ANA HERNÁNDEZ
campeche galeríaAna Hernández, LADI BEÑE (Skin of Mud), 2024–25, HD video, color, sound, 3 minutes 25 seconds.
Though soil found a privileged place within some of the major artistic developments of the second half of the twentieth century, Land art did not deal much with mud. Maybe that’s because such a debasing component—awakening associations with uncleanliness, filth, impurity, and excess—would have tarnished Land art’s sanitized aesthetics, with its links to Conceptual art. By contrast, many non-Western worldviews consider mud a generative element. Humankind is born out of it in Andean, Māori, Mayan, and Yoruba cosmologies, and, as the basis for construction, mud has led to the development of entire cities. This positive valence of the viscous mixture is more palpable in twenty-first-century artistic production, perhaps thanks to a drive to include non-Western cultures that were previously cast aside.
Ana Hernández’s exhibition “Ladi beñe” (Skin of Mud, in the Zapotec language of southern Mexico) featured paintings and sculptures that evidence the chromatic similarity of gold and soil, subtly yet convincingly insinuating their comparable importance. The Binnizá or Zapotec people—particularly those who inhabit the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, from where Hernández hails—conceive of gold as a sort of solar flotsam, an ejection of the sun’s matter on earth and therefore a sacred material, but earth is equally significant in their thought. As the source of sustenance, soil is commonly honored through rituals seeking fertility. LU’ / Ojo derecho y ojo izquierdo (LU’ / Right Eye and Left Eye) (all works 2024–25), a striking pair of gilded wood sculptures that evoke a hypnotic stare, stress the preciousness of the precious metal, while the landscape created in the canvas Juego de niños (Children’s Game) suggests instead its earthly nature: Thanks to the spotted golden hues on the cracked surface of dried mud, it seems to sprout from the ground. To make this work, Hernández sifted the soil so finely that it resembles sand. The work’s materiality is paramount, and this emphasis on physical substance was apparent in Hernández’s other medium-format canvases made of compressed soil and water—mud. While El Lodo (Mud), for example, showed it plain and flat, in binniza it serves as the surface from which language emerges, carrying a text in relief, a Zapotec phrase meaning “Sow the tongue, cloud people.” Or it can hear the imprint of objects that maintain the community’s everyday life, as in Cruje (Creaks), which carries, as if engraved into its surface, the silhouette of a fishing net.
Bixhia’,a golden sculpture of a sawfish covered by a net, hung at the center of the gallery. Though the press release called this work the exhibition’s core, I would accord that role to LADI BEÑE, a performance shown in a video. Both works refer to the son del pescado, a dance in which men, exclusively, wear a carcass of the sawfish and dance to the tune of a son, a traditional musical genre. However, in LADI BEÑE, it is the female artist we see wearing the sawfish carcass—now gold-plated—and on a sowing field. Hernández’s rendition of the dance grows frantic, thoroughly soaking her white skirt and naked torso in mud. While it was tempting to ascribe the work to a tradition of feminist performance art, the music reinserts it into Zapotec terrain. It is a reinsertion similar to the one experienced by the artist’s mother (according to Abraham Cruzvillegas’s exhibition text) the last time she crossed the border from Mexico into the United States, reconnecting to the land by getting covered in mud in the parking lot of a Texas shopping mall.