Alicia Smith
TOCI : Chapter 1
Curated by Jacob Rhodes
Artist Reception: Saturday Jan 13th, 6-8pm
Dates: Jan 13 - Mar 2, 2024
Field Projects is pleased to present Alicia Smith Solo Exhibition, TOCI : Chapter 1. This will be the second time Smith has shown with FP and her first Solo Exhibition with the gallery.
“As a indigenous person I am a post-apocalyptic being.” -Smith
Harnessing the postmodern dialect of Historical Fabrication and Indigenous Futurism, Xicana artist Alicia Smith weaves together science fiction and Aztec cosmology to tell the story of a group of indigenous women who escape the 1492 Spanish conquest of the Americas in a pyramid-vessel or Teocalli that brings them to Mars. Utilizing a combination of costuming, ritual objects, and performance, TOCI : Chapter 1 invites viewers to imagine an alternate reality where sacred indigenous knowledge and practices are fully intact and remain centered in society.
At the heart of Smith’s narrative tapestry is the medicine bundle. Called tlaquimilolli among Nahuatl speaking peoples, these bundles were seen as living beings and served as emissaries of group identity. Held by a designated carrier, a Teomama, usually an elder of great power, tlaquimilolli are filled with the remains of gods and ancestors over generations, and used as one kind of record keeping of tribal knowledge as well as for ceremonial rites. In our collective reality, these vessels were lost or destroyed during the genocide by the Spanish. However, in the reality created within Smith’s work, the bundles are preserved by being brought to Mars, thus offering a fully intact continuation of an Aztec identity and thought, which reflects a symbiotic relationship with all forms of life in contrast with the Western colonial values prioritizing profit, power and monotheism.
Alicia Smith on TOCI: Chapter 1
“All of the women in my story were altered by the conquest. Even though they were able to make their escape before Tenochtitlan fell. In order to survive in their new home they had to rely on not just each other, but countless plants, insects, and animals that gave them the power to live on a planet that as of today, is uninhabited. The colony on Mars was co-created by all of them. Their identities fundamentally were entwined with other living beings and that is what saved them.
Melissa K. Nelson, an Anishinaabe cultural ecologist talks about the Native Woman’s body that in so many stories acts as a kind of meeting place, a contact zone, between the human and more-than-human life which establishes our ethics of kinship. My tribes’ understand that their lives exist within the lives of others and how other beings interact and influence each other is what shapes their identities and existence. The Bat-Women are the Bat-Women because of the Bats, because of the virus Rabies, the Spider-Women are the Spider-Women because of the spiders, etc. They would not have Oxygen without the corn, beans and squash. Their bodies absorb radiation from space, that the DNA of the Axolotls help them to withstand.
“The permeable borders of the female are what make her threatening to ideas of containment, control, accountability. In her things merge, and from her things emerge." -Rebecca Solnit
These women are defined by their relationships. If we think about relationships not just as connections between things happening at the same time but as the telling of a story about where things come from, their cosmogeneolgy, then the potential of such relationships bring forth a presence that is unexpected and beyond human time. It encomposes the history of our galaxy and our gods.
“I will be out there as a piece of endless body..” - Louise Erdrich.
