Migrante

Migrante engages in conversation with different temporalities: the whale bones laying on the ground evoke other times when what we now know at the Peninsula of Baja California was an ocean. In this space, the bones oscillate between being the remnants of whale hunting or global warming. The presence os these bones also references the contemporary migration of humans and whales and they become a metaphor for the unidentified bodies of migrants that also lay abandoned on these same landscapes of what is now the United States and Mexico border region.

Today whales migrate from the warm waters in Baja California Sur, where they spawn, towards the Arctic Ocean, where they spend their summers feeding. Their cyclic migration brings them back to Baja during the Arctic winters, where in the 19th-century, as the gold rush and other colonial enterprises flourished, including the occupation and appropriation of half of the Mexican territory by the United States and the invasion of Baja California by U.S. pirate William Walker, the population of whales faced a genocide.

Migrante is on view at El Patio / Zona Maco, at the Jardín Escultórico Los Cabos in San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur from March 7 to May 7, 2024. The exhibition is curated by Juan Canela and Lena Sola Nogué.