NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO*

MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY

First exhibition curated by new Kunstraum Innsbruck director Ivana Marjanovic.

Opening December 6, 2019, 7 pm


…Yo te invoco Protectora
Ven en forma de culebra
Que tu trueno el cielo quiebra
Con su fuerza vengadora!

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…I summon you oh Protectress
come in the shape of a Snake
may your thunder break the Sky
with its revengeful Force!

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The end of the year and the wake of the next one is a special time when past and future are coming together. The exhibition is a call for ancestral forces to break the sky in order to keep up the spirits of those who defend life against a war called dispossession. It is a call to (re)create the flourishing planet.

Get involved in the dreamlike decolonial feminist universe that Naomi Rincón Gallardo calls to life. Based on Mesoamerican myths and cosmology, indigenous women’s struggles for the defense of the land, decolonial feminisms, and inspired by punk and DIY aesthetics as well as Mexican science-fiction B-movies, Rincón Gallardo’s video-music performances function as speculative fiction that will transport you into a non-linear time and utopian space.

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Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b. 1979), based in Mexico City, currently lives in Vienna. Her research-driven crafty work addresses initiatives concerning the creation of counter-worlds within neocolonial settings. Through masquerade lenses she creates a place between radical alternatives, fantasy and crises of beliefs. She currently is a candidate for the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.


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ABOUT THE ART WORKS

The exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck presents two recent projects by Rincón Gallardo: The Formaldehyde Trip (2017) and Opossum Resilience (2019). The art works draw on stories of indigenous women activists, stories of struggles against dispossession in Mexico. Their struggles take place in neo-colonial contexts, where multinational corporations, in alliance with corrupt governments, take control of the land through violence in order to plunder natural resources, resulting in direct consequences for the lives of local communities, but also far beyond, on a in global scale, by ruining the planet.

These heteropatriarchal extractivist projects disregard culture, history, knowledge of living in harmony and respect with Nature, experiences of organising politics and society in communal ways. The resistances against racial capitalism and its satellite oppressions have a long history in the global south. Naomi Rincón Gallardo and this exhibition join these opposing voices, presenting different worldviews and inspiring visions for the future, at a time of crisis of beliefs and ecological catastrophes disguised as “development”. 

The art works are inspired by and dedicated to Zapotec lawyer and activist Rosalinda Dionicio who participates in the defense of life and territory in south-east Mexico; and to Mixtec environmental activist Bety Cariño (1973-2010), who was killed in a paramilitary ambush.  

Naomi Rincón Gallardo fabricates fictional worlds where the cycles of life and death move in overlapping spirals of time as the Mesoamerican mythology suggests. The darkness of the neo-colonial dispossession is intertwined with the fictional utopian vision. Death, dreams, powers of the night, the “nocturnal powers,” as Rincón Gallardo calls them, work here together with the powers of light and life, revitalising ancient non-binary concepts. The ancient Mesoamerican cosmology informs also gender performance, so that femininity also shows masculine features, genders both human and divine are hybrid and queer.  

The activists to whom Rincón Gallardo dedicates her works appear in her fictions as characters guided and protected by animal spirits who share with them (and with us) ancient knowledge and powers of nature. Women warriors, widows, witches offer rituals that accompany us on the paths to death, the journey to underworlds, while at the same time performing rituals of nourishing life and care for each other.  

Contemporary stories of resistance against extractivism, intertwined with ancient myths, unfold in front of our eyes in a visually abundant imaginary world of copresence where animals, spirits and other non-human characters are in reciprocal relation with those who defend land and life. Local myths merge with speculative fiction offering an alternative feminist decolonial future politics of hope.


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THE EXHIBITION AND THE PROGRAMME DETAILS

  

Along the short videos and crafty objects that accompany them, new elements of the installations are created specially for the adaptation of the presentation at Kunstraum Innsbruck. Furthermore, for this occasion, the majority of songs and narrations in Rincón Gallardo’s work, that originally are predominantly in Spanish, fitted with English subtitles (with short sequences in German and English), now also are presented with German subtitles. In this way the art works are made even more accessible for local and international visitors. The two art works are part of a cycle of Rincón Gallardo’s bigger project and thus share certain features in terms of narration and aesthetics.  

Opossum Resilience is presented in the project space of Kunstraum Innsbruck, i.e. the smaller room, as one compact video installation offering the audience a “linear” story with a length of sixteen minutes. On the other hand, the main gallery room in Kunstraum Innsbruck hosts The Formaldehyde Trip, offering a dynamic presentation that shows the work though a number of separately displayed chapters, i.e. short videos (of three to five minutes each), audios and objects. Through such presentation, the work can be accessed starting from different chapters.

At 8:00 p.m., on January 24, 2020, The Formaldehyde Trip will also be presented, in the form of a PERFORMATIVE SCREENING, at Café DeCentral (Haller Strasse 1, Innsbruck). This will also be an occasion when Kunstraum Innsbruck goes out of its space creating a broader network of its action and making its programme accessible to different audiences and spaces. The presentation at Café DeCentral is organised as a cooperation with the anti-discrimination initiative D)Ort Das Projekt and is wheelchair-accessible. The day after, an artist talk with Naomi Rincón Gallardo follows at Kunstraum Innsbruck (5:00 p.m., January 25, 2020).

The exhibition also offers guided tours, an open reading group that will read decolonial texts and talk about them. And finally, there will be a special parallel programme, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m., on December 12, 2019: SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE AND PSYCHO-POLITICAL CARD READINGS,  a one-to-one performance by Walter Ego and Gerardo Montes de Oca at Café Arkadenhof (no booking required, in case of longer waiting times the audience can visit the exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck).    

With this exhibition Kunstraum Innsbruck also contributes to the 16 Days against Violence against Women campaign organised in Innsbruck by Frauen*vernetzung für Begegnung und Austausch, among others.

*Beneficiario del Programa Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte 2019-2022 del Fondo Nacional para La Cultura y las Artes

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION 

OPENING
06.12.19, 19:00
MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY

PARALLEL PROGRAM
12.12.19, 14:00 - 15:30
SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE AND
PSYCHO-POLITICAL CARD READINGS
Participatory one-on-one performances
by Walter Ego and Gerardo Montes de Oca


GUIDED TOUR & READING GROUP INTRO
18.12.19, 17:00
MAY YOUR THUNDER BREAK THE SKY
with Ivana Marjanovic


PERFORMATIVE SCREENING
24.01.20, 20:00
THE FORMALDEHYDE TRIP
with Naomi Rincón Gallardo*