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Calabash husks, cement, rebar.
Es empírico, te la vas inventando.
Photo by Sigfredo Gastelum.
Text by Rosela del Bosque:
Agents within the vitrines and galleries of the Geology Institute Museum of UNAM—a fossil, animal, meteorite, mineral, machine—profuse into interactions among the public and other actors. With time, these encounters reconfigure the narrative of 20th century Mexico, the modern nation’s themes and interests. This reconfigured story produces a backstory too, one nearly mute, of the tense relationship between geology and mining, the study of nature and its extraction.
The work of Mariana Medrano interprets one of the scientific instruments in the museum’s collection, a glass distillation tool by the name of Le Bel-Henninger, invented in the 19th century for identifying minerals through distilling their colors. The sculptures take this instrument through Medrano’s own logic, in which hourglass bulbs of rigorous proportions assume both a systematic and organic shape. The calabash, whose hard surface allowed its use as a water carrier, pipe, vessel, and musical instrument in ancient times, here transforms to simulate the ready shape of a snake’s rattle.
The historical montages and the contemporary, the rocks, the minerals, all contribute into presenting and alluding to the marvels of the subsoil, organized into both archaic and symbolic displays, often with mysterious signifiers. In these grounds, Es empírico, te la vas inventando animates the collection as a field where both deep and historical time, fictional gestures, and oral history concatenate into always partial narratives.
Digital animation, duration varies.
Photo by Dan San Vil.
Monarch was presented at the Center for Digital Culture of Mexico City in September 2025 and at Darb 1718 Space for Contemporary Art in Cairo in December 2025. The title comes from Cairo’s Agriculture Museum, where a display of pinned butterflies is arranged into different messages, some more ostentatious than others. An article in Bidoun magazine from 2008, titled “The Anatomy of Melancholy: Cairo’s Lost Agriculture Museum” by Clare Davies, tells how the configurations spell out political messages:
“Upstairs, exotic butterflies in a glass box have been arranged to spell Mubarak; another box displays the eagle of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and still another, the two-starred flag of the ill-fated United Arab Republic (1958–61).”
Virtual reality environment and video trailer, 3min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SpN8GXOHgs
Digital animation series and writing
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.
The Weather-Cock Points South, Amy Lowell. 1921.