ARCHIVE  (2015-2018)

of PREVIOUS PROJECTS​

​PROJECTS

BIO

• April - May 2021 : Canción Caníbal is part of the group exhibition "Picking out images from my soul's eye" curated by Verena Melgarejo-Weinandt and Andrea Keppler in DISTRICT Berlin
• October 2021 : Group exhibition, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas in Matamoros, Mexico

CANCIÓN CANÍBAL​

one-channel video
2020

part of the series KARAOKE READINGS

Es ist unser Brauch,
die Person, die wir lieben,
aufzuessen.

Canción Caníbal, Gloria Anzaldúa

There are extensive instances in which Gloria Anzaldúa writes about the limits of the body and how when confronted to extraordinary situations, it adapts by merging with the landscape, developing mystical strategies, and growing new organs in order to coexist with violently devastated spaces existing at the Mex/US border.

The ‘adapting’ body is often womxn gendered, speaks in tongues, it sometimes has gills, turns into a serpent, has erotic relationships to ghosts, understands the air and the sea, or eats lovers. A recurrent form in her work is the Aztec moon deity Coyolxauhqui, depicted by Gloria as a woman cut in pieces, in a constant process of re-articulation of the body/self.

This video piece imagines an ‘adapting’ body that dives into some of the concerns felt for the ecologies of both the Río Bravio/Río Grande and Rhein border rivers, where the artist lives, and where different extractivist and colonizing activities continue to consume the very flesh, bone and fluid of Earth. What these activities produce is an erotic close-to-hybrid womxn entity, who begins to take concrete, mundane actions that help her and her species, inhabit a new environment.

One of her questions is, why would you consume who you love?

The video is an elaboration of the KARAOKE READINGS series. The artist collaborates with the border-based mexican musician Luna León, in the musicalizing and karaoke-izing of the poem Canción Caníbal, by Gloria.

Video still © 2021 Paloma Ayala, All rights reserved