Sao Paulo Brazil
Liene Bosquê draws from the pre-colonial history of hammocks (hamacas in Spanish) to create sculptural textiles that explore the aesthetic and cultural connections and dissonances surrounding this artifact. In the HamacaS project, the artist updates the role of craftsmanship and weaving in the Global South and its significance for the populations of Southeast Asia, Central and South America, bringing up issues of territoriality, identity, and gender. Collaboratively woven and imbued with the memory, touch, and body of the public, the hammocks are situated on the threshold between cultural, emotional, and physical spaces, reconsidering the sense of a safe place and shelter – as well as the boundaries between craftsmanship and art.
Loading…
Liene Bosquê
Queens’s Hammock I, 2018/22
Fibras (algodão, rayon e sintética)
76.20 x 203.20 cm
HamacaS leads us to imagine how we carry places with us, crossing borders and barriers. The physical and emotional embrace of the hammocks involves the very journey of the Latina immigrant artist in the USA. When she left Brazil 15 years ago to study art in Chicago, Liene couldn’t find a suitable place to hang her hammock. “I was disappointed with the drywall there. Finally, when I got to New York, I got a residency in an older building and was able to drill a hole for it. Only then I was truly happy.”
A sling made of fabric, rope, or weave suspended between two anchor points, the hammock is defined by its relationship with the body – not simply by the object it represents. Liene Bosquê proposes the deconstruction of the symbolic, formal, and constructive elements of hammocks, transforming the thread and surface into three-dimensional elements and composing an organic silhouette through tension and gravity, contrasting with the geometry of its core.
The hammock first appeared in Liene Bosquê’s work with the sculpture Coffee Cycle, 2011, which is part of the Coffee’s Landscape series where she investigates the narrative and personal memory of herself and her family in the interior of São Paulo State in the mid-20th century, where there was a strong rural culture.
Loading…
Liene Bosquê
Ciclo do Café (série Paisagem do Café, HamacaS), 2011
Sacos de café, tronco e café
66 x 56 x 24 in
The work depicts a hammock made from used coffee sacks, manually sewed by the artist and hung from a pine tree trunk that was a Christmas tree. The absence of the body in the hammock is replaced by coffee grounds that the artist spreads inside and beneath the hammock like residue in a filter. The smell of coffee spreads around the work and activates the sense of smell, bringing back the affective memory of Liene’s grandmother grinding and brewing coffee – as well as the records of communities formed around the cultivation of the plant and the challenges faced by women in agriculture in a patriarchal society.
The unfolding of the hammock in Liene Bosquê’s poetics occurred in the HamacaS project, conceived from current political controversies about immigration. It was carried out in New York at the ArtBuilt Mobile Studio in partnership with the Queens Museum in 2018 and in Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami (MOCANOMI) in 2020. In collaborative workshops, the hammocks were woven with the help of mostly immigrant participants of all ages – reflecting the ethnic and cultural diversity of the surrounding communities.
People share emotions and stories while weaving the hammocks, which provokes reflections on their current state as well as deep memories, given that textile art is present in their families, whether it be household linens, their mother’s knitting, or their grandmother’s crochet.
“The hammocks have a lot to do with my own thoughts about what an immigrant would be carrying from the place they came from. It’s about displacement, how we adjust to a new culture and place. How we carry our past and our stories with us,” says the artist.
IMAGE GALLERY | Records of the collaborative creation workshops for the HamacaS in New York and Miami.
“What motivates my art is that people participate in the work and discover new relationships with space, their community, and themselves. The project functions as a safe space for dialogue, debate, and understanding through hands-on involvement – the space between the hand and the mind offering therapeutic rest.”
— Liene Bosquê
Loading…
VIDEO| Liene Bosquê interacts with participants and explains the fundamentals of the HamacaS project during workshops at Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the Queens Museum in New York.
In Liene’s hammocks, there is a reference to the body even when it is not present. It is a space-object that redefines our relationship with the world from the need for shelter: a place that will always be vital wherever we are. It is necessary to have a place – any place. The hammock evokes this return to an ancestry, to the values of our history, while pointing to the countless territorial possibilities in a contemporary context, facing an uncertain future – be it due to conflicts or environmental disasters. It is necessary to rethink this dwelling from very simple, practical, almost rudimentary things that are being used today in natural disasters, for example, far from technological resources. It is an open work in the face of equally open questions that not even the artist can know how far they will unfold.
The materials used in the hammocks, such as ropes and ribbons, come from Materials for the Arts, the creative reuse center of New York City that supports the arts, receiving discarded materials from stores and factories and making donations available to artists, schools, and Non-Profits Organizations, encouraging them to imagine a more creative and sustainable future.
During her master’s in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Liene Bosquê was greatly influenced by the theories of craftivism, activism centered on craft practices, a movement that incorporates elements of manual making in collectives, solidarity, and feminism. Under the mentorship of Anne Wilson, who defines spaces with textiles and their relationship with performers and the public, Liene participated in the performance/installation Thread Lines at the Drawing Center in New York in 2014 (image gallery below).
TEXTILE ART | In addition to Anne Wilson, Liene Bosquê’s sculptural fabrics are also related to the thinking of Anni Albers during and after the Bauhaus, who reoriented the textile tradition in terms of technique, materiality, abstraction, and the relationship with architectural spaces. Contemporary references include Eva Hesse in exploring materiality and the poetics of Louise Bourgeois, which incorporate memory, trauma, and personal healing, as well as the construction with textiles in the late phase of her career.
In the 1970s, the hammock entered Brazilian contemporary art as a cultural material and conceptually rich symbol of the culture itself. Hélio Oiticica invited the public to be part of his Cosmococa installation, lying in hammocks and experiencing art from a new bodily position. Liene Bosquê experienced the work in 2003, integrating the action Cosmocrack, which hung hammocks in Parque da Luz in São Paulo in dialogue with Oiticica’s installation exhibited at the Pinacoteca in the same park.
The importance of bodily participation for the transformation of individual and collective consciousness permeates Liene Bosquê’s creative process in projects that provide creative experiences in the very creation of the work. There is a direct reference in Liene’s work to the relational propositions and experiences of Lygia Clark’s work. In Elastic Net, Lygia encouraged spectators to engage with the net-shaped object, moving their bodies through and within the spaces defined by the object.
Liene Bosquê received the Ellies Creator Award (2019), Miami’s Visual Arts Awards, and a WaveMaker Grant to present the HamacaS Project. The first iteration of this social engagement project in Florida was exhibited at MOCA North Miami in February 2020. Bosquê was an artist-in-residence at Wave Hill in the Bronx and at the Queens Museum’s ArtBuilt residency, both in New York. She also received the Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where she presented her first public sculpture (2016).
Loading…
Liene Bosquê
Queens’s Hammock IV, 2018/22
Fibras (algodão, rayon e sintética)
254 x 76.20 cm
In addition to hammocks, Liene’s works include installations, sculptures, education, and other participatory projects. The artist and art educator brings people together to consider the connections between the work and the place through history, memory, and the tactile nature of making, dedicating herself to investigating the relationship between the body and space – and the ephemeral trace that people leave in places. “It is through touch and the exploration of materials that I connect more deeply with the audience,” she says.
Living in United States, for over fifteen years, Liene Bosquê (Garça, Sao Paulo, 1980) holds a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a bachelor’s degree from Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP, and a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidade Mackenzie in Brazil. In her works, she explores sensory experiences within natural, urban, architectural, and personal spaces. This includes sculptures, objects, installations, and site-responsive projects, often using an archaeological process that emphasizes the memory and history of spaces in a tangible way. Liene frequently uses materials that can be transformed and take the form of a mold or that can receive an impression. Thus, through installations responsive to the exhibition site and the use of malleable materials, rigid architectures are transformed into fragile surfaces, revealing stories, voids, and absences, the passage of time, and how we perceive the idea of place.
.
Textile techniques and molding have thus been at the core of an artistic practice that explores a range of fibers such as cotton, silk, and linen, and media like rust, clay, wax, plaster, and latex. Her recent production includes collaborative projects with communities, a broader investigation of the natural environment and ecosystems, and sustainable perspectives for the future. She has received notable awards and residencies in her career, with works exhibited in institutions such as MoMA PS1, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Frost Art Museum in Miami, Carpe Diem in Lisbon, Portugal, among others. Currently, Liene lives in Miami and is a 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Oolite Arts in Miami Beach and a professor at the University of Miami.
