This is a fabulous, complicated, interesting and inspiring exhibition. Although it occupies just one room (gallery 2, upstairs at Autograph ABP in Shoreditch) and consists of just eight photos, an installation and a video, it is overflowing with ideas, creative juxtapositions and wonderful imaginings.
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte is a Mexican-British artist and the installations in this room tackle a whole raft of contemporary issues around history, colonialism, imperial knowledge systems, but with a wit, intelligence and beauty I rarely find in contemporary art. I was dazzled, overwhelmed.
Installation view of ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the eight photos on the side walls, the big one at the end, and the installation in the centre of the room
1. Systems of knowledge
The room contains three distinct works or set of works but first I think I need to define the elements from which Alcázar-Duarte has concocted these wonderful pieces. Running through them all is an interest amounting to an obsession with problems of knowledge:
How do we know what we know? How does anyone know what they know? Predominantly by relying on the knowledge systems and values of our society and culture. But how do we know these are correct? When one system exterminates another, how we can be confident the right one has triumphed? What happened to the world when European imperialists crushed, burned and destroyed native systems of knowledge and value? How many indigenous ways of seeing the world have been lost and at what cost?
What if we are all living inside a system of knowledge and meaning which is seriously awry, consenting to values which are destroying the world? In fact what if (as I believe) we are living amidst the fantastically complex wreckage of numerous value systems and theories of knowledge (paganism, various forms of Christianity – Catholicism, Anglicanism, Puritanism, non-conformity, Enlightenment atheism, industrial capitalism, industrial socialism, Liberalism, imperialism and so on), which partly explains the difficulty of thinking through any idea to a logical conclusion, given the clamour of opposing systems and ideas which spring up at every thought.
An enormous amount of the modern world, its banking and economic and transport systems, not to mention all the cultural fol-de-rol of the internet and social media, are all utterly reliant on new-ish digital technology – but what if this, also, in its way, is a delusion, an artificial set of systems and values imposed on a natural world in order to control and exploit it in new ways? And imposed on us, its users, to exploit us? What if it is as compromised as all previous systems of knowledge have turned out to be?
In the artist’s words:
‘How is it that the knowledge of my ancestors has been completely disassociated from contemporary knowledge systems?… I find myself wondering if there could be different approaches to tackling the important questions of our time?’
David
And before proceeding, a shout-out to the lovely Autograph visitor assistant, David. He and I spent about 45 minutes discussing the works, teasing out their elements to reach interpretations and conclusions neither of us could have made by ourselves. Half of the insights detailed below derive from him. Thank you, David.
2. Issues and ideas in Alcázar-Duarte’s works
1. Mayan ancestry
Mayan culture, language, religion and history are invoked by the works. The 8 photos are named after Mayan gods. The Mayans, in other words, had their own complex, integrated systems of knowledge, language, ritual and ceremony. To quote Wikipedia:
The Maya elite were literate, and developed a complex system of hieroglyphic writing. Theirs was the most advanced writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. The Maya recorded their history and ritual knowledge in screenfold books… In addition, a great many examples of Maya texts can be found on stelae and ceramics. The Maya developed a highly complex series of interlocking ritual calendars, and employed mathematics that included one of the earliest known instances of the explicit zero in human history.
2. Spanish conquest
Predictably, this was wiped out with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the mid-1500s. The Spanish adventurers wanted gold but the Spanish Catholic Church, more culturally curious, encountered a complete religion and knowledge system not previously known in Europe. Some wanted to record it but one of the most notorious actions of the Spanish religious authorities was to burn the Mayan holy books, in a conscious bid to extirpate this rival, blasphemous, ‘evil’, pagan value system.
This event is memorialised in the film installation here (see below).
3. Casta paintings
During the first centuries of the Spanish occupation there was a lot of ‘interbreeding’ which created new types of ethnicity. Like colonial authorities everywhere, the Spanish were keen to name and categorise all aspects of their conquered peoples and developed a thorough-going system of caste. According to the Wikipedia article on Casta:
Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African.
What Alcázar-Duarte is interested in is that the Spanish developed an entire genre of art devoted to the caste system, the so-called Casta paintings. These illustrated the different ‘types’ of ethnicity which had been created by the Spanish occupation and the system eventually became awesomely complicated.
The point for this exhibition is that Alcázar-Duarte has used these paintings as the basis for most of the works here, in two ways: 1) in all eight photos she has dressed up and is adopting a (usually quite florid) pose taken from a Casta painting 2) she has used a modern artificial intelligence programs to analyse the poses, reduce them to shapes and patterns, then extrapolate these patterns as dotted silver lines across the photos.
4. The language of flowers
Throughout history human cultures have assigned meanings and symbolism to flowers. In these photos Alcázar-Duarte wears masks made of flowers. Like everything else they have multiple meanings because they are both part of Spanish colonial flower symbolism, itself a sub-set of European systems of symbolism; but at the same time she has selected flowering plants which were important foodstuffs for Mayan bees (see section 10, below).
So just to recap, in this photo you can see Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: 1) standing in the woods (in fact, apparently, in a stand of Queen Anne’s lace); 2) wearing an old-fashioned outfit which I imagine is taken from the colonial-era Casta paintings; 3) holding her arms in a hieratic pose taken from a Casta paintings; 4) her face hidden by a mask of symbolic flowers; 5) while a system of silver dotted lines waves and wiggles across the image. Then 6) there’s the orange lines weaving in and out of the dotted lines, and I’ll explain those in section 7, below.
K’aaxal ja’ – Mayan Thunder deity’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (2021) © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte
The deep point is that these Casta paintings are yet another system of human categorisation, taxonomy of knowledge creation.
5. British ancestry and the Industrial Revolution
Alcázar-Duarte is half British. On the face of it, for once, the British Empire is not involved. The Mayan culture covered the territory of modern-day Guatemala and its suppression, as that of most of central America, was a solely Spanish affair.
But the works in the exhibition demonstrate a link nonetheless. This is because Britain is the country which invented the industrial revolution and, arguably, everything which derives from it, the complex system of values and practices which we still inhabit, including ideas like: industrial capitalism; mass production; universal timekeeping; the proletarianisation of work; the capitalist extraction of raw materials regardless of cost; the conquest of poor countries in order to exploit their mineral resources and expand our markets. And so on. See the writings of Karl Marx.
Alcázar-Duarte has an oblique approach to all this, because the eight photos are all taken in rural Derbyshire. Why, I asked myself. David and I discussed this for a bit. The wall labels clearly state that Derbyshire was chosen because its valleys and towns were the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, why not set the photos in ruined mills and workshops and warehouses?
6. Environmentalism
Because underneath the hi-tech gloss of the photos, installation and film there is a running thread of concern for the environment. Rereading the label I see it says all the photos are set among the ‘dying trees‘ of Derbyshire. Aha. So the idea of decay, death and ruin are here, but not in buildings, instead subtly symbolised by dead and dying trees.
And this decay is symbolic not only of the past, the industrial ruins which litter the British landscape (although most urban Victorian buildings have these days been converted into bougie apartments) but of the present and future because we are, of course, in the middle of a slow-motion holocaust of the natural world. It’s not as dramatic as cutting down the rainforests or oil spills in the Niger Delta, but the British countryside is slowly steadily becoming degraded. Once common types of trees are dying out, species of birds which used to be rare are now endangered. Our rivers and coasts are now all tainted by human faeces. Slowly the pan of water is heating up and we’re sitting like stupid frogs enjoying the warmth, oblivious of the disastrous future.
All the photos are, at first glance, warm and attractive, but contain these coded portents of future loss.
7. Digital technology and copper
And of course we are living through an age of rapid technological change, the Digital Age, kick-started by the spread of the internet during the late 1990s, ramped up by the rapid proliferation of smart phones in the Noughties, and then the wildfire spread of social media. Nowadays most people are wired into this grid (like me writing this blog and you reading it) and this has two consequences for Alcázar-Duarte: one is artistic but behind it stands a vast system of meaning.
Remember I pointed out the orange lines which weave across the photo I included? They are made of copper and they symbolise at least two things. For a start, the historical perspective: copper was one of the rare metals mined by the Spanish using native forced labour. On one level, the use of copper filaments sheets across all the works on display here points towards colonial atrocity.
But it’s copper cables which have historically linked the world, first in 19th century telegraph cables, then in the phone lines laid across developed nations. Nowadays it’s copper cable which carry digital technology and link all of us in a vast web of knowledge, information, data, exchange, commerce and everything else which happens on the web.
Alcázar-Duarte has used artificial intelligence programs (see below) to scan the faces of Casta paintings in order to create datasets and then used programs to develop the patterns which wave and shimmy across the face of her photos.
Thus the symbolism of the photos suggests that, even in the most beautiful and rural setting, we are still enmeshed in the digital world which, of course, more than any previous technology, has created its own taxonomies and systems of knowledge. Think of all the articles you read explaining how the content delivered to us is driven by algorithms based on our previous choices. The internet has created digital simulacra of ourselves, which have become so complex and, in many cases, so accurate, that they’re almost more lifelike than our ‘selves’.
Squabbling about Spanish Catholic ideology (systems of knowledge and belief) wiping out Mayan ideology seem bookish and obscurantist compared with where we are, and the wholesale creating of new digital systems of knowledge all around the world, part of which process is the stomping out of local and national differences as everyone in the world starts documenting their lives via Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or their Russia or Chinese equivalents and everyone, to some extent or other, validates their lives and selves online.
8. The fleur-de-lis
There’s an aspect of the flower symbolism I haven’t covered yet because it’s done in copper. This is her use of the motif of the Fleur-de-lis. For a thousand years the fleur-de-lis has been stylised into a visual motif which has variously denoted royalty, French cultural heritage, Christianity, light, defence, female virtue and much much more. As such it was used by the Spanish in their coats of armour and official insignia and so on.
But Alcázar-Duarte has, as usual, incorporated it into her work in such a way as to create ambiguity and new resonances. For the wall labels tell us that this shining image of monarchy and virtue and whatnot was also used as a brand which was burned into the skin of slaves as a punishment. This knowledge sheds a radical new light on the whole thing, and can’t help but make you shudder.
But there’s a third level because Alcázar-Duarte scatters the motif of the fleur-de-lis very freely across the photographs, rendered in the copper foil which, as we have seen, is already a complex symbol in itself, denoting the copper which was mined by forced labour but also, at the same time, a bang-up-to-date symbol of the digital world we all inhabit.
So, having worked it through, we can see that these copper renderings of fleur-de-lis bear a complex freight of historical, cultural, moral (and immoral) meanings, as they gaily cavort across the surface of her photos.
Close-up of one of the photos in ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing clouds of intricate fleurs-de-lis drawn onto the surface of the photograph in copper © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte
9. Artificial intelligence
But of course technology never sleeps, in fact it seems to be speeding forward at ever-increasing pace. We appear to have moved beyond the Digital Age, the Internet Age and the Social Media Age into the worrying new era of the Artificial Intelligence Age.
And here again we are seeing a ramping up, a taking to the next level, of the digital systems which already mesh and define us, because artificial intelligence (if such a thing really exists) has the ability to invent new systems of knowledge and taxonomy, originating in the systems we program into it, but with the potential to create entirely new worlds of information, definition and control.
And this, too, is not just touched on but central to Alcázar-Duarte’s art works. Because all the works on display here use artificial intelligence programs. I’ve mentioned that she used some kind of program to ‘read’ the gestures in the Casta paintings and extrapolate from them patterns, in this case of dotted silver lines, which loop across the beautiful photographs like pearl necklaces lacing across their surfaces.
‘Itzamna – Mayan Time Deity’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte (2021) © copyright Monica Alcazar-Duarte
So to recap the story so far:
- colonial flower symbolism mask
- colonial dress
- pose taken from a Casta painting
- setting amid dying trees in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution
- dotted lines generated by AI
- copper lines symbolising the digital mesh we are all entangled in
- copper fleurs-de-lis symbolising beauty and atrocity
10. Non-human systems of knowledge and organisation: bees
So far we have been isolating and defining the historically consecutive systems of knowledge which Alcázar-Duarte is interested in. But, to state the obvious, they have all so far been human. But what about the natural world? One of the big things we’ve learned over the past generation is that all kinds of living organisms have systems of communication which are far more subtle and far-reaching than previous generations of scientists imagined. Two areas where amazing discoveries have been made are in the methods of communication among trees and fungi.
Anyway, Alcázar-Duarte focuses in on one particular species which has long been famous for its advanced and complicated systems of organisation and communication, bees. To be more precise, and as you would expect, she chooses a species of bee which comes laden with historical and cultural symbolism.
This is Mexico’s endangered stingless bee, Xunan-Kaab, the Regal Lady bee. This was first cultivated in the Mayan civilisation 3,000 years ago and the Spanish conquerors discovered than its honey was considered (and still is) a delicacy.
So there’s a colonial legacy aspect here, but, characteristically, Alcázar-Duarte doesn’t rest on historical grievance but drives her vision into the future, in a film which points towards the completely alien, non-human forms of ‘knowledge’ which bees, like so many thousands of other species, possess and which humankind is only barely starting to understand.
The bee element (mostly captured in the film; see below) in a way sheds a new perspective back over the cavalcade of knowledge systems and technological advances which the works embody: because it suggests the possibility that all of them are wrong simply by virtue of being human, and thus, more often than not, exploitative and coercive.
What if all human values are erroneous and, despite giving us more knowledge and power than ever before in human history, what if modern, up-to-the-minute technology, knowledge and taxonomies are entertaining and distracting us while the planet goes to wrack and ruin around us? What if we’ve been wrong all along, and the fungi, the trees and the bees are much wiser than us?
3. The works
1. The photos
I’ve comprehensively covered the ingredients which make up the photos and what you can see in them, how dense and multi-layered they are with systems of meaning and symbolism, in sections above. As mentioned each one is named after – or assigned to – one of the major gods of the Mayan pantheon. And, since you ask, here’s a list:
- Kukulkan, Mayan serpent deity
- Ixchel, Mayan moon and birth deity
- Itzamná, Mayan time deity
- Kinich Ahau, Mayan sun deity
- Ah-Muzen-Cab, Mayan deity of bees
- Ah pu’uch, Mayan death deity
- Yum Kaax, Mayan jungle deity
- K’aaxal ja, Mayan thunder deity
- Ek Chuaj, Mayan deity of Cacao
2. The film: ‘U K’ux Kaj/Heart of sky, Mayan god of storms’
While we’re on the subject of Mayan deities, the short film on show here is titled after one, ‘U K’ux Kaj / Heart of sky, Mayan god of storms’ (2023 to 2024). It’s only 8 minutes long. It was produced at Maní in the Yucatán Peninsula and why here? Because this is the town where, in 1562, the Spanish authorities in the form of the Church. assembled the largest ever collection of Mayan codices, books containing knowledge of the Maya religion, language and history, piled them up and burned them to ashes.
The film features slow shots of a wrecked building, the foundations of a long abandoned building surrounded by the lush greenery of the jungle, in which stands a statuesque woman clad from head to foot in a light flowing pink garment while a voiceover explains the events that took place here in Maya, the language of the first peoples. This is intercut with very slow close-ups of a native (non-white) hand slowly turning and rotating against a blue background.
But that’s not all. There are the bees. Remember I mentioned Mexico’s endangered stingless bee, Xunan-Kaab, the Regal Lady bee and how it was first cultivated in the Mayan civilisation 3,000 years ago? Well these bees also feature in the film, for the conquerors destroyed Mayan culture at one of the epicentres of Mayan apiculture, and the film includes references to the beekeeping skills, themselves rooted in a profound appreciation of the flora and fauna of the region, which the Spanish couldn’t extirpate.
3. The installation:
At the centre of the room is a new installation ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’. It consists of a sort of low ‘fence’ arranged on short posts in the shape of a hexagon, with one bar missing to allow visitors to enter the central space. Why a hexagon? Think about it. Because that is the shape of the cells in a beehive and, once again, the work incorporates aspects of Mayan bee lore.
Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, part of ‘Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain’ at Autograph ABP. Photo by the author
What’s she’s done is combine three things: 1) using an algorithm inspired by the collective intelligence of bee colonies, Alcázar-Duarte 2) has merged the fleur-de-lis motif with 3) fragments from the Casta paintings. What this means in practice is you have no fewer than fifty-six artificial lilies, created by modern 3-printing technology, all gilded with the same copper leaf colour we saw in the photos and – here’s the kicker – each one contains a face or hand or pair of hands recreated from some of the Casta paintings we’ve heard so much about. Bees. Copper. Digital technology. Casta. Lost culture. All these themes come together in this fragile’ garden of technology, based on the multiple historical classification systems which I’ve outlined above, and given form by the latest digital technology.
You don’t really need to know any of this, or not much, to find the ‘face lilies’ haunting and poignant.
Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the 3-D-printed face lilies. Photo by the author
4. Augmented reality
But that, of course, is not all. There is a bit of augmented reality included in the installation. On the floor at the centre of the broken hexagon is a pattern in black and white, apparently based on a map of the Yucatan area of modern-day Mexico, once part of Mayan territory.
Diagram on the floor of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, at Autograph ABP. Photo by the author
The visitor assistant (in my case, the lovely David) has a big ipad which he loans to you. As you walk into the hexagon and focus the camera of the ipad on this floor diagram, something happens. A spangly tree grows up out of the floor, outlined in the same ghostly white dots as cover the eight photographs.
Installation view of ‘T’aabal chukChuuk/Embers (2024)’ by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte at Autograph ABP, showing the ipad on whose screen appears the ghostly outline of a digital tree growing and spreading. Photo by the author
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. It seems to me an elaborate gimmick. It didn’t really add to my understanding or enjoyment of the photo, the film or the installation with its scary poignant face lilies. I saw it as an example of the cheapjack gimmicks people are trying to piggyback onto the digital world, including the numerous pointless headsets you can get which allow you to interact with the digital world (for example, Facebook’s ill-fated Meta VR headsets which were obviously going to be a failure before they were even release).
Possibly Alcázar-Duarte thinks this kind of thing is an exciting new development in digital art but two obvious points: 1) the visitor assistant only has one ipad so the entire thing is premised on only a tiny number of people ever experiencing it. 2) For me it is an extension of the deep question raised at the start which is, Might the entire digital world which everyone is helping to create, curate, and spread over the entire globe, might this digital matrix turn out to be the latest, most intrusive, most controlling and most delusory of all the systems of knowledge which Alcázar-Duarte has spent the exhibition investigating?
Conclusion
I can express what I want to say best by comparing this (relatively small) exhibition with the huge one currently at the Royal Academy, ‘Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change‘. The RA show is, in effect, a major art institution washing its dirty laundry in public, owning up to its profound and multifarious links with the slave trade and then, once the trade was abolished, to its the enduring, institutional racism which ran through a lot of its work like a poisoned thread.
It’s a massive show full of loads of interesting and often beautiful art works but it feels like it is staggering under the weight of History and the burden of guilt which is why (apart from the horrors of some of the subject matter) it has an overall lowering and depressing effect.
By striking contrast, in this exhibition by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, inheritor of an oppressed people and a suppressed culture, it feels like she has owned her historical legacy, assimilated it, mastered it, mastered all the insidious legacies of history, come out and top and transformed it to her advantage. The exhibition at the Royal Academy is crushed under the weight of its historical legacy. Mónica Alcázar-Duarte has taken her cultural legacy and transformed it into something fascinating, strange and new. She has made History fly.
And now you can see why I started my review by saying how dazzled I was by her work’s complexity and interest and depth and control and mastery of its material, in awe of the complexity and beauty of Alcázar-Duarte’s vision. It’s FREE. Do your mind a favour and go see both this and the Wilfred Ukpong in Autograph’s other gallery space. They’re both blisteringly good, but Alcázar-Duarte’s has a depth and vision you genuinely don’t often come across.
Related links
- Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain continues at Autograph ABP until 1 June 2024
- Mónica Alcázar-Duarte website
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- Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy (April 2023)
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