Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Ixchel - Mayan Moon and Birth deity, 2021. From the series Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain.

Courtesy Mónica Alcázar-Duarte and Autograph ABP.

I visited Mónica Alcázar-Duarte’s first solo exhibition in the UK, Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain at Autograph in London about a month ago. The title left me pondering on the idea of clouds. A quick google search brings up results related to the modern use of the word: cloud computing, the cloud, a global network of servers that amasses vast amounts of data supported by software and digital architectures only accessible through the Internet. Pero a mi entender, las nubes también son un fenómeno meteorológico y metafórico. Cargadas siempre de agua y de naturaleza impermanente, estos algodones de azúcar en escala de grises adornan el cielo. A lo largo de la historia y a través de culturas, las nubes han simbolizado la residencia de deidades, elevación espiritual, transformación y vida. (1)

The title in Alcázar-Duarte’s exhibition played with the antithetical fact that new understandings of clouds lose the primary purpose of these. Witty, intelligent, multi-layered and complex, Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain continued Alcázar-Duarte’s long-standing exploration of prevailing systems of knowledge and how these are being transmitted, the human obsession with progress, and the impact it all has in the environment.

The exhibition juxtaposed three very distinct elements: a film, eleven self-portraits, and an installation around which everything else orbited.

‘U K’ux Kaj / Heart of sky, Mayan god of storms’ begins ‘Para entender el mapa del universo, hay que empezar por el principio, y para empezar por el principio, uno necesita fuego’ (2). Tu men tu laakal káaj yéetel k’aak’. Yéetel jump´éel k’aak’ jach óolak u k’askunt tu laakal (3). The film was narrated in Spanish and Mayan, a language native to the Yucatan Peninsula in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. It centred around the stingless bees Xunan-Kaab, cultivated by the Maya civilization more than 3,000 years ago. Also known as Regal Lady, these bees are imperilled due to the ever-expanding deforestation of the area. The short feature foregrounded their collective intelligence and knowledge system of communication and organisation, prompting us to explore what we could learn from these other-than-human beings. Bey uchak ik súut tik óol ka’ tik íilaj u jach k’a’abetil le kaabo’obo’. Tu men le kaabo’obo’ leeti’o’ob áato’on tik laaklo’on (4).

References to fire and bee communities were present again in the installation ‘T’aabal chukChuuk / Embers’. Un jardín de flores de metal anaranjado se erigía silenciosamente en el centro de la galería. 56 fleur-de-lis estaban colocadas cuidadosamente encima de una estructura hexagonal que asemejaba un panal de abejas (5). Fleur-de-lis are associated with royalty and virtue and was incorporated to the coat of arms of the Spanish king Felipe V, 1700-1759.

   Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Itzamná - Mayan Time deity, 2021. From the series Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain.

Courtesy Mónica Alcázar-Duarte and Autograph ABP.

The flowers were coated with copper foil, giving them their orange appearance. The choice of this metal wasn’t fortuitous but an active attempt to interrogate the large-scale mining practices of this valuable material in Central America since Spanish colonisation. Further, the flowers included faces and gestures present in Casta paintings, a genre developed in Mexico during the colony that presented up to 16 typologies of human races based on race-mixing. According to scholar Ilona Katzew [i] , Casta paintings not only abode by European ideas of the exotic Other; their system of classification stimulated racist beliefs against Indigenous and Black peoples that still prevail.

At the centre of the honeycomb structure, on the floor, there was, what seemed, a topographic map of the Yucatán peninsula. Con la ayuda de una aplicación de realidad aumentada en un dispositivo inteligente, un árbol cobraba vida, sugiriendo una nota esperanzadora de que no todo está perdido, si invocamos los saberes ancestrales (6).

   Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Kukulkan - Mayan Serpent deity, 2023. From the series Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain.

Courtesy Mónica Alcázar-Duarte and Autograph ABP.

Alcázar-Duarte used the decaying landscape of Derbyshire, birthplace of the industrial revolution, combined with lush green woodlands as a backdrop of 11 self-portraits. The artist also returned to systems of meaning and symbolism from Casta paintings, the fleur-de-lis, and copper. She re-enacted poses from the Casta paintings to paradoxically embody Mayan deities in a gesture of commemorating Indigenous ancestry. Fleur-de-lis and copper threads were present throughout. Seemingly, the symbol of the fleur-de-lis was seared into the skin of runaway slaves that were recaptured, particularly, in French colonies. Its appearance in the works in copper foil, possibly connected the mining of the metal with slavery and forced labour in Central America. The continued extraction of the raw material to date, which supports digital computing systems globally even in rural areas, was suggested with the addition of multiple copper strings to the surface of the photographs.

Nonetheless, in another twirl of hope, the artist threw a nod to the retrieval of Indigenous practices, by incorporating flowers to the masks she wore in many of the portraits. These reminisced the native flora of the Yucatán peninsula from which bee colonies collected nectar and pollinated.

La obra de Alcázar-Duarte se movía cómodamente a través de disciplinas y lenguajes. Con su trabajo, la artista recuperó simbologías, modos de entender el mundo y conocimientos indígenas, fusionando temporalidades en una presentación de la historia perpendicular (7). The project proposed a non-linear narrative that foregrounded simultaneity and circularity of time present in Mesoamerican cultures. It calls forth the idea of ‘pidginization’[ii] as described by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, a process that ‘proposes indigenised, syncretic ways of going forward’. Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain did not pose absolute answers to the big questions of our time; instead, Alcázar-Duarte asked: what gets classified and how? What are the systems used to create and maintain knowledge? What would happen should we retrieve the customs and practices of our ancestors?

For more information on Mónica's work, please visit https://www.monicaalcazarduarte.com/

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Ah-Muzen-Cab - Mayan deity of bees, 2023. From the series Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain.

Courtesy Mónica Alcázar-Duarte and Autograph ABP.

Author’s note:

This review plays with language. It mainly combines the use of English and Spanish, the author’s and artist’s mother language, as mixing up the two languages is how they communicate among themselves. The insertion of sentences in Mayan references Alcázar-Duarte’s effort to retrieve the language of her ancestors. Ultimately, this text attempts to incorporate the notion of pidginization to the exhibition review.

(1) But, as I understand them, clouds are also a meteorological and metaphorical phenomenon. Carrying always water and of impermanent nature, these cotton candies in greyscale adorn the sky. Throughout history and across cultures, clouds have symbolized the residence of deities, spiritual elevation, transformation and life.
(2) To understand the map of the universe, one must start at the beginning, and to start at the beginning, one needs fire.
(3) Because it all started with fire. With a fire that almost destroyed everything.
(4) That’s how we realized how important bees are. Because the bees were the ones that saved us all.
(5) A garden of orange metal flower stood quietly at the centre of the gallery. 56 fleur-de-lis were carefully placed on top of an hexagonal structure that resembled a honeycomb.
(6) With the help of an augmented reality app on a smart device, a tree came to life, suggesting a hopeful note that not all is lost, if we invoke ancient knowledge.
(7) Alcázar-Duarte comfortably circulated through disciplines and languages. With her work, she recovered symbols, ways of understanding the world and indigenous knowledge, fusing temporalities in a perpendicular presentation of history.

__________

[i] Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-century Mexico.

[ii] Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating.