In St. Petersburg, a young artist preserves family stories through art

Kai Tomalin has never been to Colombia, but if you ask his abuelita, she’d say he’s been there hundreds of times — because she has taken him through her stories. Tomalin spent his childhood listening to his godmother, Albaluz V. Marasco, and her mother, Ernestina M. Vargas, talk about their lives in Colombia. They are not blood-related, but Tomalin, the son of former St. Petersburg Deputy Mayor Kanika Tomalin and late Tampa Bay Times reporter Terry Tomalin, considers them family. Ernestina, whom he refers to as his “abuelita,” would regale Tomalin with stories about her childhood, laced with the magical realism of the spirit world, friendly animals and the flora of Colombia’s diverse landscapes.

Those stories have become an art and ethnography project, “Dame tus Manos,” which Tomalin, 22, presented for one night only at the Studio@620 in St. Petersburg on July 22.

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Vargas told Tomalin her stories, he said, because she knew he would preserve them for the family. She told him that while everyone has a gift, not everyone opens the package. These gifts are a form of magic, and Tomalin’s magic, his abuelita said, is storytelling. “It feels like a sacred task to record these stories,” Tomalin said. The project began last year, while Tomalin was taking the summer artists and scholars program at American University in Washington, D.C. He was interested in using art as a tool for research. His proposal was to do ethnographic research — the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures. Because of the threads of magical realism that pervade his family’s stories, Tomalin wondered how he would present them in an academic setting.

 Tomalin demonstrates how he created the ink for his art and ethnography project.

The answer was to study the concept of placemaking — the way displaced people preserve their culture in a host land. Chinatowns in different cities are a perfect example, he said. “There’s a strong kind of longing to have some sort of connection or physical return to that host or to the home,” he said. “And so I was curious, in a nation that was so seriously impacted by violent conflict — that not only changed the ecology and the topography of the nation in a significant way, but also displaced people and a lot of things permanently. How does placemaking work when you can’t always return to the homeland?”

The cornerstone of the project, which he calls an “enchanted ethnography,” is the idea that people who were displaced brought with them the seeds of magical realism that is rooted in Colombia, in order to preserve their culture.

The main character of the stories is his abuelita as a child. She’s a mischievous, curious girl who is at one with the natural world. Tomalin organized the stories and watercolor illustrations into four categories: the natural world, animals, spirits and people.

  Tomalin demonstrates how he did his work for his art and ethnography project called ‘Dame Tus Manos.’  

“Each one of those four things served as a foundation for building this perception of her home, and most of these stories take place when she was a little girl,” he said. “It’s so fun to listen to her tell the stories because she tells them the way she remembers them as being a little child.”

His favourite story is about Ernestina’s family cow named Blanca, who produced the purest milk despite never having a calf of her own. When a special black-and-white orchid from the spiritual world appeared in the physical world, Blanca wouldn’t come to be milked because she wanted to stay with the flower — because it didn’t have a mother. Ernestina fed the orchid to Blanca, and the next spring the cow delivered a baby calf with the same marking on its head as the flower.

As another layer of connection, Tomalin used a variety of foods native to Colombia as the pigment for his paintings. Doing so required a lot of experimentation, like leaving saffron threads and butterfly pea flowers in water to extract colour, or layering watermelon juice on top of colours like a varnish. Skin tones are created with coffee; reds and purples with hibiscus. He dips his brush directly into a mango’s flesh to build a delicious orange colour. It all requires patience.

“The cool thing is when we look at the illustrations, with the knowledge of what they’re painted (with), it makes them a kind of collage of lived experience and the ecology of the space within the image,” he said. Tomalin found that making these on watercolor paper was the only way to combat fading. But prints of the pieces have been made on canvases, which will hang in the show. Tomalin recorded the stories — which he calls “Cartas de Amor a Colombia (love letters to Colombia)” — in English and Spanish. Guests at the opening can listen to them on headphones, in a space that he designed to feel like a living room. He made paper mache birds and monkeys that will hang in the space. Ultimately, Tomalin would like to make a book of the stories and paintings so that as many people as possible can experience his abuelita’s memories. “It’d be a great way to preserve these stories and these people and these animals,” he said.

Tribune News Service