Escribir un libro, poner un huevo (Writing a Book, Laying an Egg) presents a new body of work that delves into themes such as labor time, writing, and processes of production. The title of this exhibition by Alan Sierra draws a comparison between the act of writing—often mythologized as something that takes place in the solitude of a dark attic—and the laying of an egg, which is instead periodic and ordinary. The pieces echo a long process of inquiry into artistic creation that we have seen in previous works such as Fábula encinta (2022). This exhibition expands on ideas surrounding the figure of the creative genius and the miracle of life through the egg and the hen, while also unsettling notions of the body and labor.
Alan has conceived the exhibition from the perspective of the frustrated writer: one who, despite the adolescent dream of becoming a novelist, fails to produce a book born from a moment of divine inspiration. The outcome is merely a collection of fragments that never coalesce into “the great work.” In Fábula encinta, Alan had already explored this fragmentation as a mode of writing. From a queer perspective, he wrote about a kind of pregnancy that awaits pieces of life as artworks—works that do not rely on the idea of genius, but rather stem from small, everyday actions. In that text, he is careful to note that the idea of male gestation can constitute an appropriation of other bodies’ experiences. At the same time, he reflects on the hidden parts of artistic practice: an invisible anatomy of internal creation, held within some kind of container. From this point of view, the egg slides in as a possible visual and metaphorical representation of his proposition—be it in anatomical illustrations replacing testicles with chicken eggs, or in drawings where a question mark drips like the yolk of a broken egg.
The image of the egg has been a recurring figure throughout the history of Western art. Some attribute this fascination to its visual simplicity. “The egg has the perfect shape, even if it came out of an asshole,” Bruno Munari is said to have remarked. Since Surrealism, Salvador Dalí adorned an entire house with his obsession for eggs, which now serves as a museum dedicated to his life and work. Marcel Broodthaers was another artist drawn to the egg’s poetic potential:
“Everything is egg. The world is egg. The world was born from the great yolk, the sun. Our mother, the moon, is scaly. And the belly of a wave of water is white. The crushed shells of the egg, the moon. The egg’s dust, the stars. All, dead eggs. And the poets, lost. Despite the guards, this world, sun, this moon, stars from entire trains. Empty. Of empty eggs.”
In more recent years and closer geographies, Guatemala City saw the birth of its Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu) in what was once a streetside food stand shaped like an egg.
Fragility, sculptural quality, symbolic ties to life, and its inherent connection to human nourishment—whether pastoral or industrial—are among the themes Alan finds compelling in developing his drawings and sculptures. The metaphor of life here becomes a representation of the power of ideas. If, in the popular imagination, a light bulb turning on represents a new idea, Alan envisions an egg instead of that light: a new idea that remains hidden, not yet visible, inside the shell—in darkness. In that sense, the force it holds is the dialectic of new life: a vision of death and the exploitation of animal life itself, exposing the myth of the creative genius. From this meditation, the artwork is proposed as another small task—exhausting and inescapable—of daily labor.
Hens are born with the total number of eggs they will lay throughout their lives, though their productivity is shaped by breeding practices. In industrial poultry farming, laying hens may produce around 360 eggs in their lifetime—about four eggs every five days. This is the reason why egg cartons are packaged in multiples of 12: containers of 6, 12, or 36, with the largest cardboard box holding 360 eggs—symbolically, the life output of a single hen. There is something atrocious in this arithmetic, a synthesis of subsistence, and it is part of the questions Alan raises: Can a work of art be cruel? And further: Can the artistic process truly be an everyday act, like breakfast, stripped of the grandiosity that usually envelops it?
From these observations about the egg, the artist proposes what he calls “the hen theory of artistic labor,” a way to encapsulate concerns about labor, inner economies, the figure of the genius, and surrounding socio-political conditions. With a subtle sense of humor, the hen’s anatomy, its ovary, and its industrialized existence become an accessible model for understanding how capitalism reshapes bodies to sustain production chains. Thus, this domestic bird becomes a mirror of the systems we’ve built to exploit reproductive labor and caregiving work—often rendered invisible under the guise of individual authorship or the (re)productive body.
Candelero and Candelabro (2025) are two sculptures that combine candle-holders with the coquetier—also known as an “egg cup”—a vessel used to serve soft-boiled eggs, which spread throughout Europe around the 15th century. In Mexico, their European origin turned them into luxury items, limiting their presence to the upper classes. While candlesticks and candelabra are practical tools meant to hold light, their Mexican counterpart is the veladora—a devotional candle—relegating the former to ornamental use. In this sense, both candelabra and coquetiers may feel culturally distant or unfamiliar.
Alan relocates these objects to another temporal and geographical register, the same one where he places the 19th-century writer: the one who writes at night by candlelight and wakes to eat a hard-boiled egg for breakfast. Through this association—and dissolution—of object functions, a semantic field is opened: if one offers light in the darkness and the other food in the daytime, both moments merge, forming vital pillars for creativity. Awakening and consciousness alongside darkness and mystery. By merging them, the piece strips the object of its utility, replacing function with a reflection on models of artistic production.
Some of the questions this piece seems to ask are: Can daytime be as mystical as the night? And like hens… Could we lay new ideas each day? Can we perceive in artistic labor the arduous day-to-day work, rather than mythologizing its sudden emergence from the genius in the dark? Can we recognize the people who also create from their own knowledges or crafts, whose labor remains invisible within production chains? No light turns on by itself. Alan presents the egg as a call to observe what is not visible. That which is made invisible always implies the visible, and paying attention to the conditions of production is the first step toward emancipatory care.
In her essay Decolonization as Care, Uzma Z. Rizvi describes decolonization as an act of care for the things that were never cared for before. We cannot look at artworks without attending to their relations, without acknowledging the tools and labor that sustain them. In the words of María Puig de la Bellacasa, “to value care is to recognize the unavoidable interdependence essential to the existence of vulnerable and dependent beings.” The romantic, archetypal, patriarchal image of the hen is that of the mother of the chicks. Inevitably, the fate of that same mother hen is that of the chicken broth: a stark metaphor for the brutal submission of reproductive life force, labor, and caregiving roles. This correlation between fertility and labor, long critiqued by feminism, is one of the reminders embedded in this group of sculptures.
Referencing the wire egg baskets commonly found in Mexican markets, Gallina Mundi (2025) reproduces the shape of a hen with a world map wrapped around her. Translated into Latin as “hen of the world,” the title suggests a world that can be inhabited—as if one’s own anatomy contained all possible experiences, with the egg as its only recognized potential, its orbis. If we truly looked at what we do not see, what would happen if the world were like the hen—if we perceived the producing body rather than the product? The name of this piece also alludes to Hannah Arendt’s philosophical term amor mundi, which speaks to a commitment to a shared, plural, and solidarious world.
Silla para huevos (2025) is a repurposed Thonet chair which, instead of a seat, holds an egg tray for 36 eggs—the same quantity in the standard “family-sized” carton. Alan merges visual references: egg consumption among the working class in contrast with the coquetier as a marker of bourgeois culture. The Thonet chair itself evokes class crossing: originally designed in 1859 during the Austrian Empire, it became the first chair to be mass-produced globally.
The chair presents us with a scene of functional impossibility. There is a strange threshold—one does not know whether someone had been sitting there who might have laid the eggs. This image invites thoughts of the anus and the act of sitting. The buttocks in direct relation to the seat. As the opening at the end of the digestive tract, the anus is where feces exit the body. In hens, the anus—or cloaca—is also the site of reproduction and, subsequently, the expulsion of the egg. While human bodies have culturally associated the anus with impurity, in hens, thei—a word we also use for sewer—is directly linked to creation. When we eat an egg, we are eating a rectal product. This anatomical feature draws Alan’s interest, which he links to Leo Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave?, a text that reflects on bodily experience and its relationship to life. Alan invites us to imagine frameworks that integrate creation and help dispel the stigmas surrounding corporeality and creative acts.
The human body, writes Bersani, embodies erotic tensions and shifts in political power and subordination, asking whether the body can be conceived outside these imposed relations. He frames the rectum as the grave of the patriarchal male ideal, celebrating its potential for death over life and procreation. Paradoxically, in the hen, life and creation are also announced through the cloaca. In this spirit, Alan crafts in this exhibition a recognition of other possibilities—ones that might dismantle the genius myth as a form of privilege and instead foster networks of care that might, eventually, break the alienation imposed by the control of bodies and labor. Little by little, one day at a time.