Stars Down to Earth: Betsabeé Romero (2020)

“Stars Down to Earth” was written with Emelie Chhangur and published in 2023 in the book When Time Broke. published by El Heraldo de México.

Stars Down to Earth

This is a love letter to Betsabeé Romero from two borders north. We hope that it finds its way south. Betsabeé found her way north to see us. She found her way by what she set in motion, but she was aided by wayfinders along the route that were left by those who were on route before her. What Betsabeé sets in motion rolls along; its rolling leads to a migratory route.

Betsabeé Romero has an unconventional approach to trace-making—incorporating lowly materials and techniques from vernacular traditions and popular arts as forms of festive celebration, but also as modes of cultural resistance. Many of Betsabeé’s works are installed in church naves. But she does not vaunt the vaults of heaven; rather she brings the décor down to a human level, low to the ground. So it is a matter of reading her work not just as celebratory decoration but also as wayfinders to dialogue in the mixed contexts of the post-colonial Americas.

Take the lowly tire. Betsabeé starts out simply with as simple a thing as a tire. Much of her trace-making derives from tire tracks. You can’t get closer to the ground than the tire. Ubiquitous, the used tire yet is singular in its iconicity—fit for hanging above an altar. But the tire does its labour on the ground, since in Betsabeé’s hands the tire is also an index. Recycled, repurposed, retooled, and retread. The tire doesn’t root itself; it re-routes itself by means of what Betsabeé inscribes on its tread. (Sometimes Betsabeé works with master artisans of the popular arts, who carve old patterns that re-tread tradition.) What it imprints is not singular; because of the tire’s rotation, it is continuous: it lays out a route. It rotates to repeat a pattern. Patterns are made by things that move. Patterns are set by things that persist. The tire carries with it, and safeguards, hidden away on its tread, cultural inscriptions or symbols of long traditions that help propel it forward. The tire cultivates as it rolls along.

The tire is a map that is also a territory. It unfolds a territory as it migrates.

Carrying her bundles, Betsabeé crossed her border north into a dark and dangerous territory. When after a journey she reached our border in Canada she looked for reassuring signs in the woods and along the highways. She looked for what was originally placed in the woods before colonial settlement. The past was signaling, but could she see any sign of it, since these signs were trees set amongst other trees in a forest? They were marker trees, nature acculturated. An ancient wayfinding device, the marker tree was a manipulated sapling, bound as it grew so that its branches would point directions. This Indigenous communication device spoke to Betsabeé from across time.

Can we still find our direction in ancient ways? Betsabeé’s work helps show us. For Betsabeé, the marker tree was a first encounter that paradoxically pointed not to water, a campsite, or a safe river crossing—the original function of these wayfinding trees—but instead to how lost we have become.

Betsabeé navigated her way through the Canadian landscape with the understanding that we are both lost and found, rooted and re-routed, Indigenous and diasporic. She used marker trees as a model. So at the Art Gallery of York University her installation of six bronze marker trees (Ancient Signals Seekers for the World [Antiguas Señales Buscadoras del Mundo], 2018), with its forest of bent forms and refracted shadows, was a post-apocalyptic interpretation of wayfinding in the Anthropocene. Betsabeé was finding her way here by pointing out our need to re-route our sense of direction and re-locate ourselves in the ways of nature.

But re-routing and re-locating are not meant as fixed directives, neither in nature nor in culture. As wayfinding devices, Betsabeé’s work is a warning against the singularity of signs. And as the tire sought out the road again, Betsabeé moved seamlessly between signs found in nature (the marker tree) to contemplate as well the nature of signs planted along the highway.

Taking its inspiration from the ubiquitous road sign and made in collaboration with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, Clues to a New Encounter (Pistas para un Nuevo Encuentro, 2018) was a proposal for a new way to “share the road.” Whereas road signs strive to be singular in their meaning (in order to be quickly and universally understood), Clues to a New Encounter asks: what do these signs mean to you? Making road signs into poly-semantic markers rather than singly driven directives, Clues to a New Encounter turns commands into indexes with interpretative value.

Collectively conceived through a series of workshops led by Betsabeé and Mississaugas Band council member Cathie Jamieson, the patterns and symbols on these new road signs are comprised of references to physical anatomy (hearts, veins, minds, hands), natural elements (water, earth, trees, roots, eagle, megis shell, feathers, herbal medicines), and regenerative cycle symbols (circles, arrows, diamonds, recycling icons). A mixing of icons both sacred and profane, these new road signs translate past practices and teachings into collective and creative life pathways. They do not anticipate a bend in the road, for instance, but attend to what we might have missed along the way. They ask us to slow down because the present moment requires our attention. Clues to a New Encounter gives roots to road signs. Like much of Betsabeé’s work, this series reminds us that it is more important for one sign to say many things than it is for many things to be said with one sign.

Viewed as symbolic action that enlists culture as a receptacle of deep time, immanent rather than transcendental, Betsabeé’s work reinvests in knowledge that is slow and cyclical. It turns out that the ultimate wayfinding device is found in cultural patterns that come full circle.

—Emelie Chhangur and Philip Monk