Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Resident Artist Lecture 2026

Naomi Rincón-Gallardo presents a performance which is then followed by a lecture discussing her interdisciplinary practice. Rincón-Gallardo mixes and matches borrowed and discarded materials as part of her process. Rincón-Gallardo sees her artistic practice as a labor of underworld making, which allows her to acknowledge an intimacy with danger and death as forces that expand their domain horizontally. These mythic, political underworlds that Rincón-Gallardo creates are imagined from the necropolitical nation that Mexico has turned into over the last two decades, ever since the so-called war against narcos. The Mexican political situation unleashed plural forms of unofficial wars involving naturalized violence, a multiplication of femicides, disappearances, and forced displacements, a proliferation of clandestine graves, and an expansion of military and paramilitary forces. Rincón-Gallardo seeks to understand the history of formerly colonial territories and how they are often marked by the continuum of neocolonial disorder, dispossession and the spreading of necropower. Rincón-Gallardo seeks to create a materialized attempt to frame and host embodied forms of collective belonging and ritual. She explains that at times these materializations are ephemeral, and other times they are long-lasting. Rincón-Gallardo believes that artists need to collectively imagine conditions of living where many worlds can fit. This then allows them to pay attention to what can still be repaired, sustained, and cared for, despite multiple ongoing collapses. Ultimately, for Rincón-Gallardo, her works are offerings that imagine entanglements of earthly creatures together with death, an aspiration to rehabilitate affection, emotions, interpersonal bonds, and the desire to craft horizons of transformation.