REUNIÓN [MEETING]
Group exhibition featuring artists represented by Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery + 30 solo presentations.
From January 4 to 8
Solo presentations by Sofía Durrieu <> Ana Gallardo
Curated by: Lara Marmor
Strategic planning: Camila Charask
Text accompanying the work in the gallery:
Sketch for the Construction of a Landscape
1965 / 2010
“Legend has it that the beautiful Zempoat died of love, and her family’s tears were so many that seven beautiful lagoons were formed.”
“María del Carmen, my mother, died in 1965, in the city of Rosario, Argentina.
I think she would have preferred to die in Mexico, where her mother was from — or perhaps in Santander, Spain, where she was born.
But I know she didn’t want to die where she did.
When she passed away, Gabriela — my sister — and I were little girls, five and seven years old. We didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
A family friend lent my father his small plot in the city cemetery. Twenty-five years later, this generous man needed his spot back to rest in peace. So my father removed my mother’s remains and had her cremated. But then, he didn’t know what to do with her.
For a while, he kept her in the living room, in an urn — inside a large plant pot — in the apartment on Melo Street, in Buenos Aires.
At that time, we were living in Mexico, and I was pregnant with my daughter, Rocío.
So we couldn’t help our father.
But I think we wouldn’t have known what to do either.
By September 1990, my sister went to Buenos Aires and retrieved our mother’s ashes. We decided to bring her to Mexico, hoping to bury her in some beautiful small-town cemetery — one of those that, on the Day of the Dead, fills with color, light, and hope, where death truly seems to mean something else.
When my sister arrived at customs in Mexico City, everything got complicated. She didn’t have any kind of certificate, and a little blue bag filled with strange ashes was… suspicious.
The customs officer didn’t quite understand, but took pity on her, and thanks to the conspiratorial leniency of that era — which allowed certain things to slip through — my sister managed to bring our mother’s ashes into Mexico in that blue plastic supermarket bag.
Then we went looking for a cemetery.
For several Sundays, driving Julio’s car — my sister’s husband — we visited dreamy little towns with their peaceful graveyards. None would accept her, because we had no papers.
— “Well, miss, how do we know this isn’t a crime?” the officials would say.
And so, wandering and searching for some sacred ground — a bit naïve, sad, and bewildered — we came upon the Lagoons of Zempoala.
We loved the place. We ate delicious tacos, drank strong mezcales, and decided to bring our mother there the following weekend.
That’s where we finally scattered her ashes.
In the Lake of the Seven Lakes.
One day — I can’t remember exactly which — we sat by the shore and emptied the blue plastic bag.
We watched, moved to tears, as the ashes slowly sank and spread through the clear, fresh water — until they reached the shallow bottom and mingled with the earth, the algae, the moss, clinging softly to the stones.
We left her there, with a mixture of calm, fear, tears, and helplessness.
Twenty years passed, and this Sunday I returned to the lagoons for the first time since that day — with my daughter Rocío, now grown.
The weather was perfect. The landscape, beautiful.
I walk.
The sound is unique; in the distance, you can hear families chatting, children playing.
The breeze slowly moves the branches of the pines.
Sunlight filters through the treetops and spoils me.
The water — crystalline, with new moss, new plant species —
trees fallen and decomposing within, forming yet another new layer of nature.
Birds flutter up and down, skimming the water to drink and to catch what floats on the surface.
The water moves — cool and clear.
Rocío walks.
She sits down and completes the landscape.
Once again, the pine caresses me as the breeze stirs it.
And I feel my mother’s embrace — in this pine, in this breeze.
She rests in peace.
Life is perfect.
I return filled with emotion and calm.
My mother gave me a hug one Sunday at the Lagoon of Zempoala.”
April, 2010 Mexico
