Pequod Co. in collaboration with curator Lorena Peña Brito and Proyecto Y, is pleased to present Tierra de pocos. Teatralidades y farsas, an exhibition that proposes an urgent look at the tensions between body, landscape and power in the art scene of Mérida, Yucatán.

This heat clouds both eyes and limbs, clothing rubbing against skin that constantly stretches and relaxes, like our political intentions, our limits in public life.It becomes a vaporous haze that settles beneath the folds of skin, in the armpits,across the chest. We breathe it in as tiny beads of sweat, we smell it whether we want to or not—under the sun’s glare, in gyms, on the dance floor of a bar crowded with English speakers and Latinos of many accents. This temperature feels like a burden when it should not. Sun and landscape seem at odds when hordes arrive, drawn by morning dew, by jungle humidity, by the patina on old buildings and the pavement that reflects light and blinds passersby, merchants, and tourists alike. These degrees Celsius take on different textures: in the droplets of water on each other’s faces, in the dead skin clinging to underwear, and on the perineum of those who dance and those who pour the drinks.

We pretend that the body’s reactions do not exist. Damp clothes, sticky faces framing genuine brotherly laughter and forced smiles, both part of the working day. Fragility cannot be summoned at will; it demands an irascible essence, a natural talent for vulnerability, and a readiness to trample whatever remains excessively central: the ego, European culture, the phallic, the anthropological. We confront staged scenes from the shadows, then swarm over ways of life that refuse to slip away. We answer the theatrics of a territory shaped by dispossession and extractivism, pressing our asses and the soles of our feet against the burning concrete, against the wasteland, against heteronormative control—standing in the middle of an artificial lake, becoming eagles that spit on themselves just to touch the sky.

Everyone comes to see the ruins—the vestiges of another time. To sit within Mexican architecture and admire the crafts, saying, “How beautiful these techniques are, right? How beautiful this fire pit is. How beautiful this feeling of being spiritual, of connecting with Mother Earth and Mother Nature… and your mother’s shell.” What a powerful scene: I feel alive; let’s take a group photo, and after a few drinks, share a kiss of three or four, an electric jolt to remind us of our blood pumping. It is said—so said a gentleman, as always—that in Mesoamerican cultures, the natives created plays (not the kind of danceable shows staged at hotel theatres) built on the suggestion, the evocation, of the reality of their environment and of their audience. These were acts of resistance, through which indigenous peoples and nations processed and addressed the realities they faced, using their own references and languages. Later, the Spanish prohibited these works. Here, in this space, which we open by stretching the distance of our physicalities to build a centre from what is scarce—our generation and its guides—at least nothing is forbidden. And so we can create our own version of Farsa, or these farsitas, as another gentleman once said. Because presence is the only thing we truly have left, along with our complex and diverse identities, and the power of our own image: the tanned leather, the mark of a sun that is not here. The space that forms between us is a land for the few,. and of a select few who choose themselves.

-Lorena Peña Brito. Curator

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Artists

Max Castañón

Ximena Carrillo

Yael de Gorostegui

Melissa Gabriela Aguilar