Un Puente Sobre El Rio San Juan: A Story of Borders

MACLA Gallery, San Jose, CA | September 6 – November 10, 2024 | Artists: Irene Carvajal & Imara Osorno

“Semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.” Megan Garber, What Orwell Didn’t Anticipate, The Atlantic, October 31, 2024.

In the quote above Megan Garber discusses how far our societal discourse has devolved and ceased to be effective. We don’t have a shared, functional language to express our reality, and reality has been parsed and politicized to a degree that the very meaning of words fails us.

In this divided landscape, how can art offer solutions? How can the relationship and creative efforts of two Central American artists point us towards the ways that quiet connections can add up to a recipe for better communication, engagement and connection in shared space? Can art build bridges to understanding and guide us to create better shared futures? The two artists in this show and their coming led creations prove it is possible and offer tangible ways to work alongside one another despite the things that divide us––borders, nation, and language. The methods that built this exhibition however have sustaining power to build connections across such borders as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. More than the written legalese of past treaties and declarations from the courts or other government bodies, Carvajal and Osorno’s interpretations break through the limitations of words. Perhaps the artists’ lessons are transferable to our own U.S. discourse and national political divides. If only people and their governments embraced methods the artists offer, we would see how art guides to new ways of being in our fractured world. The work in this show offers openings for connection where words, legal documentation, and political maneuvers are left woefully inadequate.

On its face, this exhibition is about borders, geography and the rivers that traverse such locations. Specifically, El Rio San Juan is the river that separates Costa Rica from Nicaragua. These are small countries with little visibility in our consciousness when we think of the big borders with major conflict that divide countries. There is a long legal history between Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the U.S about the use of the San Juan river. This history includes times of both cooperation and conflict.

But the work of these two artists to highlight this region and their shared approaches to art making have many lessons for how to think about borders but more importantly how to bridge them. The projects they defined that guided their new works in MACLA’s gallery show are a road map for the way art connects and communicates in this cacophony of words and divisions that leave us at a loss for how to break through the borders that may often seem insurmountable.

Four projects Carvajal and Osorno agreed to endeavor are the scores for this greater geographic possibility. They are a shared personal story; the giving of time to create in dialogue; a collaborative mural and half-done self-portraits finished in the eye of the other. The resulting works in the show these two women as compassionate, vulnerable and courageous as each gives of themselves, literally to the other, sharing the eventual outcome and building the works in tandem together.

Written by Gina Hernandez, Director of Community Engaged Learning in the Arts
Haas Center, Stanford University