Their Silhouettes Bristled with Razors, Naomi Rincón Gallardo's first solo show at PEANA, showcases the video Eclipse (2023) alongside sculptures and watercolors that echo its characters and narratives. Eclipse is part of the Tzitzimime Trilogy—together with Verses of Filth (2021) and Sonnet of Vermin (2022)—where the artist crafts a world sown with dismembered bodies, scattered limbs rising in defiance against the violence that tore them apart. Her allies inhabit the underworld: vermin, scavengers, feared and rejected entities of modernity, where death is buried, but the violence that spawns it persists. Within different systems of worldmaking, these beings serve as purifiers, healers, and restorers of balance disrupted by violence. The Tzitzimime, skeletal figures tied to cataclysmic events, linger over a Mexico ravaged by the myriad violences afflicting both human and non-human lives.
Eclipse envisions the Tzitzimime descending at the moment the Moon devours the Sun. A headless figure marches to a military cadence—a headless dance of fractured humanity—while its commanding mandate begins to unravel. A group of Itzpapálotl (obsidian butterflies with razor-sharp wings) summon the presence of a Mometzopinque, a she-vampire-turkey figure shedding her human legs in a haze of purple smoke that evokes contemporary feminist demonstrations. She seeks blood in the night, finding it in the neck of the headless figure who, in senseless rage, has burned the blooming tree—the world's axis—and also spilled the blood of the butterfly beings. This blood, as an offering, is meant to restore order—but not the patriarchal one.
In a conversation I held with Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar*, we discussed how the colonial, capitalist, racist, and heteropatriarchal modernity had captured the imagination, rendering it difficult to envision a world beyond capitalism —Fredric Jameson’s famous statement that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As Escobar notes, this system perpetuates an "ontology of separation," rooted in binaries that sustain the logic of Western modernity, and contrasts this with a more favorable "relational ontology" informed by those resisting modernity’s oppressive constructs from their territories.
Coloniality deploys naturalization as a mechanism aiming to embed its ideological constructs—such as the nation-state—into our minds and bodies as if they were innate realities. Yet these constructs stem from a foundational violence that fuels the machinery of hegemonic dominance, sustained by racism, accumulation, and the escalating militarization of the planet in favor of economic interests. Against the oppression and necropower of these structures, Naomi’s work offers a cuir, feminist, and decolonial imaginary. Her excessive narrative forms—exceeding their own frameworks of reference—draw from a "bastardized" Mesoamerican imaginary and are animated by technologies and collaborative methodologies with musicians, artisans, performers, and others that delve into their potential for realization.
Naomi’s practice departs from the brutal realities of the historical construct called Mexico. It reclaims the existence and re-existence of territories that defy the logic of the nation-state . She deploys a series of tools that articulate in her work the imaginaries and knowledge of Mesoamerican peoples, queer and feminist thought and struggles, and decolonial and anti-extractive epistemologies. Together, they challenge the hegemonic capture of imagination, conjuring alternative presents and futures that acknowledge the violence inflicted on bodies and territories while reclaiming the agency of those buried by the machinery of progress. Through music, poetry, and pleasure, the beings—human and non-human—that inhabit Naomi’s pluriverses celebrate their euphoric existence, deemed abject by the colonial modernity's uni-verse.
- Catalina Lozano
* Catalina Lozano, Arturo Escobar, "A World Where Many Worlds Fit In," in Pivô Magazine #2 (São Paulo: Pivô Arte e Pesquisa, 2021), pp. 26–41.
