MinerAlert
MinerAlert
For the exhibition The Blessings of the Mystery, artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas create a new film and series of installations rooted in West Texas. The project crystallizes the artists’ extended research into the connections and tensions between the cultural, scientific, industrial, and socio-political forces of three key locations: the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, the Amistad Dam on the Rio Grande, and the Permian Basin oil fields.
The multifaceted presentation centers around The Teachings of the Hands, a single-channel film that depicts the region’s complex histories of colonization, migration, and ecological precarity from the perspective of Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. The video-installation combines observational and experimental documentary with oral histories, reenactments, archival footage and documents. The film’s narrative grows out of the land where both Indigenous and settler knowledge have been historically produced. Weaving together scenes from the present day to 4,000 years in the past, The Teachings of the Hands highlights the environmental memories and consciousness of these interconnected places across Texas.
The artists use sculpture, installation, collage, and drawing to expand on the concepts and ideas in the film, offering viewers a physical and multisensory experience of the film’s storylines. Additionally, the exhibition includes original watercolors from the 1930s by artists and amateur archaeologists Forest and Lula Kirkland, which record the ancient rock art of the Lower Pecos, on loan from the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas. These rarely-seen watercolors document the original forms and vibrant colors that were still visible in the 30s, before flooding, erosion, and human interaction damaged or destroyed them.
The Blessings of the Mystery is an extension of Caycedo and de Rozas’s multidisciplinary practice centered around environmental issues, encounters between history and memory, Indigenous rights, and other cosmologies. For their exhibition and its iterations across Texas, Caycedo and de Rozas investigate the transformation of Somi Se’k* by way of industry, infrastructure, and private property.
*Somi Se’k means the Land of the Sun, and is the way the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe refer to the land known as Texas.
Blessings of the Mystery is organized by Ballroom Marfa and curated by Laura Copelin, Director, with Daisy Nam, Curator. Iteration of the exhibition will be on display at the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin September 24–December 3, 2021 (organized by MacKenzie Stevens, Director) and Ballroom Marfa May 14- September 4, 2022.