By Natalie Taylor
Marcela Armas, born in Durango, Mexico, began her studies in Architecture. But she found the field too technical and switched to Plastic Arts at the University of Guanajuato. Here, she met her partner, Gil Esparza, and after completing their studies, and spending several years in Mexico City, they moved to San Miguel de Allende. Their Taller 30, is a multiple-artist, cooperative studio and workshop in San Antonio. She and Gil have both been exploring the use of plastics in new and creative ways, mingling science, technology, and art.
Art for Marcela is a vehicle for communicating some of the most important issues facing humanity. She has become keenly aware of the rupture between humans and nature, and the resulting social failures on a global scale. Some of this awareness came after living for ten years in the mega-urban environment of Mexico City. She was appalled by the waste of nonrenewable energy, something that takes place in major cities all over the world. Any city, she realized, is simply an economic machine that “maintains itself through waste.” Urbanization equals mismanagement of natural resources; the use and discard of nature, she says, is “a loss-loss equation.” What a city takes from nature is not returned to be used again, it’s processed then discarded in heaps of harmful trash. The urban environment is a machine that uses us all, then spits us out.
This break between society and nature has led us to global crises not only in climate change, pollution of the oceans, and scarcity of water. It has also brought about many of our serious social issues—world poverty, hunger, and social unrest. Where science and technology could be the vehicles to right many of these wrongs, Marcela feels they are instead serving the industrial complex; not helping human beings. Having identified these wrongs, Marcela has taken it upon herself to try to show them through her art.
Her public art installations address these issues. One such exhibit, titled “Cenit” (Zenith), has fine plastic tubing through which used motor oil is pumped, creating the dark outline of a cityscape on a wall. The oil drips out at the far end and runs down the wall, leaving a trace of wastefulness; forming its own strange pattern. A project called “Implant” was a cooperative work between Mexico and the US in 2015. On two sites—Commons Park in Denver, Colorado, and Chapultepec Park, in Mexico City, separate crews excavated 30 meters into the earth and extracted columns of earthen core from each place. These were then inspected by scientists determining similarities and differences—a symbolic representation of how we have become invasive and extractive. Finally, the two samples were shipped from one place to the other, and buried in the separate excavations to create mirror images; an exchange of ideas and cultures. A bronze plaque covers each spot, commemorating this exchange.
Marcela uses sound as another medium to transmit the message of our broken synchronicity with the earth. In 2017, 600 meters deep in a copper and silver mine in San Luis Potosi, a rock fragment was dug up. It was pyrrhotite, a mineral with magnetic properties, susceptible to magnetic induction. Although the mine itself dates back 150 years, this had been an ancient ceremonial site of the Wixárika people, who have been there for more than 10,000 years. They called the place Tsinamekuta—the House of Rain. An accordion-like instrument was created to read, and interpret sounds produced by the magnetic field of the rock sample, what could be called the original memory of the rock. The project ended with a ceremony, including representatives of the Wixárika. Electrical signals of two hearts—theirs and ours—were recorded onto the rock, which was then returned to its original place.
Currently, Marcela’s art installations are in Mexico City at the Carillo Gil Art Museum, but the exhibit will come to Leon in November. Marcela’s photo, above, is in front of “I-Machinarius,” an outline of Mexico (upside down) through which flows crude oil, spilling its waste.
I asked Marcela what she expects to accomplish with her art. Her hope is that her works open a dialogue and an awareness of the issues she presents. She shows visually how industrialization and urbanization have created a rift between humanity and nature; and our need to recognize our place in the environment, and protect it, to be kind toward the earth and each other. Find additional information about Marcela’s art by visiting her website: marcelaarmas.net
Natalie Taylor: BA in English Lit and Journalism, Loyola University, Chicago, 1995. MFA in Creative Writing, Vermont College, Montpelier, VT, 1999. Published writer, editor, journalist. Spanish teacher in the US, English teacher in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Translator. www.natalietaylor.org Contact: tangonata@gmail.com
