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Mariana Castillo Deball
Amarantus

Amarantus is the first Mexican retrospective of the work of Mariana Castillo Deball, who, over the last twenty years, has created a vast body of work on the ways in which Mexico’s precolonial history has been appropriated and investigated. With a kaleidoscopic approach to her varied interests, her production happens in the interstices between archaeology, science, narrative, fiction and the visual arts. Castillo Deball’s formal strategies tend to reflect an inclination towards those methodologies used by archaeologists to “trap” their findings, as well as to explore the haphazard transformations of material testimonies that allow us to construct narratives on the past. The remains of archaeological investigations take on a central place for the artist, who explores the way in which these fragments continue to speak to us in the present.

The word amarantus, derived from ancient Greek, names a flower that never dies. Amaranth—one of the most important native foods in Mesoamerica—besides its many ritual uses, produces a flower that never wilts, which Castillo Deball has taken as a metaphor for those unclassifiable and incomplete, sometimes absent, “uncomfortable objects” that fascinate her. This exhibition thus invites us to reflect on the discourses that colonial forces have imposed on the display, interpretation, circulation and distribution of objects over time.


go to Crocodile Skin of the Days