from the archive - mariana castillo deball

On the occasion of the public opening of Feathered Changes (2026), a large-scale, site-specific commission for the plaza surrounding the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), this edition of From the Archive takes the work as a point of departure to consider Mariana Castillo Deball’s practice. Extending across 20,000 square meters, the textured concrete surface is marked by animal tracks, fragments of an ancient mural, and undulating patterns that recall lines raked into sand. Situated on land once part of a marsh ecosystem, the work brings the geological and environmental histories embedded beneath the museum into direct relation with the visitor’s path.

This approach continued in Vista de Ojos (2014), presented in her first exhibition at kurimanzutto in Mexico City and now part of LACMA’s collection. Here, Castillo Deball drew on the Map of Uppsala (ca. 1550), translating a sixteenth-century depiction of Mexico City into an architectural-scale wooden floor that combines multiple systems of representation: the bird’s-eye view and the imposed grid of colonial urban planning alongside scenes of daily life and detailed renderings of the surrounding geography, flora, and fauna.

In Calendar Fall Away (2022), shown at the Mexican Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale, Castillo Deball extended this logic further, combining Mesoamerican calendrical systems, Maya glyphs, Renaissance imagery from the Uffizi Galleries, and references to her own grandmother’s home into a personal, temporal diagram. Taken together, these projects establish the conceptual vocabulary from which Feathered Changes emerges, where the floor becomes a space in which multiple cosmologies, histories, and temporalities converge.

Castillo Deball aligned her approach with LACMA’s renewed presentation of the collection, which places works from different cultures and periods on equal footing, challenging inherited hierarchies of display. As Diana Magaloni, Senior Deputy Director for Conservation, Curatorial, and Exhibitions, described in their Future Dialogues conversation, the museum is conceived as an archipelago: not a unified territory, but a series of islands—fragments removed from their original contexts and brought into relation within the exhibition space.[1]

A key precedent appears in Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances (2016), presented at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where Castillo Deball drew on these Teotihuacan mural fragments to reflect on their dispersal across museum collections in Europe and the United States. In Feathered Serpent (2016), cast concrete fragments connected by a rope, evoke the disjointed condition in which many murals survive after excavation and looting. At LACMA, this logic expands to an architectural scale: the serpent cannot be apprehended in full, and its fragments are embedded across the plaza, requiring visitors to reconstruct it through movement—foregrounding both the museum’s role in preservation and the histories of displacement it contains.

The exhibition at SFAI was also shaped by Castillo Deball’s interest in how systems of knowledge are marked by uncertainty, chance, and incomplete information. In this context, she turned to composer and visual artist John Cage, whose work since the 1950s had used the I Ching to introduce randomized procedures into the making of music and visual art. Castillo Deball adapted a similar approach to the exhibition, using chance to guide the placement of objects within the galleries and incorporating Cage’s etchings from his Changes and Disappearances series (1982). Rather than fixing relationships between works in advance, this method allowed meaning to emerge through shifting juxtapositions, foregrounding the roles of contingency, displacement, and partial knowledge in archaeological interpretation.

This attention to the site extends to the history of the LACMA campus, once a marsh ecosystem rich with life, as evidenced by fossil remains uncovered during excavation. This informed the inclusion of animal tracks across the plaza. Drawing on research into species native to California, Castillo Deball incorporated the traces of coyotes, bears, snakes, bison, jaguars, and roadrunners, studying the scale and movement of each to reproduce their paths across the surface. Visitors encounter these traces of other beings that have traversed the landscape. Their trajectories extend across the museum’s interior and exterior, introducing a non-human presence that situates the work within a broader ecological continuum and expands the temporal horizon beyond human history.

The artist’s interest in geological time and how life leaves its imprint finds a parallel in Hypothesis of a Tree (2016), presented at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial. There, Castillo Deball constructed a spiral bamboo structure based on a phylogenetic tree, a diagram used in evolutionary biology to map relationships and degrees of proximity among species. From its branching framework hung paper rubbings of fossil sediments, produced using a technique adapted from archaeologist Merle Greene Robertson, who documented Maya monuments with Japanese paper and ink. By combining this method with scientific models, the work brings fossil-based and data-driven approaches to time into dialogue. Developed through fieldwork at fossil sites in Brazil and research in natural history collections, the project unfolded through exchanges with paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and conservators, highlighting a methodology grounded in collaboration.

This concern with the imprint of fossil records and Maya sculpture and how fieldwork evidence can be documented to be shared with other audiences, reappears in works made alongside the LACMA commission. As the project neared completion, Castillo Deball produced large-scale frottages of the floor onto thin, nearly translucent cotton, using the same ink-rubbing technique developed by Greene Robertson. These works register manholes and other infrastructural elements alongside the artist’s composition, forming a palimpsests of the plaza. One now hangs within the new David Geffen Galleries; another was presented in her recent exhibition at kurimanzutto, New York, along with Feathered Serpent (2016). 

The surface was built through successive concrete pours, during which lines, textures, and impressions were inscribed. The undulating patterns that connect the “islands” were produced through broom finishing and raking, recalling the patterned grounds of Zen gardens. These gestures guide circulation while responding to the building’s organic form. 

Other elements required the development of new methods. The feathered serpent drawings, for example, were transferred using ropes attached with zip ties to large plastic sheets, embedded into wet concrete and removed once it had partially set.