Karla Ekaterine Canseco

 Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s exhibition, Grietas de Acero (Steel Fissures), is composed of an installation and a series of sculptures primarily made of ceramics and metals. Here, metal acts as a conductor for all matter, while crude oil serves as the viscous lubricant that allows it to move. These materials can be considered as "beings" with their own agency, representing events, experiences, institutional processes, and economic practices: personifications of forces that constantly impact and imprint the ways that a body is created. What we call the body is a situation in continuous invention, porous like clay, susceptible to being traversed and molded by fictional and real powers. In this way, the artist questions the multiple meanings that this era has given to the material with which it shapes its imaginings. 
 
         Like several sculptures in this exhibition, "Stalagmite, an unusual descent" exists as if in implosion; its vertical construction keeps it in tension with gravity, in constant relation to its own vulnerability and collapse, petrifying moments of transformation. If in certain Mesoamerican rituals sculptures are broken during the ceremony, then the works presented here inhabit a second moment of incorporation of those entities— that of their monstrous recomposition from their fragments.
 
         Xolot is one of the guiding beings in this body of work; in Nahuatl, it means "monster" and is related to an ancient Mesoamerican metaphor for transformation. Within its meanings is one that refers to the installation Neobiota: the being that possesses a scission. Constitutively abject and abnormal, mischievous, especially sexually, split from itself and transgressor of the borders, this being continues to give us clues on how to desire fiercely. Canseco's sculptural practice is not only about bringing life to inert figures but also about limiting the agency that beings considered too powerful have over us. In the same gesture, she questions the fundamental division between the viewer and that which is seen; the perritas that inhabit this exhibition lack eyes and have a demand: to momentarily become them, lending them our eyes to see ourselves through their gaze, but only because, by looking through their eyes, you have stolen them.
 
         Canseco's work shows us that love, earth, anger, and passion are interconnected. They ignite through contact with an agitation imagined as fire. Indeed, the line that separates the inflammable from the incombustible divides our reality and modulates our perception of passion and intimacy. In the southern part of Mexico, two tribes share the same territory: in one, bodies inflame the desires of other bodies, and in the other, they liquefy their entrails. But in both, beneath the mass of images, verbal variations, moods, and tactile experiences, there is a stable, dense, slow, and fertile oily substance that vegetates darkly within us. It is beyond the reach of any of our senses: "they are beasts that charge at us in the darkness of matter" and become visible when imagination lets them "sing reality."