Writer: Alexandra Trujillo Tamayo
Essay Mentor: Aimé Iglesias Lukin

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Luma by Catalina Tuca, mentored by Esperanza Mayobre, and on view at CUE Art from June 20 – August 10, 2024. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online.

Installation view of *Luma* by Catalina Tuca, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Catalina Tuca's practice is situated in a fertile ground of political and environmental interpretation. Interested in the performativity of objects and their relationship to human behavior, Tuca’s works give new dimension to the idea of nature, uncovering layers of ecological, sociological, and psychological meaning embedded in the things we think we know.

It is not surprising, then, that her most recent body of work, presented in the solo exhibition Luma at CUE Art, took her to the national forests of Chiloé, an island in the southwestern part of Chile. This work, at once a process of research and resignification, traces the bodies of the forest and objects that derive from it, and positions them as far more than passive tools to be used, but rather as active agents in the construction and reproduction of identity. Tuca focuses in particular on the paradox of the luma, a police baton in Chilean Spanish, and its origin, a tree of the same name. In bringing awareness to this duality of meaning, she challenges established narratives and promotes a critical awareness of Chile's political history and the intersections between social and ecological memory.

The capacity of objects to influence the world and social relations through their use and meaning is profound. Judith Butler, for example, researched the ways in which objects can serve to reproduce gender and power identities.¹ In Tuca's work, she relates objects to memories, geography, emotion, and identity. The forest is a site of origin for our embodied violence.

The luma used by police in Chile—and its counterpart in most nation-states throughout the world—is a tool for civilian control. It represents the power of the state and the social wounds that this power inflicts. After the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, during the still recent period of history referred to in Chile as simply “the dictatorship,” the country experienced a violent agenda of political repression, human rights violations, and censorship. Until its dismantling in 1990, the military regime implemented authoritarian measures to consolidate its power, including the persecution of political opponents and suppression of the media.

In 2019, twenty-nine years later and just before the pandemic, a series of large-scale protests erupted in Santiago. In that moment, Tuca—and many others of her generation—remembered the luma of the 1970s, constructed of wood. She also recalled something about its materiality: that she had been told by her father that the luma was, in fact, a tree. It was then that she began the poetic search that informs this body of work.

“Many people in Chile know more about the police baton than the tree,” she tells me. And so she began contemplating how to share this duality of meaning, and how it could be a metaphor for the ways in which we change the meaning of things through their use.

The luma tree grows in the southern parts of Chile and has long been known to inhabitants of those areas. It has medicinal uses in Mapuche traditions, where it is a remedy for digestive problems and an anti-inflammatory treatment. Tuca spoke with many local people on the island of Chiloé who told her stories about these uses not encountered in textbooks, such as Luzmira Soto, who recalled her grandmother bringing the leaves home. The tree is a part of the myths and legends of the communities in this region, and many of these stories allude to spectral beings. It is said that the presence of the luma attracts the protective spirits of nature, and that those who respect and care for the tree are blessed with good fortune against the dangers of the forest.

The luma, beyond its existence as a biological entity, serves as a locus of intertwined cultural, social, and ecological meanings. From a phenomenological and semiotic perspective, the tree becomes a node in a vast network of human and natural relationships, where its symbolic and material presence feeds a web of narratives, rituals, and cosmovisions. Tuca mentions in our conversation that local people use the wood of the luma for warmth. The forest enters the house, and the luma takes on a different meaning. Its performativity lies not only in its ability to serve as a material resource, but in its capacity to embody and transmit values, identities, and ontological links between humanity and its environment. The significance of the luma is rooted not only in the materiality of its biology, but extends towards a horizon of shared meaning, where the intersection between the human and the natural is intertwined in a dance of co-creation and constant resignification.

The luma as police baton is an extension of this resignification, and it, in turn, can be resignified by those who hold it in their collective memory. Instead of simply being an instrument of coercion or force, the baton becomes a symbol of violation and repression that many acknowledge as destructive and seek to create distance from. "We inherited the traumas of the dictatorship," says Tuca. As a way of healing, she gives voice to the forest, which is also threatened by prevailing extractivism.

In my conversations with Tuca, I come to think of the luma as a manifest image. According to Andrea Giunta, these are images that not only represent an idea or a cause, but that also transform our sense of reality. They go beyond mere visual representation and become tools for political and social action.² Through Tuca's sculptural work presented in the exhibition, the luma loses its power, becoming a symbol of fragility by way of new material interventions. The choice of clay for this gesture adds another layer of complexity; the material alters the physical appearance of the baton, and in turn challenges its ingrained meanings. The cast versions are made of something soft that turns brittle and breakable, reminding us of the precariousness of inherited and existing forms of power.

The dichotomy of the luma is made clear by Tuca through this exhibition, and the space of the gallery becomes a site of shared recognition, one that allows us to collectively reflect upon the relationship between nature and culture, between violence and contemplation. The luma—both the baton and the tree—acquire new identities contextualized by their relationship to one another. The resignification of visual symbols is not only an artistic tool, but also a strategy to challenge hegemonic narratives and offer new perspectives. In making visible the origin of the baton in the forest, away from the hegemony of the state, Tuca challenges conventional conceptions of power and resistance, and opens space for a deeper reflection on the relationships between humans and non-humans, between culture and nature.

The paradox of the luma as a symbol of life and death is an undercurrent throughout the show. While the tree is a life-giving being, the baton can serve to extract and diminish life. In repositioning the final narrative of the baton beyond its foregone conclusion—away from one that leads to death—and in referencing the illustrations of pioneering Chilean botanist Adriana Hoffmann (one of the few women in her field), Tuca’s work could also be read as embodying an ecofeminist perspective that rejects the dominance of patriarchal forces and embraces more holistic and interdependent relationships between human and non-human beings.

Through the exhibition Luma, Catalina Tuca further develops an approach that is one of the hallmarks of her artistic practice, inviting us to rethink our relationships with objects and to reposition their meanings. In placing the narrative of the luma that occupies the political memory of her generation alongside that of its ecological source, she subverts its destructive power, giving life-affirming potential to an object rooted in structures of violence and exploitation. Her work reminds us that objects are not simply inert products of society, but active agents that participate in the construction and reproduction of social and cultural meaning—and perhaps can even, through their resignification, become tools of resistance.

Detail view of *Luma* by Catalina Tuca, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Endnotes

[1] Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York.
[2] Giunta, Andrea (2016). “Todas las partes del mundo.” VERBOAMÉRICA. Malba: Buenos Aires.

About the Writer
Alexandra Trujillo Tamayo (b. 1990, Quito, Ecuador) is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, and performer. She is a graduate of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where she studied performing arts, installation, illustration, and visual arts. She holds a Masters degree in Visual Communication and Diversities from Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, and also studied at Instituto Mexicano de Curaduría y Restauración in Mexico City. She currently resides in New York City.

Trujillo Tamayo has exhibited at prominent events and institutions worldwide, including the São Paulo Biennial and the New York Latin American Art Triennial, as well as +Arte Galería, Arte Actual FLACSO, and Centro Cultural Metropolitano in Ecuador. She participated in the Cuarto Aparte Bienal de Cuenca in 2018, and her work has been presented in international projects in France, Argentina, Bolivia, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Ecuador. She is a co-founder of CUERPA(S) International Performance Festival, where she led video-mapping projects nationwide. Trujillo Tamayo has held artist residencies in Paris, and she was awarded the Al-Zurich Art Prize for Art and Community in 2020 and the COCOA Art Prize in 2017.

About the Writing Mentor
Aimé Iglesias Lukin is an art historian and curator. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she has lived in New York since 2011. Her Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers University, titled “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York 1965–1975,” became a show at Americas Society in 2021. She completed her M.A. at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and her undergraduate studies in art history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research received grants from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, and the ICAA Peter C. Marzio Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her writing has been presented at conferences internationally and published by prestigious museums and academic journals, including the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. She curated exhibitions independently in museums and cultural centers and previously worked in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Learn more about the program here. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.