Breaking Bread with Arnie Campa
Sliced Bread Staff Writers Thomas Fuson Kennedy and Sadie Foer sit down with Arnie Campa to talk weaving, textiles, and familial ties.
Instagram: @traumatizedtoddler
Sliced Bread (S.B.): Hi Arnie! Tell us about yourself.
Arnie Campa (A.C.): I am an interdisciplinary artist in the third year. I study art history and IRHUM, which is basically funded thesis research. But my area of focus is weaving communities and so I study early 20th-century weaving communities and think about how art facilitates community-building.
I'm super interested in thinking through pedagogy and about how we can look at communities that are primarily led by women, queer, women, women of color, and distill that to different elements that we can take and apply to the modern day and also think through the problems of the past. My art practice is centered a lot around that and also around just writing and living and being.
I am the former Los Angeles youth poet laureate. I'm also a weaver and I've been formally learning how to weave for about four years. My practice is really interested in marrying a lot of that together, with weaving, text, and photo, and particularly I've become really interested in archives and thinking about how we document the stories that we tell each other to keep our history alive.
S.B.: What inspired you to get into weaving and textiles?
A.C.: I went to art school for high school. And we did regular class in the morning and we did studio from 12 to 4. And I exhibited in high school, I've exhibited like nine times, which is super uncommon because [usually] you exhibit once you graduate undergrad, or you exhibit [in] a coffee shop, but we were in galleries.
I had an assignment by a professor who was like, you're gonna make a piece that has to be 6 ft tall or greater than 6 ft tall and like a certain dimension width that I don't remember, but it was huge. And I was super into plaster. I was making molds of my face and casting them in wax and doing ceramics and stuff. I was really into materiality and touching stuff.
And I was like, this is what I'm going to do forever. And then she was like, you can't use plaster, I'm banning you. And I was like, oh, I love it. That's my life.
I had always kind of been really interested in fashion and people who could make clothes and the Bauhaus Ballet, which is like the super kooky ballet with really crazy costumes and that was like my whole screen on my phone and my laptop paper. And so I was like, ok, cool. I'm going to work in fabric. And I don't know anything about it and I broke my mom's sewing machine and I sewed a 6 ft tall Fisher Price xylophone, out of vinyl. And it was super cool and it was so long and arduous and I fought with my mom so much about the sewing machine, but it was cool and I was exposed to this world of textiles.
And from that I was like, I want to know how to weave. And so I just basically asked everybody that I knew if they knew how to weave or if they knew anybody who knew how to weave, like for months. And then finally, I had a boss whose friend was a weaver. And they had worked on this project together and they were part of a collective called Ambos that did a lot of activations along the US-Mexico border.
I worked at a print shop at the time. So I was working and doing printmaking and she invited her friend to the studio and me and all of my peers working there, learned how to weave. And I was like, this is so cool. I think it literally changed my life forever.
I post about me weaving all the time and my boss slides up and she's like, nobody's ever taken it and ran with it like you have. And I was like, yeah, because it's literally my life blood. So, yeah, from there I learned how to weave on a frame loom, like just classic.
[Now] I work out of the Chicago Weaving School, which is in Irwin Park, Urban Park. Super far north and terrible, terrible blue line trip. I'm just really interested in growing and expanding and learning. I'm definitely far from being done learning and Chicago doesn't really offer weaving classes. So it's kind of just self exploration.
S.B.: What distinguishes weaving from other kinds of art forms? You’ve talked about plaster as well—do you ever go back to that?
A.C.: I haven't touched plaster since I was banned, which is really sad because I really like it. And also it is really bad for your skin and has chemical reactions and can burn your skin. And I was just doing that shit, like no gloves on. I was just doing that. But I guess what distinguishes weaving from other forms is its materiality. It's very labor intensive, it's very slow.
It's very not rewarding. Because you weave yarn and it takes hours and hours and hours to weave something versus like if you're doing woodwork or you're making a sculpture, it's pretty easy to see pretty fast where you're going and weaving is very meticulous and very long.
“What distinguishes weaving from other forms is its materiality. It’s very labor intensive, it’s very slow.”
Campa’s Weaving Process
A.C.: I remember I learned how to do the four heddle loom. A loom has a warp, which is up and down strings, and what you weave is the weft. The warp on a frame loom is just one pair of strings that you just keep going up and down, up and down. You have to get a piece of yarn and make it continuous. And my weaving was going to be 3 ft long. But since there were so many up and down, it was something like 600 yards of yarn, but it had to be continuous, right? So I had to keep wrapping it around this thing called a warping board and you wrap it in a pattern and then I would want to change the color. So then I had to cut and then I had to tack and then I had to keep wrapping and then I was such a bad counter– I would lose track and then have to go back and count. So it's super labor intensive.
It's also a practice primarily done by women. It's women's work and it's not really respected, like craft is having its day, it's come up. But if you say you're a weaver, people are like, I'm good. But if you say, I'm a painter, people are like, oh my God, what do you paint?
S.B.: How do you see your study of weaving connect to your practice of weaving?
A.C.: I was a weaver first and I think it's important to note that I came up through community. I learned because I asked other people and I didn't go to school for it. I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to study weaving and I'm going to do undergrad and then I'm going to learn from an instructor. The original way that I learned was like sitting next to like 12 of the people who didn't know what they were doing. So I think that informs my interest as an academic– quote, unquote– for sure.
In art history, you're interested in the object, you're interested in the painting, maybe not how it was made. But what are the formal qualities? What does it look like? Was it in a museum? What does it say about the artist and history? Versus for me, I'm interested in the communal story. I'm interested in the story of the workshop or who was sitting next to who and what was the gossip. And how does that then help us read the object? This isn't a thing that's made in a vacuum. It's a thing that's made, especially around other people. And so that being in community is something that has affected me my whole life. And it's definitely in my practice.
“I’m interested in the communal story. I’m interested in the story of the workshop or who was sitting next to who and what was the gossip. And how does that then help us read the object?”
A.C.: One of the biggest projects that I've done was build a 6 by 7 ft house at Logan Center and I wove the walls and the walls were woven with scrap fabric, but they were also woven with communal dreams. We had like four or five workshops with community members in Hyde Park. There were students, there was a family day that we did at the Logan Center, and we sat in a room and people brought their kids. And we just talked about this practice of communal dreaming, which is like an abolitionist practice that's looking to think about, what are the things that we know and love in our communities?
And then how can we dream? We use that as a jumping point off to dream about a better future. Instead of being like, what are bad things in your community and like, tell me the bad things a million times and then we will make them better, which is like, obviously not true. So the walls were woven with communal dreams. My friends helped me weave the house and they all learned how to weave like I taught them.
So it wasn't like they were weavers either. And then at the closing, people were allowed to take a strip of dreams because I sewed the dreams together into warp strips. People were taking and dispersing these dreams. I think community is super embedded into the way that I'm thinking and the way that I'm making and the way that I'm learning.
S.B.: It looks like a lot of your work revolved around the theme of community. What exactly does that mean to you?
A.C.: I wish I knew. Like for real.
S.B.: I feel that– honestly I wasn't sure if I should ask that question because I don't know how to answer it either.
A.C.: Community is the people who I came up with, the people I'm around, the people I engage in dialogue with, community is my ancestors, the people who I read in the books, community is everything. And I wish I had an answer because I have to define my terms for my thesis right now and community is one of the terms that obviously is very integral. I think it’s a complicated term. It’s also a way of being, like to be in community with each other and to gather, like we're in community now. So, yeah, I don't know if I can give a straight answer for that one.
S.B.: To me, weaving and quilting and other sorts of textile arts are such a family, memory thing, like from generation to generation. So I'm kind of curious how your family influences your art.
“Community is the people who I came up with, the people I’m around, the people I engage in dialogue with, community is my ancestors, the people who I read in the books, community is everything.”
A.C.: Yeah, nobody in my family is like a weaver or even an artist. And so when I went to art school, they were like, what the fuck, what's going on? And the closest that I get is, my family in Mexico are silversmiths. But that wasn't something that I was directly familiar with, we're displaced a border away and also I never learned how to metalsmith and I'm afraid of fire.
But once I learned how to weave, I was like, I know this, some parts of me know this. This is an action that's familiar, whether that's like people before me were weavers, people that I didn't directly know were weavers. But I also think it's just like a practice that's very natural to your body. It's very repetitive. You're doing a lot of the same motions.
I think family and lineage informs a lot of my alternative practice of writing. And archiving is something that I'm new to but super interested in. My most recent project is called Memory Thread and it's an artist book that I got funded to make. And that was about documenting my mom as a teenager and then me as a teenager, and thinking about how we have shared history in where we grew up, but also in the way that we were expressing and documenting ourselves and our friends.
A Spread from Campa’s Memory Thread
A.C.: And my mom was a chola, which is like the female version of a gangster, I guess, but there's an aesthetic around it. There's paper thin eyebrows and she had lip liner and lipstick and it had a lot to do with your appearance and how you were, the kind of words that you used.
This is a history that has largely gone undocumented– not undocumented but informally documented. So people have pictures and people are in conversation but it's not a thing that's recognized, like, oh my grandma was a pilgrim.
So they have old pictures of them at parties or they're hanging out. Like my mom would take studio pics and go with her friends to take studio pictures. It was this very distinct aesthetic and something that I was really interested in and a part of my mom that she didn't necessarily talk about, but there was a lot of documentation that had been her life.
And so I was like, damn, I want to find a way to preserve these things. And so that began with creating the archive. I got a grant, I applied and I was like, I want to do this project. And this is my first big artist grant because I turned 18 and I was like, let me just apply to this for fun and then I got it and it was exciting.
I bought a scanner and I scanned like over 300 photos and like, that's not even like the tip of the iceberg. And I was like, OK, what can I do with this? Like, how can I put these things in dialogue? And the first thing that I remember arranging with her old high school ID was like my elementary school ID. And I was like, this looks fun and kind of funny. What can I do more? So then I started making these pages of combining her teenagehood and my teenagehood like, how are they similar? How are they different?
I got the grant when I was 18 and I finished the book before I turned 20. And so I was like, this is my last time to write about being a teenager and what that means and obviously our lives were totally different. My mom and I had very different life trajectories. She got married when she was 18. She had me when she was 22. When I turned 18, I was like, hell, no, I could not imagine getting married at all. I was just thinking about all those different things. So the first part of the book is thinking about, what is an archive and what does that mean?
Because for so long I wanted answers, I wanted ancestry dot com. I wanted to be able to trace so far back. And I didn't have that because my mom is an immigrant and my dad, his mom is an immigrant. So documents begin when they came here. And that's all I have. And then the second part of the book is thinking about me and my mom in conversation. And then the third part of the book is me forging family documents using Cyanotype, which is an alternative print medium, and writings about that and thinking about what a continuous narrative is. So it was super short. It was like a 30-ish page book and then I printed it and had a party and my friends read and we got together in Los Angeles and it was just a lot of fun.
S.B.: I'm curious how writing and poetry interact with weaving because they are such different practices to the untrained eye.
A.C.: I think they are intertwined. they're definitely intertwined.
Writing was my love. Like, that's the first thing I learned to do. I was writing whatever poems and I was like, oh, this eats. I was like 13. And I think language is super intertwined with weaving in the ways that we think about units and there's a whole bunch of people who do linguistic studies with weaving that are really cool.
Honestly, I've never thought about this. Some of my first weavings were with words and they had poems on them and then I would weave the poem. I would leave the poem and then I would turn it into like a cylinder and then it would spin.
S.B.: Yeah, you do also have the one on Instagram…
A.C.: It's “Así No Me Llamo,” it was an experiment that I did and it was thinking about naming. I guess I've never thought about poetry and weaving which I should because like, duh, I do both of them. But “Así No Me Llamo” was an experiment to think about tattoos.
Campa’s “Así No Me Llamo”
A.C.: I have four tattoos, but when I was little, I really wanted a heart tattoo that was blank. So that way every week I could write in the name of the person I loved. So like if my mom was super nice to me that week, I would be like, my heart says mom, but if next week is my brother, then I write his name, something like that, right? I don't have a heart tattoo that is blank. But I'd seriously consider that. So I was thinking about that idea but also thinking about naming and how people perceive and name me, my practice, who I am as a person.
Weaving is a white dominated space. Weaving history is really weirdly male, like white male and conservative. They don't want to think about the communal aspects. They're like, this is a weaving and this is an object and this was sold as a placemat. And I'm like, OK, but how was that made? I'm like, who was there? And what were they talking about? So weaving a place for me; weaving a place for myself.
I think a lot of the time also, my weaving is thought to be cultural, like weaving is a cultural practice. I wasn't trained to be a cultural weaver. I'm not doing these like traditional patterns, like backstrap weaving is something from Latin America where women are tied to their weaving and it's super cool and like, yeah, I want to learn how to do that and I want to be a part of that lineage but also, I'm not a Mexican weaver or something like that. And I think that people are quick to assume. And so I think that's what I was thinking about with that work.
S.B.: I think that's what makes you cool though, you kind of rewrite those ideas and change them. To me, at least when it comes to weaving and like textiles and things like they have very strong connotations that artists can play with.
A.C.: Yeah, I'm not a traditional weaver, but I'm talking about traditional things. So I'm not diverging myself from that. I'm still a Mexican weaver, I'm still in that lineage, but I'm just not directly reproducing. But that's still important to me– materiality engendered meanings of weaving.
Thinking about my house, the house that I built at Logan, that's not a functional structure. Weaving often was used for functionality. You make towels, you make curtains, you do that. You decorate your home. My weavings are nonfunctional. Nobody can live in that house. No matter how hard they try. The weaving that I do is interested in complicating functionality– while that doesn't function as a house, it does function as a gathering space. My friends and I hung out in there, people came by. People read the dreams.
“My weavings are nonfunctional. Nobody can live in that house. No matter how hard they try.”
Campa’s Logan Center Project
A.C.: I'm a woman and I make work. But this is not the only thing that I do. And women have historically been under-recognized for their labor. And so, by me doing this thing, I'm like, dude, look, this takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of effort. So I think it's cool that I get the opportunity to do that and to kind of revise maybe or revisit histories that are under-told and undersold. I hope that when somebody sees something they're like, oh my God, that took a long time and then they're like, let me think about what my grandma made and how long that took. And there's this culture of recognition that hopefully it produces.
S.B.: I feel like one of your big themes is fragility. You're talking about the house and if you took it as literally a house, it would be just blown down. But that's what makes it that much more precious.
A.C.: I think all my work is fragile but not in the sense that the archive is fragile. Like, if I don't preserve my mom's photos, they're gonna disintegrate and eventually nobody will have that history. These are all records, keeping records. Dreams are fragile– and then [I’m] translating them and transcribing them and weaving them into a house. I think a lot of what I do is situated at the edge of fragility but also preservation and documentation. Seeing fragile things and being like: how can I save you a little bit?
I'm a woman and I make work. But this is not the only thing that I do. And women have historically been under-recognized for their labor. And so, by me doing this thing, I'm like, dude, look, this takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of effort. So I think it's cool that I get the opportunity to do that and to kind of revise maybe or revisit histories that are under-told and undersold. I hope that when somebody sees something they're like, oh my God, that took a long time and then they're like, let me think about what my grandma made and how long that took. And there's this culture of recognition that hopefully it produces.
S.B.: I feel like one of your big themes is fragility. You're talking about the house and if you took it as literally a house, it would be just blown down. But that's what makes it that much more precious.
“All my work is fragile but not in the sense that the archive is fragile.”
A.C.: I think all my work is fragile but not in the sense that the archive is fragile. Like, if I don't preserve my mom's photos, they're gonna disintegrate and eventually nobody will have that history. These are all records, keeping records. Dreams are fragile– and then [I’m] translating them and transcribing them and weaving them into a house. I think a lot of what I do is situated at the edge of fragility but also preservation and documentation. Seeing fragile things and being like: how can I save you a little bit?