Reports - Venecia - Italy Mexico

Lorena Tabares Salamanca

Reading time: 6 minutes

A
A

30.05.2022

Until the Songs Spring. Echoes on the Collective Presence in the Mexican Pavilion between disturbed times and technologies

Mexican Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale

Hasta que los cantos broten [Until the Songs Spring] is the common denominator of Mexico’s participation for the eighth time in the national pavilions format of the Venice Biennale. This title is an allusion to Temilotzin Icuic, a poem by Temilotzin of Tlatelolco, an Aztec military strategist and composer of songs. In the Nahuatl sense of the word, he is a poet.

The curatorship of Catalina Lozano and Mauricio Marcin, as its name indicates, proposes a detour to the individual agent: either of the artist, of what is exclusive to a single genre, of the usual centers of production, and, even more, of what is merely human. This bloom of songs announces that, in spite of the circumstances, collective seeds will appear at any moment. What are we waiting for to hear or pronounce them? The speaking beings of these various Mexicos, unknown because of the homogenizing effect of a racial and nationalist policy, and those who for more than five hundred years have suffered the colonial and neo-colonial effects that live among phantasmagorias, invisibilizations and echoes where the cries and screams are filtered through. I recall the words of a quote Lozano herself makes in The Cure (2018): “Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I am afraid of them.” The relationships between life and death, the invisible and the visible appear in the twilight of this modernity as ghosts.

With my emotional radar on the other side of the ocean, I tried to follow simultaneously the biennial and the multiple caravans against the ecocide that is taking place in several areas of Mexico. While the inauguration of the pavilions was taking place and artists like Cecilia Vicuña were reciting songs for the memory of the rivers that are dying out, in Mexico both illegal groups and police agencies were fiercely repressing and persecuting the communities fighting against the contamination of aquifers and the dredging of wells. Large transnationals and mining companies permeate their own neoliberal policies with armed strategies to displace the inhabitants of communal lands. What are we trying to bloom without water? In recent weeks, hundreds of people have been violently displaced in Chiapas, particularly in the communities of San Gregorio and Aldama; settlements of Triqui communities have been violently raised in front of Bellas Artes in Mexico City; and the requests for the restitution of communal lands demanded by the Wixárica through a walk of more than 900 kilometers from Jalisco to the CDMX have been ignored. In this panorama it is more urgent than ever to re-enchant the world, to take collective decisions as a constituent force.

Mexico has its headquarters in the Arsenal, a historic building dating back to the 13th century, and shares its location with pavilions such as the one for the United Arab Emirates. Wanting to meet a demanding schedule of openings, I walked for six to eight hours inside that naval factory. With an unprecedented recovery, this space amalgamates its own ruins and the common mold of the ports: Venice is a symbol of sumptuous decadence. Every two years it becomes a pseudo-summit of metaphorical and political negotiations of realities that are impossible to reterritorize[1]; it keeps among its layers the subtle echo of a war factory where the pieces of the guest artists Mariana Castillo Deball, Santiago Borja, Fernando Palma Rodríguez and Naomi Rincón Gallardo rest.

This pavilion resounds in its four points. At its imaginary peak, is a dark room that divides the general hall from the unwanted species or Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s video installation entitled Soneto de alimañas (2022). The sounds of her sharp script overlap with the exterior screeching of Fernando Palma’s installation Tetzahuitl (2019), a techno-chamanic vertical force that shakes 43 dresses in the air and lets them fall to the floor to the rhythm of the old coyote’s hands. These forces, or habits without bodies, rest on the engraved floor, next to three other framed linocuts by Mariana Castillo Deball—the entire installation is called Calendar Fall Away (2022). In a broad framework, this exhibition has opposing rhythms: in Castillo Deball’s case, the crowded motifs that appear near the top become more sparse by the time they reach the front door of the pavilion. The collaboration between Santiago Borja and the weavers of El Camino de Los Altos. in Chiapas, that concluded in Talel (2022) gathers 23 looms spun by eleven collaborators, just like the 23 chromosomes of the human body. The looms are a focus of connection with the earth, as their installation adapts to the force of gravity. On the ends of each loom hang heavy objects such as rocks, coke bottles, logs or candles, some less rigid such as corn or hair combs. It is disturbing, as well as attractive, that in order to have an understanding of space it is necessary to be in constant movement: leaning, shrinking, sitting or moving from one corner to another.

What is the length of the halo that embraces this exhibition? I stick to my status as a visitor for the purposes of this curatorship in order to avoid falling into the pessimism caused by dead-end labyrinths, it will depend on the steps we take to organize ourselves as a society to be able to delimit our own path of response. If the question is to ask ourselves about bodies, property and productions outside capitalism, what we witness here, on the contrary, leads us to the constant and voracious clash; that is, there is no other epistemology that in its resistance is not being attacked by a system that solidifies the opportunities of escape of the “hydra”, paraphrasing the Zapatista Movement to name the enemy—also said by Mauricio Marcin in a recent interview. To that extent, I believe that this space, mediated by a State organism that extols the revolutionary Zapatismo of the past or figures like Benito Juarez, is cautious when it comes to openly present who and how are actually doing reconstitutive epistemologies that are avowedly anti-capitalist. What about an art that invites to talk face to face with others who ignore the centrality of their governments?

On the other hand, the influence of capital on societies is more than real. What is amalgamated between the insistence of an ancestrality, the weight of capitalism and colonization latent in that trench we call Mexico? Their absences and at the same time their presences are amalgamated. The rupture of the calendar, the graphic technologies of the codices and the catechization of the inhabitants of these lands in Mariana Castillo Deball is symmetrical with the disturbed times and the ironies that Naomi Rincón Gallardo presents with five centuries of difference, where the bugs or accumulations of excrement seek how. Technologies are also presences, in their appearance and functionality times are compressed. If we look around us at the tools we use, we will see that they contain the inventions of successive decades or centuries. There is a back and forth between radio transmitters, precarious animal-machines or large wool textiles where the needle or the loom was its most archaic principle. In another case, the bodies of those we cannot forget emerge in their very absence, we refer to the 43 disappeared of Ayotzinapa, or other 43 beings coming to life.

Hasta que los cantos broten transports the contradictions and epistemic collisions to another point in this sphere. Capitalism appears as a devastating force of those who live and think differently, yet this exhibition also becomes a borderline space to understand the existence in resistance of ancestral and future visions of this present time. Presences, absences, excrescences, escaped times and revealing reproductions of existence become multiple lenses to distort and fix our own existence. Is this an experience about those who rebel to disappear?

Notes

  1. The structure of national participations—at times nationalistic—is more obsolete than ever as it has become a political anathema of censures and silences in the midst of an ongoing war conflict and others in the making in the South Pacific. This anathema is permissive of many of the political-military coalitions that abuse more fragile power structures. I mean to say that in this small-scale tracing of our geo-sphere in Venice, the economies of death and categorical constructions of those of us born there, the role of the neoliberal-state is today more than ever that of the division of social groups and the economy of oppression, which collides strongly with the reimagining of organized societies outside of these political apparatuses. In the navels of the world, contradiction is eliminated, while for collective forces it becomes a way of walking.

Comments

There are no coments available.

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date