Boiler Room Project: LLANO
“I am like the fragment of a pre-Hispanic vase”, commented the Mexican artist Noé Martínez recently. “A 3,000-year-old fragment”.
Martínez’s work focuses on what the artist considers to be stories without images, pieces of a colonial narrative that need to be recontextualized and understood in the present time. Built upon a thorough investigation of archives from several countries that record the global scale of an economy based on the slave trade, combined with the use of materials that refer this practice and ancestral processes learned in his family context, Martínez’s work sees in his body a medium to map the colonial imprint and create a new image within the history of art.
For the Boiler Room Project, Martínez creates a memorial to his Huastec ancestors, traded as slaves during the first centuries of the Mexican colony. The exhibition is the result of in-depth research within Mexican archives and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, and revolves around the practice of using enslaved people as a trading chip for buying animals, and the forced migration of Mexican and African workers. Allied to the documentary aspect of his practice, Martínez presents another equally important facet of his work: that of healing.
Occupying a large part of the exhibition room are large fabrics printed with curative plants, created through a traditional dyeing process in which plants and cloth are boiled together in water and the result depends equally on the temperature of the hand of whoever is handling the water as well as the climate in which it is carried out. “The plants used in the dyes are the same ones my grandmother used to cure me. In my community, bodies are healed by being covered in fabrics and by the vapors produced when boiling the plants”, says Martínez. Here, instead of people, the fabrics are employed in healing the space.
Next to the fabric are necklaces of wooden plates originating in Congo and San Luis Potosí (Mexico), carved with the symbols used to brand the enslaved and that are still used on livestock today. Details of the piece allude to the process of transporting people from one continent to another: the wood that refers to slave ships, the knots that refers to people’s binds. The room also displays a series of crystals, objects formerly considered luxury items on the large farms of slave owners, but which are currently used by spiritual shamans in the art of divination. The old colonial objects are shifted to the present to give new meanings to a new history.
The movement of transforming objects imbued with a painful history, through ancestral practices that aim at new modes of existence, is recurrent in the artist’s work and can also be observed in the video made in partnership with artist Maria Sosa. In it, the pages of an old colonial periodical are transformed into paper pulp mixed with dry tobacco, a healing plant in the Huasteca culture, and in this way a new paper is created and incorporated onto the artist’s body.
The work of Martínez is a balance between a statistical and academic knowledge of data and a physical sensitivity arising from community knowledge. By using traditional processes to give objects renewed life, Martínez opens different paths of circulation for them, challenging a global economy built on capitalist notions of slave exchanges. By reconstructing the fragments of his social and personal history, Martínez builds a new version of the possible present – a new world, constructed on the will to heal.
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The Boiler Room project is a collaborative international platform of artistic and critical exhibition located in the basement of the same building as Galeria Jaqueline Martins in Brussels. Hosting four guests per year, the project creates opportunities for like-minded galleries to insert themselves into a larger, international context, at the same time providing the Belgian public and that of neighboring countries a chance to access artists and galleries that would normally be out of reach.
