N.A.S.A.L. returns to Zona Maco with Opciones para un Trazado Cardinal, curated by Natalia de la Rosa, presenting works from Jessica Briceño Cisneros, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Raura Oblitas and Miriam Salado.
This curatorial project presents the recent work of four artists who live and work across the Americas. It proposes a dialogue articulated through four voices and four points of connection between Jessica Briceño Cisneros (Venezuela–Chile), Raura Oblitas (Peru), Miriam Salado (Mexico), and Wendy Cabrera Rubio (Mexico). The exhibition traces relationships between each artist’s chosen media and conceptual inquiries, while generating a series of intersections that highlight territorial markers through sculpture, drawing, installation, and ceramics. It outlines a multilayered framework in which each piece connects to the next, emphasizing an intrinsic relationship between body and territory.
Like many recent exercises in reflection and research, this exhibition engages a critical reconsideration of the category “Latin American art.” Within this debate, it foregrounds a geographic condition in order to propose instead a network of strategic points that rethinks landscape, material, and corporeal connections through the work of these four artists. In doing so, it redefines the very terms of Latin American representation by invoking the monument, the commemorative plaque, weaponry, and the fictions of mestizaje.
Jessica Briceño Cisneros offers a cosmic orientation and a bodily delineation through three sculptures: a triangle that marks the “Coño Sur” and two luminous nebulas that invoke and fictionalize two constellations—the Southern Cross and Polaris, the guiding star of the North Pole. Raura Oblitas, in turn, extends her research on memory, burial, and the commemorative monument, reformulating these symbols through a digestive lens. By embedding four dental plates, she produces a striking contrast between erosion and shine, permanence and ephemerality, burial and exhumation, what is displayed and what is swallowed.
Complementing this, Miriam Salado presents Armas salvajes, a hybrid exploration grounded in the desert as subject. Through these composite forms that construct a violent natural landscape, she investigates an ambiguity between attack and resistance. Finally, Wendy Cabrera Rubio completes the dialogue with two ceramic plates made from Oaxaca clay and ceramic paste, intervened with iron oxide and the artist’s own dehydrated blood. These works question positivist taxonomies based on alimentary, geographic, and cultural classifications as a critical lens on the history of racism in Mexico and its conditions of formation.
By bringing all these works together along a cardinal trajectory that crosses the Tropic of Capricorn, the Equator, and the Tropic of Cancer, the exhibition invites us to reflect on our own experiences and movements across this topography and the narrative possibilities it opens.
