2024 Holidays Gift Guide - Interview with Aram Han Sifuentes
Aram worked with us to create a tote bag and a bandana this year, and we were able to catch up with her to talk about her practice and the leech related merch she made with us. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did in talking to her!
***CONTENT WARNING: references violence against brown bodies
Kimberly Kim: Hi Aram! Please introduce yourself.
Aram Han Sifuentes: I am Aram Han Sifuentes. I use she/they pronouns. I'm an artist, an educator, an occasional writer, and based in Chicago.
K: On your website, you introduce yourself as an immigrant and a daughter of a seamstress. And based on what we personally know about you, you visit Central and South American countries, often because you're invited for exhibitions and residencies and you do all sorts of really cool stuff. As a Korean American myself, I love finding familiarities while traveling, it makes me feel good to find common ground. I guess a better worded question would be, what's your drive in your extensive travels?
A: Thank you for that. I Yes. I am an immigrant myself, and my parents, once we immigrated, started working in dry cleaning, and so I learned how to sew when I was really young, because my mom was a seamstress, and they did that work for 28 plus years and recently retired.
And my partner, Roberto Sifuentes, is Chicano, a Mexican American, and we visit Mexico quite often. specifically Chiapas, which is the southernmost region, and we have fallen in love with it and made so many cool friends there. … I'm really interested in textile traditions across the world, and the different ways it's connected globally. So I was interested in learning backstrap weaving, because we have backstrap weaving in Korea, but it's really hard. Obviously, as a diaspora it's hard to access our own culture from afar, right? And it's not something that every day people practice.
K: For those of us who don't know, What is backstrap weaving?
A: It's one of the most ancient, traditional ways of weaving. And it’s all across the world: in the Americas, in Asia, and in parts of Africa. Backstrap weaving, you have a belt that gives tension, and then you have a series of sticks, and you usually tie it to, like a tree or a hook. And people weave beautiful and complex textiles just by doing that.
K: I think I saw a video on your Instagram.
A: I love it because the way people weave now is on these big machines, they take up so much space, and they're so expensive, but to just be able to make these beautiful textiles with some sticks and a belt and to do it outside. And finding that Korea has traditional backstrap weaving! I loved it and wanted to learn this. It wasn't so easy for me to learn Korean backstrap weaving, but I had friends in Chiapas, who are indigenous weavers. And my teacher is Marcela Gómez Diaz, from a community called San Andrés Larráinzar, and she's been teaching me how to backstrap weave.
K: That's amazing. I’m getting chills listening!
A: Yeah, it's been cool, because last time I went, I took traditional Korean materials, mosi and Ramie. It's rough, but cool and super strong. And I brought some mulberry silk, and then we started experimenting with those. It's been pretty interesting to connect to my own culture, by learning a different culture, you know? And that's been how Marcella has been able to learn about other backstrap weaving around the world, and it's been really amazing.
K: That's beautiful. That was an amazing answer. Thank you.
Pivoting a little bit, perhaps this is more telling of my biases, so I thought that established artists like yourself don't usually spend time maintaining something like a small press, or produce very affordable pieces like sticker sheets, zines or enamel pins. But you do, and yours is called CUTE RAGE PRESS. What drove you to start, and what's behind the name?
A: My collaborator is Ishita Dharap, and we started the press called CUTE RAGE PRESS. We're both petite Asian American femmes. We have a lot of rage because of racism, sexism, and white supremacy. we were talking to each other about how sometimes when we're really angry and express it, people say it's cute.
K: I know what you're starting to talk about as a fellow small Asian American femme!
A: So we said, “let's channel that, and let that be our kind of Trojan horse, where we can get away with more and point back at them.” And so it really started from talking and brainstorming, and, you know, it wasn't even that serious. And I thought, I wish I can go around and label all the bullshit around me in the world. What if we had these stickers that said “that's ableist,” “ that's sexist,” “you're a homophobe,” and “you're a fake woke.” What if we have these stickers? All these kinds of things that are so clear to people like us, right? I was telling Ishita I wish I could label it all. And then we actually made those into stickers.
K: I mean, having to say these small injustices out loud to somebody to explain is so much work, and for me to bypass that and be able to put a sticker on something that represents this bullshit in my life, wow. That's hilarious.
A: These things that we make, come from those internal everyday experiences we have. I also have that enamel pin that glows in the dark, and says, “don't ask me to be on your diversity committee,” you know? And the fact that it glows in the dark is, people do not have a choice to not see this shit. That's like another level of confrontation.
[ Kim is clapping and laughing ]
A: So I just wear it. And I have been asked on diversity committees so many times. And it's funny because my friends and partner experience the same. And we're like, “ we have this pin.” We just point to it. We don't even have to respond.
You know what is sad? A couple weeks ago, I was visiting an artist at a university in Texas, and I gave it to my friend who's a professor. She's a person of color as well. She took it and said “this is kind of sad, because we don't even have a diversity committee.”
K: Damn.
All right, last question. You collaborated with us to create some leech related merch! It's a red tote bag that says, I love leeches. And a bandana with amazing little leeches dancing around. Can you tell us a little about your leeches and about why? And what were the bandanas used in?
A: Yeah, so I'm really excited that you guys supported me to do that, because I know it's weird. I used leeches for the paisley print of the bandanas, because I read somewhere that one of the origins of Paisley could be leeches. I don't know how true that is.
And so why the leeches is, because my partner, Roberto Sifuentes, and I do a performance called Exsanguination, and we use leeches on him and place them under his eyes, so that he's bleeding tears through this performance and around his neck to reference decapitation that happens at the border. So his performance is really about the violence that happens against brown bodies. And then he uses these bandanas during his performances, and gets the bandanas drenched in his blood. And sometimes he's on a concrete platform so his blood dyes the concrete. This way. It's really intense. But because of this work, we've gotten to know a lot about leeches, and we have pet leeches now.
And how it started was because of how leeches have been used throughout history for medicine, and bloodletting, and how they're actually cool animals. They give you this anticoagulant so you can drain blood, when you need to. They are not like mosquitoes or ticks that give you any virus or diseases. So that's why they're used in medicine. They're really cool and beneficial animals. And also, with Roberto's work, he uses animals and insects because they're often metaphors against immigrants or people of color, like weird leeches on the system.
K: Oh shit. I did not make that connection at first.
A: Yeah, they're really cool, and they're really amazing creatures.
K: Tell me more.
A: Over time, we've worked with scholars that work with leeches. They just eat once a year. How leeches are used in medicine right now, for example, let's say you severed your finger and you put it back, because blood flow is more difficult in places like fingers, they'll use leeches so the blood flow. And in plastic surgery with noses and nipples, places where blood doesn't flow naturally much, they'll use leeches to promote that.
K: I think you're converting me into a fan of leeches. Thank you so much for spending your time to talk to us about your practice.
A: Thank you.