part of nature, and we are embedded in it. This coincides with what Arne Næss3 calls the ‘ecological self’. A sense of self that identifies with the social, ecological, and spiritual, which reacts to the interests of more-than-human others — forests, lakes, icebergs, etc. — as if they were theirs. A sense of self that feels hurt when the Amazon burns and the Arctic melts.
Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, New York, 2019, Photograph by Paula Court
CLIMATE CHANGE HAS ALREADY TRANSFORMED EVERYTHING ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART
By William S. Smith May 4, 2020
In New York 2140 (2017), sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines cultural life in a city changed by the warming climate. Rising seas have flooded this future Gotham, transforming much of the five boroughs into an intertidal zone. The two great “pulses” that inundated downtown Manhattan and other low-lying areas had catastrophic effects on citizens of the former financial capital. The tides also ushered in a thriving, anarchic aqua-urbanism.
Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, New York, 2019, Photograph by Paula Court
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2019, ILUSTRACIONES DE LA MECÁNICA
The collaborative duo Las Nietas de Nonó—sisters Mulowayi and Mapenzi Nonó—draw on their own autobiographical, familial, and community histories in their interdisciplinary work, examining the dynamics of race, class, and colonialism in Puerto Rico through performance. Ilustraciones de la Mecánica (Illustrations of the Mechanical), which has been presented in several different formats and contexts since 2016, takes up the history of medical experimentation and the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico. It considers in particular the violence inflicted on Black women’s bodies in the name of medical research.
Ilustraciones de la Mecánica, Berlin, 2018
THE 6 MOST COMPELLING WORKS AT THE 2019 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, EXPLAINED BY ITS CURATORS
By Wilder Davies May 17, 2019
Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City presents a survey of contemporary work aiming to represent the current state of art-making in the U.S. Throughout its nearly century-long history, the Whitney Biennial has been a showcase for significant American artists on the rise. It has also remained a flashpoint for public protest and a stage for larger cultural tensions bubbling beyond the gallery walls.
FOODTOPIA: Manifestaciones en Periodo de Caza, 2018
Atlas San Juan: Afro-Caribbean Connections
By Marina Reyes Franco March 1, 2019
FOR ANYONE who then lived in Puerto Rico, or had even visited the US territory, the results of the 2000 census likely came as a surprise. That year, in response to a question about race—the first such query in more than forty years—more than 80 percent of the island’s 3.8 million people identified themselves as white, while only 8 percent identified as black or African American. These figures, which seemed to dramatically understate the number of Puerto Ricans with African heritage, were met with incredulity, confusion, and mockery, as well as genuine intellectual curiosity about the status of Afro–Puerto Rican identity.
LNN Archive G-27
LAS NIETAS DE NONÓ BY SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE
Puerto Rican artists Sofia Gallisá and las Nietas de Nonó discuss their approach to the prison system in Puerto Rico and the cycle of poverty and racial and class discrimination that feeds it.
Chicago, USA 2017
#ARTISJUSTICE: LAS NIETAS DE NONÓ ON CREATING OPPORTUNITIES WITH ART
Las Nietas de Nonó, made up of sisters Mulowayi and Mapenzi Nonó, use theater to tell the story of their community in Puerto Rico.
Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico 2017
WE NEED TO HEAL THE WOUNDS
BY THERESA SIGMUND June 19, 2018
The Puerto Rican sisters and artists Lydela and Michel Nonó present their performances at the 10th Berlin Biennale. Theresa Sigmund spoke with them for Contemporary And (C&).
Mulowayi in Ilustraciones de la Mecánica at the Berlin Biennale, 2018.
Photo by Timo Ohler.
BOMB MAGAZINE: LAS NIETAS DE NONÓ BY PEPÓN OSORIO
By Pepón Osorio December 5, 2018
I first met Las Nietas de Nonó a few years back while traveling to a familiar place in my parents’ hometown of Carolina, Puerto Rico. Along with some students, I went to Patio Taller—the community art and performance space that sisters Michel and Lydela Nonó created on their grandparents’ parcel of land—to see Manual del Bestiario Doméstico (2014)…
BERLIN, WE SHOULD TALK, GABI NGCOBO AND LAS NIETAS DE NONÓ
Cast: Las Nietas de Nono, Gabi Ngcobo
Director: Jiří Žák
Camera: David Přílučík, Monika Rychlíková
Sound: Milan Mazúr, Jiří Žák
Editing: Jiří Žák
Interview: Jiří Žák
FOODTOPIA: MEAL READY - TO - EAT, 2018
ARTISTS: BB10 - BERLIN BIENNALE
Las Nietas de Nonó’s practice merges theater, interventions, and performances of everyday life. Formed by Lydela and Michel Nonó, Las Nietas de Nonó are based in Barrio San Antón, the same working-class neighborhood where their grandfather Nonó lived. His former home, now their living and working space, has become Patio Taller, a community space, an international artists’ residency, a hangout spot for the neighborhood’s kids, a workshop center, and a place for producing, cooking, and sharing food through informal gatherings.
Manual del Bestiario Doméstico, Patio Taller, 2014
Foto Angélica Allen
LAS BESTIAS DOMÉSTICAS
Por Christian Ibarra 14 de noviembre de 2014
Lo primero es esperar, con ansias, un cupo dentro de los veinticuatro disponibles. Lo segundo también es esperar, esta vez un correo electrónico, con las instrucciones y la dirección del lugar. Parece un juego. Y en cierto modo lo es. Las nietas de Nonó, sin embargo, juegan en serio. Tanto, que su trabajo Manual del bestiario doméstico es una radiografía brutal, necesaria, de la violencia y el cariño.