Galeria La Caja Negra | EVA LOOTZ | Centzontlahtoleh, the languages that speak to us | Madrid | May 26 – July 29
May 26 – July 29, 2022
EVA LOOTZ | CENTZONTLAHTOLEH, LAS LENGUAS QUE NOS HABLAN
Galeria La Caja Negra
In-Person Viewing:
Fernando VI, 17-2 Left, 28004 Madrid ES
Virtual Viewing:
https://lacajanegra.art/2021_06_eva_lootz_lenguas
OPENING May 26 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
The title asks for clarification: centzontlahtoleh is the name of a bird that is very present in Mexico and the Caribbean that imitates the voices of other birds, but also the noise of the train or telephone signals, the mockingbird. It is a word that comes from Nahuatl and means 400 voices.
The theme of the colonization of Latin America has occupied the artist since 2020, the year in which the exhibition “The reverse of monuments and the agony of languages” was held at the Museo Patio Herreriano simultaneously with the intervention made at the Museo Nacional of Sculpture of Valladolid, former College of San Gregorio.
“Having stumbled -literally and without having looked for it-, with the splendid building in which, in their day, Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda faced each other, -in the buildings something always remains of the events that took place there place- having come face to face with a key event that marks the beginning of modernity, the Valladolid Dispute, at the precise moment in which every thinking being in old Europe becomes aware of witnessing the hangover of the Enlightenment and spreads discouragement over the unfulfilled promises of modernity; when voices calling for reparation and restitution of stolen goods increase in the long shadows of colonialism and museums rush to re-write their agendas, it has provoked in me a long series of drawings, of which a small part is shown in this exposition.
They are drawings made during the pandemic, drawings -at the same time daily- about the questions I asked myself about the precarious and almost invisible existence of the native peoples of Latin America and their languishing languages; about the unbearable arrogance of the world to which I “belong”, about the life circumstances of peripheral communities within states that, broadly speaking, have just celebrated 200 years of independence.
The result is this exhibition that revolves around themes such as otherness, resistance, transculturation, translation, miscegenation, languages in danger of extinction and marginalized peoples.” (Eva Lootz)
There are four series exposed:
“Náhuatl” of 2020, alludes to one of the majority pre-Hispanic languages of Mexico. It is currently spoken by more than a million and a half people.
The 2020 series “Aníbal Quijano” refers to a prominent Peruvian anthropologist who was one of the first to undertake the rewriting of the story of colonization.
“La diagonal del loco” from 2021, which alludes to a chess figure; he plays with drawings that come out spontaneously and with the figure of the “cross”, the “cross of Saint Andrew”, which is also the scheme of the bracing of a constructive structure.
And finally “Toussaint Louverture” from 2020, a series that alludes to the revolution in Haiti, which led the country to its independence.
This is the artist’s first individual exhibition in Madrid since “La cancion de la tierra”, held at Tabacalera in 2016.
