“Por Aquí Venden Barbacoa” by Cassandra Mayela Allen, 2026.
Photo credit to Carlos Núñez and Instituto Cervantes New York.

Aquel Amplex

Aquel Amplex, an exhibition at Instituto Cervantes New York, strikes me as the moment one realizes a private affair of some sort is best done collectively. The featured textile installations draw from artist Cassandra Mayela Allen’s years-long work with fabrics and clothing that she weaves together alongside other people who have experienced displacement or exile. 

Scrapes of crochet, tutus, ripped lycra, sportswear, and a flag all form the nets that give name to the exhibition. The show takes its title from a 1969 letter sent by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica to fellow artist and confidante Lygia Clark while both were living in exile during Brazil’s military dictatorship. “Aquel Amplex”—amplex being a Latinism meaning to surround somebody with one’s arms—appears as Oiticica’s sign-off in the letter, and the phrase carries the density of a historical condition. In the correspondence, the artist laments the inertia of London’s art scene, includes updates to broker conversations about Clark’s work with curators in London and New York, and reflects on the fading promise of the Jean-Luc Godard–Pier Paolo Pasolini cinematic horizon. Solace arrives elsewhere: in Gilberto Gil’s newly released song, “Aquele Abraço”—“that embrace”—written shortly before the musician’s forced departure from Brazil following imprisonment during the dictatorship. Installed by the US-backed coup of 1964, the military regime would remain in power for 21 years, displacing an entire generation of artists associated with movements such as Grupo Frente and the Neo-Concrete movement. Their practices, once rooted in Brazil, became fragmented mostly across centers of the Global North.

Mayela Allen’s borrowing of this phrase folds these histories into one another. Oiticica himself had borrowed “Aquel Amplex” from a passista in Mangueira, the Rio de Janeiro favela and samba school community central to his artistic and political practice. Through this chain of citations and displacements, Mayela Allen locates the layered architecture of Latin American modern art: its nominal construction from Global North centers, its grounding in local communities, its rupture through exile, and the disenchantments of global capital.

On the gallery walls, there are two works on paper that catch me. They are colored pencil drawings, and each unit of color works in two ways: it is part of a grid while contracting into curves that reflect on the wrought iron common in Latin American colonial architecture. Mayela Allen allows the paper to be a compositional element in its own right, and the sparse blocks of color harness the material support of the paper. Like passing by a cherished spot in the city slows one’s walk, the contraction of the squares into curves slows down the eye.

Mayela Allen’s reflection on the tension between representative and public space draws on a tradition of Latin American modernism. We see this from Lygia Clark’s explorations of the “organic line” and Brazilian Concretism’s reflection on the aesthetic effects of industrial and economic mandates, to Amílcar De Castro’s 1957 redesign of the Suplemento Dominical newspaper where he used flush text separations to break with the idea that negative space was the same as wasteful empty space.

Dissociating ideas of space and territory, or what is non-productive and wasteful, Mayela Allen seems to use the grid to take the thought from the page to the city, bringing attention to the subcultural codings of public space. Henri Lefebvre, in his work on the production of space, noticed that much of Latin American urbanism shares a grid-like layout similar to New York City after the 1800s. As a long tradition of Latin American thinkers and practitioners has explored, cities or utopias of modernization can also reach a point of paralysis through their structure of constant deferral, so closely linked to the idea of progress and its repressions.

“Hija de la Independencia” (2026) and “Por Aquí Venden Barbacoa” (2026), both on view at the show, work with the certainty that memories and sentimental maps appropriate public space. At first, one would assume that bends and twists have no room in a checkerboard, but Mayela Allen manages to allow them by contracting the color units. After seeing the show, I had the chance to ask Mayela Allen directly about this:

EG: If the grid has been studied as tools of dominion of space, how do you mobilize the curve within this?

CMA: The curve, for me, refuses that clarity. Nature has no grids—its logic is found in fractals, spirals and waves—so curves feel more honest: adaptive, imperfect, resourceful. In my drawings I contract color units to make room for bends; the checkerboard stretches, cells pull, braid, and rejoin so ornament and gesture slip through. That softening doesn’t erase the grid but undermines its claim to total control; it surrenders to flow.

Curves also carry histories of domestic labor, migration, and communal making—quilts, fences, Adinkra-derived motifs—so inserting them reclaims and translates those stories into urban geometry. The work values process and memory more than tidy resolution.

EG: I know that the materials you work with are constitutive of your work—in your textile work, the fabrics you and your collaborators braid are oftentimes repurposed ordinary clothes marked by experiences of exile and displacement. I was wondering if colored pencils and pigment also have a material and affective weight in your works on paper?

CMA: There’s an ongoing dialogue between me and the materials that only happens through making. Textiles, colored pencils, pastels, paint, paper, canvas—each one demands different gestures, pressure, and time. I repeat marks across surfaces to learn their language and to translate between mediums.

I’m strict about sourcing fabrics: everything is reused, donated, collected, repurposed. That constraint creates a limited palette based on what I find or what participants bring, so control is partial. Drawing and painting, by contrast, let me choose exact hues. Those colors carry memory and bodily presence—the washed yellow of a shirt, the dull rust of an iron grille, the lavender of a wall. Many compositions grow directly from observation.

I’m always thinking about perception: how adjacent colors will shift tone and meaning the way context changes how we read a person or a place. Whether through thread or pigment, I’m aiming to translate this logic into marks that hold both material and emotional weight.

*** 

Mayela Allen’s drawings do not project a transcendent idea on the urban; instead, the viewer actualizes the work through memories and differentiation. The artist’s attention to shapes of the public doesn’t exhaust the city into cumulative images of circulation—as Georges Perec once attempted to do at Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris—but rather she shifts the rhythm from movement as circulation to movement as encounter. It is as if by observing with playfulness bits of the everyday often disregarded, one could effectively look into the eye at capital’s relentless absorption of social space. As we disentangle those impressions from knowledge, we are bound to feel emotions of loss, re-encounter, and memory. Through the chaotic surface of space, the grid-like curves of Mayela Allen’s drawings allow in the tension within the dominated and re-appropriated spaces of the city.