Starting Wednesday, September 7, Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte presents this project by Ana Gallardo, first conceived in 2009. The work revisits and reinterprets a ritual from Oaxaca, where people bring their offerings to the Miraculous Virgin. Since then, Ana Gallardo has brought this project to various cities: Casa de América, Madrid; Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador; Turinne Le Grosse, Belgium; and the 56th Venice Biennale, among others.
El Pedimento invites participants, through the handling of primary materials — earth and water — to connect with a thought about their own future, to imagine themselves as old, and to create an object out of clay, one that represents a need envisioned for their own old age.
In these magical, mystical acts, the artist describes the power of the requests and the strength that collective desire can acquire.
Los pedimentos 2009–2015 [The Offerings 2009-2015]
“In Mexico, in the region of Oaxaca, there is a Virgin called the Virgin of Juquila.
Her name comes from the Nahuatl Jukilla, which means place of the beautiful legume. The correct form is Xiu-quilla, a contraction of Xuhquililla, meaning place where the blue quelite abounds — composed of Xuih = blue, Quiliti = quelite, and the variant Tla, a suffix denoting abundance.
People go to visit her and make wishes.
In this case, they don’t just leave candles; they build, out of clay, the object of their wishes and requests. It is a place of deep tradition. There is no exact record of when this custom originated — perhaps it has been practiced for a century — nor who first conceived of this act of asking. Everyone visits this place and makes their petitions there. Almost everyone who wishes for something shapes it in clay and leaves it at the sanctuary.”
I draw upon this Mexican ritual from the mountains of Oaxaca.
There, by the roadside, stands a sanctuary where people make pilgrimages to ask favors of a miraculous Virgin. They make their requests in clay, using the earth and water from that place. They leave their small sculptures side by side, piled up and exposed to the elements.
I appropriated this ritual with the intention of reflecting on the intensity that certain magical events can take on in human emotion — on how such events influence both individual and collective memory. On how the evocation of these moments helps people to locate themselves within a channel of hope in the face of irreversible circumstances.
It is a reflection on the possibility of collective meaning within a creative act — within an act of life. On solitude, the mystery of death, and how the evocation of possible and magical situations, through art, has helped human beings to situate themselves once again in a space of hope.
El Pedimento invites participants, through the use of these primary materials — earth and water — to connect with a thought about their own future, to envision themselves as old.
I invite them to make an object out of clay, an object that represents a need imagined for their own old age.
