#  Three Variations of a Diasporic Landscape  

 



##  Three Variations of a Diasporic Landscape 

 

 

       ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_28_10__1920x685/public/2025-04/2O2A2807-HDR.jpg?itok=gTgYdnvV) 

 

 



 

 



 


### A Geography of Longing and Belonging 

**April 1, 2025 - June 1, 2026**

*Curated by Jose Luis Falconi with Marcela V. Ramos*  
*Featuring works by Naomi Gamarra, Sandra Gamarra, and Sarah Zapata*

#### **Curatorial Text**

In how many ways can you be from the same place? What is a “place” after all?

Organized as an “intervention” within the hallways and offices and upon the walls of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Three Variations of a Diasporic Landscape presents three artists whose works intertwine in more than one sense: first, they present a longing for a country where the artists feel they belong, but which remains far away for different reasons, and second, they create intricate personal landscapes from this longing. Together, the works form an intimate geography of places and moments which covers a hemisphere, and which now serves to cover the Center with the delicate veil of nostalgia displacement distills.

The show features **Sandra Gamarra** (Lima, 1972; lives and works in Madrid), **Naomi Gamarra** (Geneva, 1999; lives and works in Geneva), and **Sarah Zapata** (Corpus Christi, 1988; lives and works in New York City), three female artists of Peruvian descent. Their works interweave and cut across the walls and hallways of the Center to visually ask the visitors, passersby, and daily users of the Center why the liminal identities of the diaspora are barely considered when thinking about the Latin American region, despite its growth in numbers due to massive migration, and their economic importance – currently only acknowledged by way of the proverbial “remittances.”

The restrained, Colonial-inspired monochrome wallpaper motifs of Sandra Gamarra are juxtaposed with the colorful vibrant textures of Sarah Zapata’s pieces, which evoke pre-Hispanic influences. These, in turn, are set alongside the “poetic weavings” of Naomi Gamarra, together creating a landscape of nostalgia (understood as mourning for something that you never had): a spectacle in which history and the desire for belonging are fused. The intervention aims to question why it is so difficult for Latin America to include its growing diaspora as a legitimate social and cultural constituency.

With cosmopolitanism at its darkest hour, it might be time for the region to learn from its own diaspora. The artists’ experience of liminality, of living in the in-betweenness of cultures and regimes, might teach us a thing or two; helping us to strike back against the wave of extreme nationalisms sweeping the continent, threatening our democracy, and to restore the region to its former renown as the world’s laboratory for new freedoms and identities.

#### **Biographies**

**Sandra Gamarra Heshiki** (Lima, 1972; lives and works in Madrid) is one of the most important Latin American artists working in Europe. She was the first foreign born artist to represent Spain in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) with her renowned “Pinacoteca MIgrante,” a series of (re) appropriated and intervened paintings from Spanish Colonial collections to expose the colonizer biases. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Museum, London, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, among others. She has exhibited in XXIX Sao Paulo Biennial, the XI and XVI Cuenca Biennial, MoMA in New York, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin and the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna. A mid-career retrospective of her work is planned for March 2026 at MALI, Lima. This is her first show in Boston, MA.

**Naomi Gamara** (Geneva, 1999; lives and works in Geneva) multi-media work explores the transmission of cultural heritage, and the issues related to her personal experience of migration, intra-family and collective memory–as she examines her Swiss upbringing and Bolivian and Peruvian heritage. Thus, her installations and sculptural work are syncretic representations that have emerged from this cultural and political clash, which show the power struggles between the traditional and the modern at the heart of a capitalist globalized world. This is her first show in Boston, MA. [Instagram](//03E30DFF-FEA8-4840-B8D8-E00269853DBD/@corexazon)

**Sarah Zapata** (Corpus Christi, 1988; lives and works in New York City) employs weaving, tufting and traditional craft techniques to create loud, architecturally responsive installations that traverse themes of gender, colonialism and fantasy. Zapata’s site-specific works reflect her intersecting identities as a queer woman of Peruvian heritage raised in Evangelical Texas and now based in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Museo de Arte de Lima, the Museum of Arts and Design, amongst many others. She currently teaches in the Painting graduate program at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT. [website](https://www.sarah-zapata.com/) , [Instagram](@sylk_z)

**José Luis Falconi** (Lima, 1973, lives and works in Boston) is Assistant Professor of Art and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. He is also the President of Cultural Agents, Inc, an NGO which aims to showcase, study and promote the recognition of the arts as resources for positive change, and its efficacy in social interventions. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. From 2001 to 2011 he was Art Forum Curator at the David Rockefeller for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, curating more than thirty shows of cutting-edge Latino and Latin American artists in an academic setting. His latest academic publication, Pre-Text International (2023), co-edited with Doris Sommer, has just been released by Harvard University Press.

#### **Featured Works**

**Naomi Gamarra** |***¿Por qué comer un huayruro?*** |10’/HD, Color, Stereo (Spanish) | Camargo, Bolivia, 2025 + [Poem](https://www.drclas.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum1521/files/2025-04/Por%20que%20comer%20un%20huayruro.pdf), part of video performance (Spanish-English) | Geneva, Switzerland, 2025

A sensation of quiet instability runs through all of Naomi Gamarra’s work that straddle as many genres as they do countries to which she belongs. The daughter of Peruvian and Bolivian immigrants in Switzerland, Gamarra’s practice often begins in one medium and transitions into another—each complementing and exceeding the last. This results in a kind of weaving across media, mirroring the perpetual cultural crossing involved in the effort to connect—or reconnect—with ancestral roots. In *Por qué comer un hauyruro* a two-channel video and poetry installation, Gamarra moves fluidly between word, image, and ritual. The work stages a personal ceremony repeated in different geographies: she reads a poem over her Bolivian grandmother’s intricately embroidered quilt while burning *palo santo* on a raclette grill in a Swiss park and reenacts the same gesture in the highlands of Bolivia. Gamarra is acutely aware that these carefully choreographed acts do not simply blend cultural symbols—they produce a quiet dissonance, an intimate and ironic fusion of memory and displacement through ritual. The result is a landscape of nostalgia of the diaspora—understood here as mourning for something you never truly ever possessed.

**Sandra Gamarra Heshiki** |***Treatise of Tropical Landscape \[Tratado de Paisaje Tropical\]*** | Wallpaper | Dimensions Variable | 2025

The restrained, colonial-inspired monochrome wallpaper motifs of Sandra Gamarra are deliberately vintage-looking, evoking a time when nearly every middle-class household in the region—from the 1950s to the 1980s—had *papel mural* in at least one room. This calculated appeal to nostalgia, to the fuzzy mid-century era when she still lived in Lima, and to a space of intimacy (her home), serves as an anchor for Gamarra to produce a piece in which the slight misalignment between word and image turns each iteration of the bucolic wallpaper scene into a meditation on the *problema de la tierra* throughout the region. Each of Gamarra’s prints sets up a different tension between text and image, as the various legible phrases all present critical commentary on Latin American landscapes or the deteriorating state of the natural environment. Thus, the work mirrors the mirage—the fog of nostalgia in which national longing is trapped: from afar, it looks like paradise, but under closer scrutiny, when one reads between the lines, the situation is never as rosy as it first appears.

**Sarah Zapata** | ***A Landscape of Nostalgia I,II,Column*** | Natural and synthetic fiber, handwoven cloth | Dimensions variable | 2025

The colorful, vibrant textiles of Sarah Zapata defy easy classification. On one level, they are exuberant—almost playful—capable of transforming any space into a fully immersive environment charged with whimsical energy. On another level, they offer a deeply personal connection to her Peruvian heritage, as her weavings unmistakably echo the textures and patterns of Pre-Hispanic Andean textiles. Thus, Zapata’s work, through its materials, surfaces, and spatial installations, achieves a unique balance: a sense of intimacy—intensely tactile and affective—without ever relinquishing its cool, conceptual syntax. For this occasion, Sarah Zapata has produced three large-scale textiles, custom-made for the walls and columns of DRCLAS, each evoking a perpetually shifting terrain, proper of dreams . The diverse array of materials—of mixed origins—and the range of techniques deployed across their surfaces may at times recall the intricate craftsmanship of Gobelins tapestries, or at others, the vibrant complexity of Paracas textiles. Zapata masterfully weaves these traditions together, creating works that are striking not only for their formal synthesis of disparate lineages, but also for the way they transform the emotional turbulence of longing into evocative, tactile landscapes.

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 ### Installation Shot S. Zapata & S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2735-HDR_1.jpg?itok=bDZMKu3J) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/2O2A2771-HDR.jpg?itok=ZyvMNHbV) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation shot S. Zapata

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2763-HDR.jpg?h=42e87257&itok=pTdjAV82) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Gamarra

 

   ![hall 1](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/IMG_7989.jpeg?itok=Y0JjMGtJ) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot Wall Text 

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2791-HDR_0.jpg?h=19ff5e49&itok=JA2_JOwX) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot N. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/12O2A4069-HDR.jpg?itok=sW_-Pla8) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot N. Gamarra & S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/12O2A4061-HDR.jpg?itok=dw06XW4j) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot N. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2783-HDR_0.jpg?itok=lnFrgX06) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Zapata & S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2807-HDR.jpg?itok=HyoxHrQs) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Zapata 

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-04/2O2A2827-HDR.jpg?itok=PIWNnQ_9) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/12O2A4093-HDR.jpg?itok=Qx7yCfRi) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Gamarra

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/12O2A4117.jpg?itok=9WzuArI4) 

 

 

 

 ### Installation Shot S. Zapata

 

   ![artwork](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-06/2O2A2851-HDR.jpg?itok=aviHmLlU) 

 

 

 

  

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##  Related Programming 

Related programing, organized in collaboration with the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

 

 



  [### Invocations of the Diaspora: A Conversation on the Art of Belonging 

 ](/event/invocations-diaspora-conversation-art-belonging?occ_id=0)September 25, 2025

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 5:00PM - 7:15PM EDT 

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 Room 422, History of Art and Architecture Department 

 

 In Person 

 Two decades ago, migration and diaspora were central topics in critical discourse. Today, there is renewed urgency to revisit and reimagine the diaspora as a defining experience of our times. Invocations of the Diaspora: A Conversation on the Art of... 

 

 

   ![Flyer of the event](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-09/12O2A4117.jpg?itok=-AijNUCJ) 

 



 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

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 Attachments- [  picture\_as\_pdf  Por que comer un huayruro.pdf ](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/2025-04/Por%20que%20comer%20un%20huayruro.pdf)
- [  picture\_as\_pdf  Art Exhibit Three Variations of a Diasporic Landscape Self Guided Map.pdf ](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/2025-11/Art%20Exhibit%20Three%20Variations%20of%20a%20Diasporic%20Landscape%20Self%20Guided%20Map.pdf)
 
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