A fishing net is a record of decisions. Someone chooses its fibers, ties its knots, learns the water it must enter and knows what a catch can mean for a household. Carolina Caycedo’s Spiral for Shared Dreams brought eleven handmade atarrayas into MoMA’s atrium from November 2023 through May 2024. The sculpture was made with four fishing collectives in Mexico, not merely inspired by them. That difference is the work’s political center: people facing environmental change are also producers of knowledge and form.
MoMA identifies the collaborating groups as Mujeres Pescadoras del Manglar in Oaxaca, Salvemos Temacapulín in Jalisco, Cooperativa Norte in Nayarit and Sociedad Cooperativa Mujeres del Golfo in Baja California Sur. It describes their distinct environmental challenges and Caycedo’s long investigation of dams and other infrastructure that alter rivers, lakes and oceans across the Americas. An atarraya hung in a museum can look delicate. In the communities that made these nets, it is connected to food, labor and a body of practical observation about water.
The work resists a familiar museum habit: presenting environmental damage as a landscape emptied of people. A dam may be described in megawatts; a lagoon may be described by its geographic coordinates. Neither measure tells us what happens when fish can no longer move as they once did, or when a community must revise the skills that sustained it. MoMA’s collection account says the collectives wove, and in some cases used, the nets before they entered the installation. Their prior life is part of the material.
Caycedo, whom MoMA identifies as Colombian, has called the larger Cosmotarrayas series a way of joining the physical structure of a net to social and ecological relationships. In a Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago artist interview, she describes the nets as artisanal work woven by community members and connects her river research to the agendas of the communities with whom she works. That account does not dissolve authorship; it clarifies what her authorship involves. She arranges a meeting between an art institution and knowledge often excluded from its walls.
Symbols woven or placed on the nets carry another register. MoMA notes a shrimp, the glyph atl for water and an eye representing Chalchiuhtlicue, associated with fresh water. These details connect fishing practice to stories and meanings that cannot be priced as a resource. A net can catch fish, but in Caycedo’s installation it can also hold a demand: recognize the people and relationships that keep water alive.
The exhibition has ended. The underlying question has not. When a museum collects a work made with community tools, the people who supplied those tools must remain visible in the record. Spiral for Shared Dreams gives their names, places and labor room in the artwork. Its scale is impressive; its more consequential gesture is to make collaboration impossible to mistake for anonymous raw material.