{"id":7078,"date":"2025-04-12T00:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T00:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/?p=7078"},"modified":"2025-10-09T04:28:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T04:28:23","slug":"what-lies-beneath-the-living-archives-of-lorena-mal-by-ambika-subra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/what-lies-beneath-the-living-archives-of-lorena-mal-by-ambika-subra\/","title":{"rendered":"What lies beneath: the living archives of Lorena Mal, by Ambika Subra"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Text by Ambika Subra
Mexico Brief, April 2025<\/span><\/h6>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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What Lies Beneath: The Living Archives of Lorena Mal

Unearthing the hidden narratives beneath our feet, Mexican artist Lorena Mal is revealing the deep entanglements between land and power. She is an excavator\u2014not only of the earth\u2019s soil and trees, but of the knowledge systems, political structures, and forgotten narratives embedded within it. Working across sculpture, performance, and archival intervention, Mal dismantles the illusion of landscape as a neutral backdrop. Instead, she exposes it as a charged site of conflict, migration, and resilience, shaped by forces both geological and geopolitical. One of the most exciting voices in contemporary Mexican art, her recent works at the XV Bienal FEMSA and Museo Jumex have cemented her place as a radical force in rethinking our experiences of landscape.

Mal refuses to see land as separate from history. In Restregarnos Tierra en los Ojos [Rubbing dirt on our eyes]<\/em>, an installation commissioned for the XV Bienal FEMSA, she created an archive of occupation and displacement by covering the space\u2019s surfaces with soil\u2014a raw, living material applied in a fermented state, allowing microbial life and air to bind it into a clay that naturally cracked and shifted over the four months of the exhibition. Sourced from the Baj\u00edo territory, the soil bore the region\u2019s long past of floods and droughts, colonial mining extraction, and environmental destruction. Who has the right to a land? Who determines its fate?

Mal\u2019s intervention blurred the lines between architecture and archaeology, embedding the region\u2019s instability directly into the walls of the exhibition. The soil itself became testimony\u2014not just a metaphor, but an active record of conflict, survival, and resistance.

Beyond the visible, Mal\u2019s work listens. In Largo Aliento [Long Breath]<\/em>, performed at Museo Jumex this past year, she translated tree rings into sonic compositions, using instruments made from those trees as a vehicle for a deep, resonant breath. Just as the soil preserves and reveals the memory of land through its raw materiality, Largo Aliento [Long Breath]<\/em>\u00a0treats breath as a conduit for memory, where tree rings vocalize their silent histories. These rings, like layers of sediment, hold the imprints of environmental upheavals\u2014fires, droughts, cycles of violence and renewal. By playing their breath, Mal does not impose a structure onto their histories but coaxes out their latent recollections, turning them into sound. Her instruments do not adhere to tempered scales or fixed notation, but instead respond to human interaction. This relationship resists linear time in favor of something more fluid and horizontal, creating a resonance that blurs the boundary between past and present. Both earth and breath become modes of listening\u2014fragile yet persistent archives of what landscapes remember.


History is not confined to human narratives alone. At its core, Lorena Mal\u2019s work is about destabilization\u2014of narrative, of power, of our very understanding of place. She is not interested in transformation as a fixed act but in how landscape holds and reveals its own records through its raw architecture. Mal excavates how land bears witness to colonial displacements, migrations both human and botanical, and the erasure embedded in plantation histories. By blending materials across geographies, carving new sonic pathways through time, and forcing us to confront what lies beneath our feet, Mal reframes the land as an active force\u2014one that remembers, resists, and refuses erasure. Her practice is not simply an exploration of landscape; it is a reconfiguration of how we engage with the world itself.<\/h6>

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Otras publicaciones<\/h4>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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La voz de la monta\u00f1a<\/a><\/h3>
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Ex Teresa 30 a\u00f1os<\/a><\/h3>
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Text by Ambika SubraMexico Brief, April 2025 What Lies Beneath: The Living Archives of Lorena Mal Unearthing the hidden narratives beneath our feet, Mexican artist Lorena Mal is revealing the deep entanglements between land and power. She is an excavator\u2014not only of the earth\u2019s soil and trees, but of the knowledge systems, political structures, and…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7080,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[66],"class_list":["post-7078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articulo","tag-66"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7078"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7099,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7078\/revisions\/7099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lorenamal.com\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}