Although humans walk on the earth, we are often unaware of the world beneath our feet, geological, animal, or plant, nor of the implications between the political and social aspects of the land itself, intertwined in the eternal cycle of life/death, as a resistance between the perpetual colonial past and the current necrocapitalist regime. 

Naomi Rincón Gallardo, a visual artist and Mexican researcher born in the late seventies, who resides and works between Oaxaca and Mexico City, is very aware of what it means to step on the land. In her projects, she presents dreamlike and critical-mythological worlds as forms of expression, with a personal and unmistakable style in her way of mixing techniques and disciplines. She incorporates into her work an interest in theatrical games, popular music, noise art, the baroque aesthetics of queer cinema from the eighties, Mesoamerican cosmologies, music videos, speculative fiction, the plasticity of festivities and vernacular crafts, decolonial feminisms, and queer/colored criticism, among many other inspirations and tributes that emerge from her work.

In Hedor, the artist takes us on a psychedelic odyssey between the human and non-human, between the mythology of ancestral goddesses and the violence of a war state, but viewed through the kinship relationships of decomposing beings that nourish the subsoil. An installation where various sculptural characters related to the narrative of her new videographic production Filiación Abono (Dung Kinship), accompany the audience on a musical digestive journey through the subsoil, the mineral, the mycelium, and the unconscious. 

The protagonist of this tale is a fly that, among trash, waste, and debris, embarks on a hallucinatory journey through the forest where children-fungi, who grow with manure, catch her and reveal an epiphany before letting her fall into the hells where the decomposed and the dead dwell: her mission is not reproductive but excavatory. The fly, in her drift, becomes part of a dung ball of a beetle after her spiral fall, transporting her to the cave of a bastard version of Tlazolteotl, the matron of filth, garbage, and excrement. There, she will also find a Xochipili go-go dancer who advocates pleasure underground, revealing hidden information about the history of espionage and imperialism. Together, they revel in the generative decomposition process that occurs beneath a territory plagued by war and military domination where drones buzz and a martial march resounds. An exit into the reality of contemporary conflicts, under an unpleasant smell, where violence and death, unfortunately, are part of our daily lives.

Agustín Pérez Rubio