Paloma Contreras Lomas presents Cartucho (la nación espiritual) /Cartridge (the spiritual nation) for Siembra 33 in kurimanzutto,

The Secret of Stones

The following exhibition happened during a blackout, a phenomenological essay, depicted in an artificial manner. The installation is divided into rocks, caves, ashes, and pantheistic clouds of smoke that together form an artificial ecosystem. Each of the

elements is accompanied by a spectre, a ghost, or an apparition. Just like casting the search for the right questions to the wind. What I mean is, there is no such thing as a universal spectre and what is being proposed in these phenomenological-political invocations are

different methodologies of listening to the constructed landscape, the testimonial landscape.

First Manifesto to the Volcano

FIRST MANIFESTO TO THE SPIRITUAL NATION

That year, the stones were converted into night,

embrace me cloud, align me with the rest of the ashes,

that year, plumes of smoke revealed themselves to be the true covert

terrorists,

hiding in their cave, what is beyond its gaze, of legality,

embrace me night, hide me beneath your darkness,

that year, complete darkness became a trade,

put me to rest rest in the landscape and find me in the senate,

that year, the eruptions would be transmitted on national networks,

unstitch me mother, in your houses of fog,

that year, the devil ceased being the only one smelling of sulphur,

the government smelled like it too,

put me to sleep volcano, for I’m so tired of being a student, best to find

me in the south,

that year, the mountain entered the central chimney, blowing itself up,

after the economical crisis,

kill me father, make me global, welcome the new Spiritual Nation,

where the climate is political, where the landscape is natural,

that year, the monuments made us orphans and became gunpowder,

find me stone, for you’ve been searching for me for centuries in the

wrong place, for I am in the snow, in the skirts of the hidden union.

That year, the strike ended and the university became a cemetery.

–Paloma Contreras Lomas

about the artist

Paloma Contreras Lomas (Ciudad de México, 1991) began her artistic training studying Visual Art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, La Esmeralda (201 1-2015). Shortly thereafter, she joined the multidisciplinary collective Biquini Wax EPS (2015-2021) and that same year,

joined the education program SOMA (2016-2018). Contreras Lomas’s work extends to various media such as video, writing, drawing, and performance, as well as collective productions that run parallel to her personal research. Her artistic production explores distinct quandaries such as the removal of class from art, literary fiction as a tool, landscape as costume and testament, Latin American science fiction and the terror of the middle class.

Her work has been exhibited in places such as the Palais de Tokyo;

FRAC Centre Orléans; Museo Tamayo; Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM); Galería de Arte Contemporáneo Antonio López Sáenz, among others. She has been the recipient of grants such as Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA (2018-2019), Next Generation Grantee (as part of Biquini Wax EPS) and the Cisneros Fontanals CIFO award in the category of Emerging Artist (2020). She is represented by Pequod Co gallery in México. She is currently Actualmente planning the creation of La Nación Espiritual very close to the Popocatépetl volcano, she lives and works in Mexico City.