Siamesa / Conjoined twin
Amauta García & David Camargo
Amauta García & David Camargo’s artistic and research work finely weaves relationships of kinship, visiting histories, linking places and proposing practices of care, not only between people, but – and above all – with the earth and its temporality. Their works have investigated the impact of real estate bubbles and the effort to find tenderness in a sometimes violent world. It is a work that also weaves filiation with different social movements, actions of resistance, a creative resistance, creating ways of inhabiting and coexisting with others and with the world.
With elements of architecture, sculpture, video and virtual environments, García & Camargo tell stories that are at once personal, social and political. They ask: How can we relate to the land beyond its exploitation? How do the people, who have made the land and defended it, relate to the volcanoes that create or destroy our worlds? García & Camargo engage in a conversation between the volcanic soil of their homeland in Mexico, the Dutch underwater volcano Zuidwal, and other histories buried in the subsoils that bear the wounds of years of violent extraction, as in the case of the subsoils exploited by mining in Bochum, Germany.
The aesthetics, understood as the fabric of social relations, the scale and dimensions of our perception and a shared sensitive experience, that García & Camargo’s work evokes can be understood as an active search for the heritages and lineages that link them to the ground we walk on, to the dimension of geological time, to their ancestors and their stories, languages and songs. Digging into the earth, digging into traditions, digging into their own family histories to connect, to create kinship, to tell stories that make futures possible. Together they have delved into the story of García’s mother, who in 1971 participated in Latin America’s largest illegal land invasion in the volcanic enclave south of Mexico City. This exercise in active inheritance re-signifies the creative resistance of García’s mother. It recognises her as Xocoyota, as akin to the creators and destroyers of the earth, a sister to the volcanoes. And this kinship is not limited to the volcanic zone south of Mexico City, it is a sisterhood that links her to the underwater volcano Zuidwal, to the Bochum coalfields through the veins of lava, gas and minerals of the earth.
García & Camargo’s powerful work also manages to center a way of looking at the world, and our relationship with it with a language that is not that of colonial extractivism, but that of a filial relationship: a re-indigenisation of the world. It is an inspiring projection that moves away from the modernizing paradigm, from Western development, and which I personally like to feel as a decolonial intervention. As an invitation to listen, to contemplation and to recognise ourselves in our filiations, as part of a whole that pulses in everyone and that we must re-learn to care for.
Alexis Rodriguez
