Playing with Mud in Ladi Beñe by Ana Hernández at Campeche

Ana Hernández (Santo Domingo Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, 1991) inaugurated her first solo exhibition at the Campeche gallery on February 3rd.

Demanding that identity processes resolve our doubts, be transparent, teach us what we don’t know, so we can decode them upon a second glance, is a temptation that arises whenever we are faced with opacity as a practice. Resistance to immediate translatability is evident in the work of Ana Hernández. Only from this position do her pieces honor the artist’s land and roots; it is a space where distance and care are maintained. In Ladi Beñe, however, this happens through an ambivalent seduction—showing us too much while making us aware that we are outside the code, the language, and the references. This strategic opacity is embodied in one of the paintings, which reads: "bini diidxaza binni binniza"—words that confronted me as a naïve spectator, searching to understand a linguistic play in Zapotec.

Hernández knows how to guide her viewers' gaze, using the interplay between mud and gold as two elements that immediately challenge our most sterile imaginaries of belonging and value. In the artist’s words: “No one wants to get dirty with mud... Mud has always been despised and, at one point, it became a reference for poverty. The dirt in the streets marked that the people there were poor. I don't think so. Dirt is the most important thing.”

Hernández’s video-performance invites us to listen to the music that accompanies Ladi Beñe. “It’s very important to mention that this is the music I grew up with, music from the Banda Princesa Donají of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This is the music that accompanies the dance, and it becomes powerful with the performance. Every strong movement of my body falls in sync with the musical beat,” the artist explains. The sounds make her spiraling movements seem lighter as she carries on her back the sawfish sculpture, evoking the dance of the Son del pescado. This is a ritual dance where a sawfish escapes from fishermen, typically performed only by men, which led Hernández to disrupt that imagery by performing the dance in a field with a large mud puddle. “As a child, I used to wonder, why was it only practiced by men? I saw myself performing this dance.” The careful repetition of known rituals in Hernández’s work creates the necessary tension between opacity and transparency. On one hand, there is a generous act of sharing her own history and heritage in her work, while on the other, we are aware that we are witnessing the artist’s personal interpretation without any pretense of grounding herself in an essentialist origin. Rather, on the transformation of continuing the dance and her culture in a different register.

The video-performance is my favorite piece because we can see Hernández’s effort to carry the piece and maintain the dance at the same time, as well as her labored breathing, which reveals her exhaustion by the end of the performance. As the artist notes, this performance is the starting point for all the pieces that make up Ladi Beñe. The spiral Hernández draws with her body in the mud is also present in the gold sculptures at the back of the gallery. The eyes, as the artist explained to me, are a metaphor for what opens and closes when we live and die. “In my work, the elements come from the earth, and in the end, I believe the earth is both the origin and the end. Life and death meet in earth.” The seven paintings that make up the exhibition reflect her deep understanding of the materiality of the land. Hernández succeeds in maintaining depth in her strokes, as well as the patterns and cracks that mark the surface of her canvases. The texture in her paintings also evokes the textile ancestry of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The trap, as always with each artistic gesture, is getting caught in the net, like the sawfish, preventing artists from continuing to play and pursuing their desires in response to the gaze of the other. Here, Hernández takes the risk of being recognized as an artist who will need to, as her work seems to suggest, avoid the demand for absolute transparency and enjoy the joyful power of that journey. As she says, “The fish is not dancing out of happiness, it is a fish fighting not to be caught.”

When can getting caught in a watchtower also be a sign of fortune? I pondered this question as I stood before the monumental sawfish covered in gold at the center of the room, suspended above a mound of earth. This fish has already been caught, as it is wrapped in a golden net. I’m not quite sure how to answer my question—signs of fortune are always opaque, and it often takes time to realize that what happened was indeed fortune.

Ladi Beñe is open for viewing until March 29.

— Stefanía Acevedo

Translated to English by Luis Sokol