Liste Art Fair Basel: Tomás Días Cedeño

PEANA is pleased to announce Tomás Díaz Cedeño's solo presentation at Liste.

Díaz Cedeño presents a series of base-relief panels made in low temperature red clay from Tzintzingareo, Michoacán; an area in México known for its traditional clay making techniques and vegetation. The panels showcased on the three walls of the booth act as fictional portraits of the landscape through the representation of vegetal, animal and anthropogenic motifs. Accompanying the panels, an aluminum grid covering the electrical cables on the floor exhibits eight glazed ceramic sculptures placed on their intersections, each sculpture holding a 5.5” screen displays videos from an overhead perspective of subtle actions of the body coming into contact with the ground and merging with local landscapes that are affected by the decomposition of the soil due to single-crop farming techniques implemented by multinational agricultural corporations that have invaded the state of Michoacán. Along the grid, extracts of an aboriginal poem referencing a myth of creation are inscribed, attesting to the naturalness of the synthetic in which rituals of preservation and survival are carried out.

This installation expands on a body of work developed by Díaz Cedeño, where he works with site-specific materials to create objects integrated within the landscape that evoke fictional settings and whose temporal origin cannot be clearly identified, as well, as a continuation of his investigation of natural cycles, as seen on his installation 1000 years (2021 New Museum Triennial, New York). This body of work by Tomás Díaz Cedeño is informed by the idea that ecology is ‘dark’ as proposed by Timothy Morton. It demands that we rethink and question the concepts of nature and ecology and our intimate interconnections with them.