The Digestion of Earth Has Been Interrupted: On 'HEDOR' by Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Plataforma

"It's just that the earth is hot," a lady told me during the Mushroom Festival, an annual event held in the central square of Cherán, Michoacán. Although her tone carried concern, she didn’t seem surprised: "It has rained a lot, but before that, it was so hot the spores couldn't hold out." We are at the beginning of hongosto*, and the fungal community’s reproduction is particularly scarce. Sporadic, in more ways than one.

Yet to me, it seemed strange. After all, we’ve seen stories of colorful, resilient fungi narrated by Björk, accompanied by beautiful timelapses that lure us into the fungi dream. We flip through papers tracing the complex yet fundamental logics of mycelium, get hooked on documentaries about the omnipresent subterranean network that imperceptibly sustains life on Earth. We read firsthand accounts of psilocybin journeys from anthropologists or watch verité documentaries chronicling mystical and healing experiences, and we crave them. In science fiction, mushrooms, like love, always triumph. We willingly play nature-machine-organism, imagining planetary self-regulation through biopolitical metaphors. We indulge in these delusions because we fail to distinguish between coexistence, responsibility, and servility. The adorable image of laughing mushrooms in speckled hats makes us forget the impending mycological hecatomb.

Then along comes Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Dung Kinship to remind us that San Isidros are coprophilic—entheogenic fungi that grow in cow dung. Her latest audiovisual piece tells the tale of a biker fly ensnared by the mischievous San Isidros. In her hallucination, the fly becomes trapped in a ball of dung, pushed relentlessly by a dung beetle—a Sisyphean hell rolling back to Earth.

The biker fly descends into the planet's bowels, where, indeed, the earth is hot. The Mexica deity of filth and fertility, Tlazoltéotl, stirs up the digestive processes of the underworld. But this underworld resembles less a ceremonial center and more a gym-mechanical workshop-michelada bar hybrid: stationary bicycles from archaic eras, vessels with suspicious concoctions, dance, light, and sound. Amidst this spectacle of filth and nourishment, the biker fly comes to a revelation: flies are meant to decompose shit!

Structured in four songs, Dung Kinship is part redemption story, part camp fable, and part ecological and social justice manifesto. Rather than offering a moral, the more-than-human entities critically reflect on the affiliation annihilating them—the "patriarchal bulimic machine." Commissioned for this year's Toronto Biennial and co-produced by KADIST, the video is currently exhibited in Guadalajara as part of HEDOR, the second show in a cycle curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio at the newly inaugurated Plataforma space.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, the large-format projection of Dung Kinship, is framed by ceramic slabs embossed with worms/fingers. Surrounding it are iron fly sculptures with colored glass eyes and wings, piercing the darkness of the room—Ananamascaparadaanlaparad... in direct dialogue with the biker protagonist of the video.

The final piece in the exhibition is a representation of Tlaltecuhtli, a clay and volcanic rock sculpture poised between defecation and childbirth—or both. On her belly, a screen displays a choreography of dismembered arms snaking around. The sculpture is impeccably crafted. However, having both video pieces in the same room complicates the sound experience—bzzz bzzz, a concert of flies and drones...

HEDOR by Naomi Rincón Gallardo will be open to the public until September 15, 2024, at Plataforma Arte Contemporáneo. Afterward, Dung Kinship will be on view at the Toronto Biennial from September 21 to December 1, 2024.

Paulina Ascencio Fuentes

Translated to English by Luis Sokol

*Hongosto is a playful nickname for the month of August (agosto in Spanish). The term blends "agosto" with "hongo," the Spanish word for mushroom, to create a word that emphasizes the connection between this time of year and the fungal growth.