SER MONTAÑA
GENERAL INFO
- LOCATION
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Travesía Cuatro CDMX, México
- DATE
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DEC. 2022
- TYPOLOGY
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EXHIBITION
- ARTISTS
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Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Valeria Mata and Infrasonica
“Ser Montaña” was an exhibition that brought together three artistic and curatorial practices to explore how territory itself acquires a voice in the face of dispossession, colonization, and the violence of extractivism.
Through speculative fiction, interspecies communication or active listening, the works of Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Valeria Mata and Infrasonica dialogue with each other about how territories are constituted as entities that are part of the everyday life of their inhabitants and ecosystems, as well as their associated materials and imaginaries. Through different formats –video, installation, online conversation–, all of the works understand the complexity of certain specific places, and how their narrative must include, as protagonists, other non-human beings. From this new constellation, links emerge that exceed the way in which a mountain is usually thought of; as an object, as an image, as land that can be exploited, or as a natural space that must be preserved.
Installation view at Travesia Cuatro, CDMX
Sound, the guiding thread of the exhibition, gives voice to the hill, answers the warning of the bird (Serinus Canaria) through its song -or its silence-, and explores the relationship between the perceptible and the material. Ecology is thus linked to the audible, to the hidden, and the sensitive, including frequencies undetectable to human ears, such as the movement of tectonic plates, to narratives and life, configuring a complex landscape of interdependent relationships. Listening is placed at the center of the exhibition as a radical ecological and artistic practice, recovering the echoes of the landscapes of a wounded planet in order to think of new ways of cohabiting its territories.
Resiliencia Tlacuache by Naomi Rincón Gallardo. Video HD, 16’, 2019
Resucitar a un canario, notas y materiales de una investigación en curso by Valeria Mata. Installation, 2022
ARTISTS
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Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Visual artist living and working between Mexico City and Oaxaca. From a decolonial-cuir perspective, her research-driven critical-mythical dreamlike worldmakings address the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings. In her work she integrates her interests in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique. She completed the PhD in Practice Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
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Valeria Mata
Valeria Mata is a researcher and social anthropologist. Her work has focused on the intersections between artistic practices and anthropology, the political and cultural dimension of food and the anthropology of travel and tourism. She has coursed studies at the Complutense University in Madrid, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. From 2015 until 2019 she directed the project MUEVE, a roaming platform for independent publications from Latin America.
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Infrasonica
Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western sonic arts and cultures. We record, analyze and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations. The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.
