Naomi Rincón Gallardo at La Casa Encendida

Artist: Naomi Rincón Gallardo

Exhibition title: Tzitzimime Trilogy

Curated by: Pakui Hardware

Venue: La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain

Date: June 16 – September 17, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, La Casa Encendida, Madrid and the respective copyright holders

The Tzitzimime were female deities in Aztec mythology. As such, they were related to fertility and rainfall, yet feared for their ability to descend to Earth and devour men during solar eclipses, when it was feared that darkness would prevail forever. Powerful Mesoamerican deities play central roles in Rincón Gallardo’s films, in which pre-Hispanic cosmology meets queer futurity in a bleak landscape of planetary cataclysm. Her films’ characters are born out of local and planetary ecological emergencies, current and historic injustice and patriarchal oppression, carrying no illusion of a “bright” future:

Adapted to the ruins

We don’t demand a future

We metabolize toxins

one more dose of cyanide!

Deep in their political and critical messages, the films, however, don’t stay in the dry land of theory. On the contrary, their explosive surrealist aesthetics, music, performances, DIY costumes, sculptures and humour generate potent fables of “staying with the trouble” in creative, non-normative ways. While pre-colonial deities roam around wastelands and uninhabitable zones—produced by the capitalist ongoing greedy extraction of resources—they befriend animals, non-human creatures, fragmented body parts and underworld characters. Together, they search for ways of resilience, resurrection and re-existence in this cataclysmic world. Embodied pleasure, desire and solidarity are their weapons of survival.

The Tzitzimime Trilogy, in which the worlds of the dead, the undead and the living merge together without any visible boundaries, ends with Eclipse—an event of cosmic proportions dreaded by people in the past. An eclipse heralds a culmination to the multiple endings of worlds that are accelerating and intensifying in an era of collapse. The Sun is devoured by the Moon, darkness triumphs and the Tzitzimime descent upon Earth to eat up men—it is the planet itself that takes on an action of cosmic self-defence.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Tzitzimime Trilogy, 2023, exhibition view, La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Courtesy of the ©artist and ©La Casa Encendida