The Sweat of the Plants

Noe Martínez.

LLANO presents “The Sweat of the Plants”, a new body of work by Mexican artist Noe Martínez that makes visible an almost unknown story within the official narrative: the slavery of thousands of people from the Huasteca area in Mexico in the first years of the colonization. Each work is a symbolic healing to the memory of their ancestors and the places from which they were extracted to be exchanged for animals.

In the Huasteca culture, places can also get sick, that is why in the series “El sudor vegetal” (The Vegetable Sweat) we travel, through analog photographic prints, “La Antigua” one of the rst towns founded by colonizer Hernán Cortez on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Each textile was dyed with botanical printing using tobacco, muicle and rue, plants used in the healing and protection rituals of the Huastecos. Placing ritual plant prints with these images is, in a way, to heal the landscape. The metaphor of healing is a way of confronting the artist’s colonial wounds and thus nding a way out of a colonial continuity.

The “Notlacayo” watercolor drawings are a series of records in which the body of professional actors and the artist is interrogated through acting training exercises of the biomechanical method and Butoh dance march, the intention is to connect with the common ancestors and with the ancient Mesoamerican world taking the body as an archive.

Finally, “Notlacayo Tlalpantok” is a necklace with porcelain reproductions of fragments of sculptures made by the Huastecan ancestors of Noe Martínez. Each fragment represents parts of the human body in a metaphor for the collective body that the artist explores as a memory of a shared colonial wound in America.

–

I saw people in lines getting off a boat at noon,
hundreds almost naked,
bony and fearful with eyes full of dull stars,
dry mouths and skin like crunchy shells.
Sweating from the e ort to survive
in the belly of the sea monster.

I heard the bustle of a market,
indecipherable tongues,
the timid footsteps creaking the wooden piers,
the sound of fear lost in the landscape of noises
that arrive when they meet
the corners of the world.

I saw the light of a violent sun between bright fabrics,
blue, yellow and green.
I saw a woman without the will to advance,
blinded by this new sun
that was di erent from all those
had seen.

I saw when a fierce sane man struck his belly
and the humanity that contained his womb
with the contempt with which images are struck
when they no longer perform miracles.
I heard death in the crack of that blow.
I’ve never stopped listening to it.

But I know thunder is furious about it.
I saw my head turn into a pot
and break at the same time hearing that blow.
I saw in my arms the salt of the sweat of all the bodies in that row.
I saw my mouth in them, I saw my eyes in their eyes.
I got back in line and my will was broken.

My grandparents looked at my body
move through the market.
The metal stuck to my skin
it took all the weight of a forgotten world.

I saw bodies thrown into the sea
I still see them now.
Lost on roads
with dead muscles.

I lost my balance and walked
by the western world.
I saw the ones who fell
trapped by the empire.

They never stop
the empire has eyes.
Those eyes see resources
they do not recognize essences.

I discovered a word
sunk in my head
waiting for me for centuries
now it makes me scream

I took the empire out of me
it was in my bones
and it went to my arteries,
it hid in my nerves.

History to the present,
you named me; indigenous
you put me a time;
prehispanic past.

I stayed on the shore
because I am not
in the extractivist
civilization of yours.

Lost walking
building cities
we have seen all
the faces of the colonizer:

Friar, agent,
viceroy, slaver,
religious, military,
hitman, president.

The news comes.
From many places,
lost, carried away,
they only returned things to us.

The news came today
we saw broken bodies,
carrying the fatter corps.
Fat, sugar, skin powder.

The news was forgotten
we can’t talk anymore
the other is dead
I killed him, I forgot.

The slavers of the caribbean
they recommended classifying.
Man, women, old, strong,
young, weak, shod.

Reward ones and
punish others
accept and despise
and everyone must see it.

They told the slave buyers:
envy is stronger than empathy
resentment is always stronger than help
do this to sleep four hundred years.

Aren’t we seeing the same thing today?
They separate us and classify us
They accept us or exclude us
They created the others in us.

Will they dominate us for more years?
Sometimes I am the other
Sometimes you are the other
And always lost.

In us the absence
But walking we are presence
Hurricane Presence,
I killed you and forgot you.

When I see that I broke
every piece breaks again
Tongues fragments
Fragments of cosmos

Walking in time is bleak,
There are answers, but wounds open,
Colonial, deep, newly discovered
I walk on them when I walk in the city.

– Noe Martínez