Attention Fixed on Mutation: On “Deseos Diferentes” at Museo Cabañas

The group exhibition Deseos Diferentes, curated by Dorothée Dupuis, brings together ten artists who were born in or currently live in Mexico: Claribel Calderius, Nicole Chaput, Débora Delmar, Elsa-Louise Manceaux, Melanie McLain, Adeline de Monseignat, Sofía Moreno, Berenice Olmedo, Athenea Papacostas, and Paloma Rosenzweig. The exhibition affirms that feminisms expand horizons and foster new ways of conceiving body, language, and world, while opening pathways toward desires yet to come.

The curatorial text notes that social achievements driven by gender equality movements in the 1970s—such as reproductive choice, workplace equality, and the recognition of consent—have become normalized, almost unquestioned aspects of social life. This immediately raises questions: normalized where? In specific regions of Europe or the United States? And for which social classes?

Painfully, in Jalisco—the territory where this exhibition takes place—none of these “achievements” can be taken for granted. Here, abortion was decriminalized only in October 2024. That legislation came too late: Jalisco remains one of the regions with the highest number of child and adolescent mothers in the country. As for employment, women and men alike face difficult conditions, where only ten percent of workers earn more than 9,000 pesos a month (around 500 USD), a circumstance that makes owning a home nearly impossible.

After crossing the blazing concrete esplanade leading to the museum entrance, I entered the exhibition eager to encounter these artists’ work. At first, the burst of color in Nicole Chaput’s paintings drew me in instinctively. From her woman-monsters burst bones, entrails, braids, ribbons, breasts, nipples, and bows. Mammary glands mutate into birds dripping phosphorescent liquids. I thought of the harsh lives of grandmothers who were held hostage as tireless reproductive machines. Yet these vividly colored women with exposed ribcages resonate at other vital frequencies; the monstrous figure framing each piece shelters smaller monsters within.

Sometimes one must become monstrous in order to break one’s own ribcage—that mental corset designed by others, intent on suffocating everything. Mammary glands are possibility; they are not bound to produce milk, and only milk. Everything we give our attention to nourishes us: conversations, language, companionship, encounters. Nicole Chaput’s paintings, too, are milk.

Since I started scattering birdseed in my small patio, mornings have filled with robins. I imagine Nicole preparing her pigments, opening the glands of attention and making way for new monsters.

The next room contains large-scale acrylic paintings embroidered on jute by Claribel Calderius, presenting the body as an immense territory interwoven with roads and pathways—a body as infinite crossroads. Perhaps the crossroads of creation resembles wearing a porous material like jute, one that allows us to summon poetry and the healthy territory we lack.

At the threshold appears the feathered mask of Sofía Moreno, alongside a video documenting a performance she carried out at the center of the room, where there were fruit and purple flowers. There were, because they are no longer purple; they have dried. There I remembered a question a dear transgender friend once asked me: “You know you’re going to die, right?”

In a corner, an installation of syringes embedded in the wall unsettles visitors, as if highly toxic waste were something rare—when it is not. In Jalisco, water has shifted from a life-sustaining element to a poison laden with heavy metals, causing kidney disease, cancer, and the death of ecosystems.

In Sofía’s ritual performance, the return of an ancestor from beyond is invoked. How many rituals, how many singular and collective transformations must we enact before life and death cease to be exploitable resources enriching the world’s elites? Life extends, branches, nourishes, coexists, and dies in relation to everything. Amid the remnants of the performance, in the dry mud, a tiny sprout of grass emerges. The sound design of the video is hypnotic, spectral—it left me with a rhythmic, alert sensation that must continue.

The phrases spoken in Athenea Papacostas’s video Las lectoras [The Readers] seeped into my thoughts as I moved through the rest of the exhibition. The video shows women reading, alongside the inner soundscape that emanates as they do so. I enjoyed moving through the space as everything blended chaotically: noise, sculptures, memories, fragments of friends’ words, the feeling of their presence; moments tied to books and reading.

To lie down and read ourselves is reason enough to keep existing. The organism of reading-friendship is warm and nomadic: how many books have we carried, packed, searched for in unfamiliar streets, where people open their homes or bookstores to us, becoming small shelters of friendship where we sleep, bathe, drink, and continue reading.

The voice of Alejandra Mosig, one of the readers in Papacostas’s piece, is gentle and resonant in the basin of my ears. A friend once told me she finds the voice—its rhythm, music, tone, and volume—more attractive than a person’s image. We learned to speak centuries ago to raise prayers and communicate. This is the dream of art: to activate spells. Reading is a soft, abundant, idle magic through which we come into contact with both the living and the dead.

Magic also appears without the need for texts or lengthy wall labels—things happen without explanation. Free from the poisoned gift of verbal language, forms manifest and discover one another. This is evident in the larval, latent sculptural beings of Adeline de Monseignat: creatures that stand facing one another, in dialogue and attraction, adopting playful forms, stacking upon each other despite their material properties—bronze, onyx, fibers—and distinct spiritualities.

In the final room, the mutant beings of Berenice Olmedo appear: bodies in torsion, patched, flexible, matte and translucent. Light passes through them; beams penetrate their interiors and continue outward. That light reflects aspects of trans existence: a migratory, electric way of being in the world, dismantling and recomposing structures; a living vocation to change constantly. The sculptures Olmedo creates possess a brave, eccentric quality. The one nearest the exit emits a small orange glow from within.

Upon leaving the gallery, I sat by the circular fountain in the museum courtyard. Water transforms spaces; its vital flow caresses and revitalizes the soul. Visiting the Cabañas this year also means witnessing the removal of the large fountains that once stood in the front esplanade, replaced temporarily by FIFA viewing zones—displacing people experiencing homelessness in the process. To stage a handful of football matches, the fountains—once aquatic gathering places where people could bathe, cool off, and play—were destroyed.

It is the voice of Karina Aranda in Las lectoras that brings us back to James Baldwin: “any territory is always under threat.”

— Alejandra Arreola

Translated into English by Luis Sokol