A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 40
WILLIAM CORDOVA
“Space, like language, is socially constructed; and like the
syntax of language, the spatial arrangements of our buildings
This interest started out as curiosity when I first arrived in the
U.S. with my family when I would observe randomly discarded
and communities reflect and reinforce the nature of gender,
race, and class relations in society. The uses of both language
and space contribute to the power of some groups over others
and the maintenance of human inequality.”
wooden stereo cabinets sans their speakers in large garbage
piles throughout South Florida. As a child I assumed they
were Cajones, rectangular wooden drums invented in Peru
by African slaves during the 1700s. The Cajon, a vernacular
symbol of defiance and self-determination, became a major
representation of contemporary Afro-Peruvian music and
culture. At the time, I related these two similar looking objects.
Thinking them to be one and the same, I wondered why they
were being discarded.
-Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist
Critique of the Man-Made Environment
My work has been motivated by a creative engagement
in architecture, geometry, and history. These are essential
components that have continuously shaped my world view. I am
interested in the fundamental origins of abstraction, including
cultural encoding and non-linear narratives from the African,
Andean, and Asian diaspora point of view that originate in Lima,
Peru, where I was born and raised. My work continues to invest
in this cultural, ethnic, and racial synthesis, as a method of
disrupting, challenging, and reassessing their influence on the
history of Western secular architecture, modernism, and theory.
Later, in my teens, I came across large stacks of custom wooden
speakers during the annual Goombay Festival in the Coconut
Grove district of Miami, a celebration of Bahamian cultural
roots in South Florida. Many streets and flatbed trucks would
be filled with oversized custom handmade speakers blaring
sonic syncopated sounds that reminded me of my uncle Cesar’s
drumming in Peru. I was drawn to the customized architectural
statements of these large speakers. Each was hand-crafted
like the Cajon. Many of them resonated and echoed familiar
rhythms like the Cajon. Some were adorned with beads and
small makeshift altars, candles not unlike what Cajoneros
surround themselves with during a session.
At the same time, Andean architecture and its structural
design also came to mind. The ample amount of towering
custom speakers at the annual Goombay Festival and other
local concerts in the intersection of Miami’s Black and Latino
communities reminded me of the many Huacas (sacred
monuments) in Lima and Cusco, Peru and the immense
rectangular structures made of adobe or single stones cut with
detailed precision.
william cordova ©2018
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Everything that was sacred, rituals, and cultural events were
all in constant conversation: ancient and contemporary
transceivers transcending and, in many ways, protecting
