Slow Museum Walk - Objects and Their Meanings by Liudmila Klimanova

Arizona Historical Society, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

klimanova1 — 2024-02-22 14:05:37 UTC

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:31:16 UTC

This is a map of Arizona and vicinity in the 1870s. Linguistically, three communities are represented: English (the language of colonial settlers aka pioneers); Spanish (spoken in the area since the arrival of Spaniards in the 16th century); and Tohono O’odham (one of the languages of the indigenous peoples residing in this region for thousands of years. Spatially, the map depicts borders in two senses: the newly formed national border (la frontera) between Mexico and the United States and the borders/boundaries placed between the lands/homes of indigenous peoples and newcomers.

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:32:40 UTC

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:34:28 UTC

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:35:44 UTC

Series of quilts that integrate traditional quilting techniques, meaningful and intentional elements such as colors and fibers and shapes, and squares created by children engaged in the project.

Some questions that were asked and others that remained unanswered: who participate in this project? Is there dialogue with communities on the other side of the border? Who is ‘welcoming’ whom? How are the tensions and trauma navigated in the process of making these multimodal and multilingual narratives?

On the theme of ‘borders’, these objects can speak to the possibility of living, working, being transnationally by co-creating. Yet these objects also speak to the traumas and tensions related to the border locally.

The practice of quilting is a transnational, intergenerational and collaborative practice that perhaps many of familiar with. I think of the work of women artists who used quilting as a way to surface often silenced narratives.

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:35:57 UTC

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:40:51 UTC

This picture was significant to me since I feel that barbershops continue to be sacred, cultural places for Black and Brown communities in the USA. It made think about the importance of this space as one of the few safe spaces left.

Arizona State Museum, East University Boulevard, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:44:41 UTC

Part of the narrative shared by the historical museum includes the role that mining had in the local landscape—quite literally as the land was mined for ore, but figuratively even more so. With mining came settlers, technology, economic shift, questions of property ownership, and clashes of equality among the cultural groups involved. In a complexity of layers, mining is the context of the local historical struggle for humans’ rights—concerning women and children’s quiet roles, enslavement of indigenous groups, inequity in pay and compensation, quality of life and approaches to healthcare, and more. What stood out to me in the image of the block caving diagram was the resonance with other imagery: pieces in the hotel lobby, Tucson airport, topography of the area, and in several other pieces of the museum. Outside of that locality, circular and triangular overlapping shapes can represent the interplay of the corporeal body with the spirit, which may have further significance.

Arizona History Museum, East 2nd Street, Tucson, AZ

2024-02-22 22:45:55 UTC

In the group, we discussed the idea of "border" and how it is often imagined as an impenetrable physical obstacle when, in truth, mental barriers that come with it that are impenetrable. This was well shown in the image of the border between "dry" and "wet" during Prohibition, where the wall was actually pretty low.

Similarly, the idea of private property (often only signaled by a sign saying 'Private Property') is mostly in our minds, mostly coming from internalized law. This is interesting when looking at the introduction of land ownership that arose when settlers arrived