“I am very invested in that sociocosmic space, narrated by humans but woven out of animal agencies, deities, cosmic beings and potencies intervening in everyday reality”
In one of Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s early video experiments, Utopías Piratas (Bootleg Utopias, 2012), one can already identify the nutrients that would later grow in the dark, deep, moist and fertile soil from which the Mexican artist’s eccentric, equal parts funny and wise storytelling emerges. It’s a series of music videos inspired by interviews with members of JAR (Revolutionary Anti-authoritarian Youth, from the initials in Spanish), an umbrella group for punk activists created in 1993 to coordinate their participation in the 25th anniversary protest of the Tlatelolco student massacre of 1968. The following year, the groundbreaking Zapatista uprising transformed JAR into a collective acting in solidarity with Indigenous communities and their struggle for autonomy from the state. For Rincón Gallardo, and for many others of her generation, the revolt was a moment of political awakening and social effervescence. She was fifteen years old at that time, and as she describes over a lengthy video call, seated on the terrace of her studio right outside Oaxaca City, trailer trucks roaring by: “That moment catalysed so many of my lifelong interests. It was a political epiphany: farmers, labourers, Indigenous movements, students, academics, all coming together in support of Zapatismo, arriving at the conclusion that Mexico was a territory of mismatched, unjust realities.”
Utopías Piratas is a series of vignettes in which different members of jar are played by actors – decked out in goth makeup, black leather and spikes galore – singing, in dishevelled schools and run-down city buses, songs about their cultivated hatred of authority, of wanting something opposite to the mainstream way of life. The punks quote Walter Benjamin, sing about supporting the resistance against the US occupation of Iraq and the liberated autonomous zones in Mexico’s Chiapas state. A definite highlight is a postpunk, synth-pop song about “the glamour of darkness”, of wearing all black to contrast with one’s white-plastered visage, seeking the “spiritual in the gothic”.
Rincón Gallardo’s work has continued to build on such exuberance, her worldbuilding still filled with pithy, clever and playful lyrics, sung to lively music by characters dressed in costumes handmade by herself and a large group of collaborators and artisans. Her characters are usually stand-ins for anti-mainstream, anti-Western and often anti-state perspectives. In Tzitzimime Trilogy (2021–23) – named after the Mexica fertility deities/stars that were demonised by Catholic colonisers, and shown last year at La Casa Encendida in Madrid – the artist presents a series of characters that embody different Mexica beings and archetypes to propose a new reading, and perhaps even an escape from – as the lyrics in the video put it – “the brutal continuum of premature obituaries” that shape contemporary Mexico and its landscape. In the trilogy’s opener, Verses of Filth (2021), a silver-clad Cihuateteo – a woman honoured as a warrior after perishing during birth, and a tzitzimime herself – befriends a band of vultures while they are scavenging for body parts, which leads her to a meeting with other tzitzimime goddesses, and ultimately to the discovery of a realm of underworld creatures – sensual monsters preening themselves while making guttural metal-style vocals to voice their demands: “dispossess yourself, bristle, shake, twitch, shudder!” These creatures are joined by the desiring, enlivened dead, who clamour for a “residual uprising of decapitated fists” as they literally emerge from the ground. The delightful second part of the trilogy, Sonnet of Vermin (2022), which was shown at the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year, represents the survival of ‘undesirable’ creatures – snakes, scorpions and bats, and a group of frog-children – as they adapt to environmental toxicity and attempt solidarity in the midst of contagious upheaval; its conclusion, Eclipse (2023), in which the tzitzimimes finally claim victory over Earth by devouring the sun and letting a primogenial chaos reign, was shown earlier this year at her Mexican gallery, Peana, and in 2023 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Rincón Gallardo’s characters are always assemblages of both materials and identities, piling on timelines and life-forms as well as all kinds of found objects reformatted as DIY costumes. This was already evident in Ocotepec Odyssey (2014), another early video in which Rincón Gallardo remixes feminist pedagogies, hallucinogenics, monastic psychoanalysis and alternatives to institutionalised schooling, in a nonlinear narrative centred around the spirit of Austrian theologian Ivan Illich and his CIDOC (the Intercultural Documentation Centre he founded in 1965 in Cuernavaca), and where Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire – whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a vital influence for the artist – also spent some time. In it, as the artist puts it on her website, ‘a galactic queer axolotl warns us about the counterproductive effects of modernity, and a transgender priest reads a mass and lulls to sleep their fetus-monks’. In practice, it looks as out-of-this-world as it sounds: Rincón Gallardo herself plays the axolotl in a shiny cosmonaut outfit; “nobody finds satisfaction, insatiable”, she sings, moving with swimminglike movements across the sky, while her chorus of triangle-wearing humanoids sing about institutions distancing themselves from the virtuous intentions that birthed them; the aforementioned priest lulls a monk-foetus, still attached to an umbilical cord, with a song that perfectly encapsulates Sylvia Marcos’s inter-dualistic ‘Mesoamerican perceptual device’ – another touchstone for the artist, which allows for reading reality as a series of overlapping, combining and unfolding dualities, of contradictory and fluid opposites, where a subject can never be a unified ‘one’, but a relational hodgepodge of everything it comes in contact with – as they croon about the “the cold in the heart of heat, the ignorance at the heart of knowledge”.
Rincón Gallardo rolls all of her influences into a ‘contextual practice’ – one in which it is indispensable to understand her surroundings, what is urgent, what is existentially affecting you and those around you, and the land. As she says, “It is a practice rooted in the place directly beneath your feet, conducive to transformation and movement”, but also seeking to understand that which lies beyond the threshold of the merely human. All of this is clear in her latest video (live action, sometimes involving a green screen), Dung Kinship (2024), shown at the Toronto Biennial last year, in which a bike-riding fly cruises around a drought-cursed land, digging into the subsoil looking for the precious liquid, water. At some point she arrives at a pretty, wooded area where children-fungi sprout, revealing to her – in adorable amateur child-chorus voices – that her mission is not reproductive but excavatory. The fly is then transported, via a faeces-ball rolled by a dung beetle, to the underground lair of the matron of filth, a wonderful, seductive, neon-pink-nippled character, who wears CDs just as Tlazoltéotl – the dirt-eating Mexica deity of both impurity and purification – wore her ear-gauges. The goddess further elucidates on the generative powers of putrefaction, and on death as the grounds for new forms of living. The fly leaves the underworld only to find the crushing boots of a military march, accompanied by the pathetic, high-pitched singing of a voice decrying the “bulimic patriarchal machine” of the nationstate “eating its children only to puke them out – in a demented bellicose tantrum, dying only to carry on killing until the end”. Where hope appears lost, the children-fungi and their scavenging vulture friends return to remind the fly of her fate. As they scurry away again, the fly continues rolling shit with her dung-beetle friend. The work of survival and rebirth must go on.
If Rincón Gallardo’s storytelling is never linear, it is because she is committed to a form of thought, of learning and showing, that is shaped as a spiral. It is the spiral temporality of Mesoamerican myth, in which past, present and diverse approaches to knowledge and history coexist in an always interlaced reality. The artist’s research usually leads her to define the guiding axis of each of her videos, which she says, involves “overlapping the mythic temporality of Mesoamerican knowledge with our collapsing present, to create a tension between them, between the available wisdoms of a subjugated past and the necropolitics and fascism of our present”. Her characters go on journeys without clear beginnings or ends, instead digging themselves deeper, exploring the wombs and subworlds of the subconscious, the digestive apparatus of Earth and the spiritual world. In her words: “I’m trying to get a reading on what is at stake, existentially, in the place that I’m standing in. Dung Kinship has everything to do with poop, it’s about drought in Oaxaca and having to use a dry toilet, about composting and those daily habits. I link all of that to the larger issues that give rise to my indignation, and I use that as a force to mobilise, to create.” In order to turn that indignation into something more expansive, Rincón Gallardo seeks to link that energy, of the experiential and domestic, to Mesoamerican epistemes, many of which have the wondrous ability to interconnect the daily trials and joys of life to the larger forces of the material and immaterial cosmos: “I am very invested in that sociocosmic space, narrated by humans but woven out of animal agencies, deities, cosmic beings and potencies intervening in everyday reality.”
Her relationship with more academic theory, which permeates all her work in equally perceptible and digestible forms, is also related to this fundamental rootedness of her work: “Theory is only relevant as it passes through the body, through the visceral, relational dimensions of reality, as it is severed from the efficiency and hygiene of instrumental reason – I despise technopositivism and I’m only interested in theory that becomes dance, sweat, that’s related to convivial processes, the stickiness of dealing with other emotional and erotic energies, cooperation and conflict.” In Dung Kinship, as in most of her pieces, this translates into palpable collaborative relationships, in which every performer, song and costume adds to Rincón Gallardo’s unique skill for tackling hard truths – like the necropolitics and fascism of our present – mixing decolonial and neomaterialist theory to get results that are candid and unpretentious, and never condescending. It is in that sense that the journey is a spiral, or a rhizome, and never the hero’s journey of individual trials and tribulations that leads to capital-K knowledge. Rincón Gallardo’s protagonists are hardly heroes. They always share the spotlight with dozens of other creatures, with hills, agave plants and plushy opossums, with disembodied hands poking from the ground out of desire and resistance, all of that narrated and accompanied by the most unexpected mixtures of musical genres. Yes, the disembodied arms that inhabit her version of the Oaxacan hills are sometimes reading Sara Ahmed and Ileana Diéguez, but that is just another wink to her audience, another gesture of generosity, of opening up her references, rendering them not only transparent but approachable, while still funny and exciting, in their absurdity, to watch for people of any age or background.
Against the techno-progressive ideas of the singular hero, Rincón Gallardo prefers to focus on the relational mappings of specific landscapes, such as the rural areas of Mexico State and the hills of Oaxaca, and on natural elements as much as the political oppression and violence that shape them. Her characters burrow into ravaged landscapes, they dive into dark caves. “Caves are the Mesoamerican homes of the deities of the night and water, the access to the underworld, the mouths and bellies of reality,” she says. “There are so many mouths in my videos, so many cracks and holes and cavities in the lands and in the bodies, thresholds to mucus and interiority – they evoke refuge, hideouts, clandestine spots, dive bars – I connect the nightlife, the bar to the cave, to me they’re both about collective ritualism.”
The erotic, desire-fuelled aspects of that ritualism are also important to Rincón Gallardo. She cares about queer theory – or cuir, as it is known in Latin American spaces – only as far as it reflects the ‘theory in the flesh’ of activist Cherríe Moraga: cuir as the know-how to disassemble hegemonic, normative structures of our ways of life, to enact new ways of existing. Cuir is an essential element of Rincón Gallardo’s work, and more than that, it is a praxis at the centre of her life. Cuir matters in its encounters with decolonial theory, antiracism and nonwhite feminisms because sexuality, desire and dissidence are not exempt from the power dynamics of class and race. As the artist says: “Queer theory and decoloniality don’t necessarily enjoy a smooth dialogue, it’s always full of contradictions – but there’s something about cuirness and how it resonates with decolonial imperatives, in its searching for different forms of desire and existence, of relating with the nonhuman – I very much want a cuir ecology, of human and nonhuman assemblages, toxic matter, minerals, subjects in constant transformation.”
Rincón Gallardo’s work is a call for a complex understanding of life, in all of its multiplicity, in its endless mystery and its inability to be contained and rationalised. She reminds me that so many of those holes in our Mexican territory are not only caves or mines, but clan- destine burial sites – “and the dead resist and insist too, they manifest themselves because they have unfinished relations”. Hers is a pedagogy of agitation, of that which continues, and will continue, to rise from the soil.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s exhibition Planetary Convulsions is on view at Kadist, San Francisco, through 2 August
Gaby Cepeda is a writer based in Mexico City
From the May 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
