Aqua

2015 - Installation (Installation)
Dimensions variable

Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans. In this case, the gourds (guajes o bules in Spanish), made from the fruit of Lagenaria siceraria , which have been used since pre-colonial times as containers, communicate with each other. These ancestral flasks stand for the importance of the liquid they can potentially contain, their materiality being eloquent enough as a narrative element that is further enlivened by their movement. Their conversation addresses concerns for the stress water sources have been put under to supply the largest city in Latin America, affecting important ecosystems. Through the use of robotics, Palma Rodríguez relates to Western technology in a critical way, acknowledging its logics, but turning its potential against its fixed assumptions of progress and development that have often marginalized non-Western understandings. Instead of creating neat mechanisms of deception, he exposes the basic devices he uses to animate his works, going against the grain of what Bruno Latour has called blackboxing , the process by which science and technology’s innerworkings become more obscure as their outcomes gain visibility.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez was born in the rural area of Milpa Alta, Mexico City and his practice is intimately related to this place. After living in the United Kingdom for three decades, Palma Rodríguez returned to Mexico ten years ago and establish himself back in Milpa Alta where he develops his artistic practice as well as the project Calpulli Tecalco, with his mother Carmen Rodríguez Meza, and sister, María Angélica Palma Rodríguez. Calpulli Tecalco is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the ecological wealth of the area through the milpa—an ancient native agricultural system—as well as the teaching of Nahuatl. Palma Rodríguez’s practice is influenced by his initial training as a mechanical engineer, but also by his interest in Mesoamerican Indigenous thought, past and present, and by the process of learning Nahuatl, the language of his elder relatives that he only learnt as an adult through tape recordings his uncle sent to London. He articulates his interest in science, robotics, and programming with an artistic practice informed by environmental and cultural activism. His work purposefully adopts rudimentary technologies that yield precarious animated sculptures made out of found waste, stones, earth, and vegetation that bring back to life elements and narratives of Mesoamerican cosmologies, which the artist links to present day situations.

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