An Unfinished Map of Matter: material metonymies of migration

Works of four Latin American artists based in Mexico City – Andrea Nones Kobiakov, Manuela García, Madeline Jiménez Santil, and Valentina Díaz – propose an experience of migration, translation, and other forms of displacement wherein identity is problematized and questioned, while any appeal to ancestral origins is absent.

Instead, the pieces in the exhibition foreground the constant negotiation between contexts, where both poles are modified and transformed – not by way of illustration, but through the way the artists work with their materials. The embeddedness of the experience in graphite and steel, in textile, in wax and watercolor, and in sugar is what the curator of the exhibit, Gustavo A. Cruz Cerna, calls “material metonymies” – substitution strategies of meaning based on proximity; contact, or contagion, rather than resemblance – with which the works allude to a flexible understanding of the processes of geographic displacement.

Andrea Nones Kobiakov works with the textures of sugar to translate the bodily experience of longing. Manuela García offers us an interpretation of the thickness of memory, in which its haziness casts doubt upon it. Manuela Diaz brings opaque codes to the table without providing clues for their decipherment. Madeline Jiménez Santil, for her part, pierces and dismantles all expectations of order and sobriety, as well as the demands for self-exotization she has faced.

In the materiality of their works, these artists dissolve conventional notions of identity and belonging, instead sketching the cartography of an ever-unfinished territory, one built through the unforeseen affections that emerge from the encounter between two worlds.