3 October
16.30–18.30
Mindepartementet, Projektrummet
Slupskjulsvägen 26C
This presentation will intertwine a screening of Verses of Filthwith notes that both expand and have informed the work. The title refers to a pre-Hispanic mortuary chant called Tzocuicatl (chant of filth), which is part of a ritual rife with scatological allusions that accompanies the putrefaction of the body and later its cremation. The purpose of the ritual is to drain the stench and filth from a body and propitiate a catharsis for the pain caused by the death of a loved one. In Verses of Filth, a bastardized Cihuateteo[1] has become a scavenger/seeker digging up wasteland residues: body fragments and cultural debris. Along with a band of vultures, the scavenger recruits a brigade of arms that have been detached from their bodies and other underworld creatures seeking touch, pleasure, and revolt. In a Mesoamerican episteme, vultures connect the earth with the underworld by sticking their heads into dead bodies. These scavenger birds eat waste, decay and corpses and are considered purifying agents. The arms that rise from the grave raise their dismembered fists in protest. Still, they insist on seeking bonds of proximity with other arms: caressing, repairing, documenting, snapping, signing, and reading words that give an account of their existence.
The annotated screening will be followed by a conversation.
Naomi Rincón Gallardo (Born 1979). Lives and works between Oaxaca and Mexico City, Mexico.
From a decolonial-queer perspective, her critical-mythical worldmaking addresses the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings. Rincón Gallardo integrates an interest in theater games, popular music, Mesoamerican cosmologies, speculative fiction, vernacular festivities and crafts, decolonial feminisms and queer of color critique. She holds a BFA degree in Visual Arts from ENPEG La Esmeralda, Mexico, a MA degree in Education, Culture Language and Identity from Goldmiths University of London, UK, and a PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
Recent shows include: Sonnet of Vermin, Hayward Gallery, London (2024), Tzitzimime Trilogy, la Casa Encendida Madrid, 2023; Artes Mundi 10, Chapter, Cardiff (2023); Momenta Biennale de l’Image, 2023 Montreal; 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2022; 34th Bienal de São Paulo, 2021; Una Trilogía de Cuevas (A Trilogy of Caves), 2020, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; May your thunder break the sky, 2020, Kunstraum Innsbruck; 11 Berlin Biennale, 2020, Berlin; Heavy Blood, 2019, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City.
This event is an initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm). Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a visiting senior researcher at CAPIm at the Royal Institute of Art (Kungl. Konsthögskolan) in October and November.