This exhibition shows some of the landscape’s attire. Each of them escorted by a ghost or a specter.
The observation of landscape as a political alternative.
The secret of the hills, conversations between cacti and the hidden life of stones. Through different pop figures, by means of a televisual imaginary, of the eternally foreign tripper, I pretend to articulate certain apparitions in a country with several skies, where we might not be asking the correct questions to the horizon, because the answers might be on the soil’s humidity.
With this, I do not pretend to romanticize a landscape where I was not born in, but to fictionalize the hills’ free will. In the show, different characters born from fiction are disposed, inspired in a promise’s nostalgia of an agricultural country which turned into a maquila and a field of neoliberal experimentation.
The representation of the Mexican countryside in the 20th century is still roaming as a ghost of the never fulfilled revolutionary promise. Today, more than half of the Mexican skies are licensed, as if the stones or our ancestors-plateau did not have free will. Mexico’s landscape has hidden guerrillas, drug dealers and movie heroes. At the same time, The Fog has sheltered the State from coups, tucking in the real children of the landscape, those who the Mother-State of Stone has termed as others historically.
I am interested in imagining the abyss where characters enliven from their sculptural and literary condition. Where at some point, what underlies in the landscape accomplishes that the imaginary achieves to dominate and transform imagination.
In The Marshland of Souls a saguaro appears, the same saguaro which observed Wayne’s western films, the one which is still there, watching how the subsoil is pinched, bought and stripped. The same which had fake saguaros produced, posing as a fern, posing as governor, to make us think it was them to make us think we were citizens with a point of view, when we are nothing in front of them: The Hills.
…the answer is on the soil’s humidity.”
- Paloma Contreras Lomas
