Using subterranean materials, Beatriz Cortez creates metaphysical transmitters that narrate geological transition and cultural loss from a future-oriented perspective, rendering time elastic. In The Underworld, Cortez delves into the organic and industrial aspects of her work as they relate to the Earth’s biology and Indigenous practices that respect and nurture natural ecologies. Below, Cortez speaks with X-TRA editor Candice Lin, whose own artistic practice similarly advances a decolonial perspective through her use of organic and industrial materials and catalytic processes. Their conversation has been edited for print.
CANDICE LIN: Beatriz, I’m so glad we get to be in conversation again, following our talk at Occidental College, in February 2019, where we had just begun to map out some of our common interests and overlapping research. As we’ve been in conversation on and off these last few months, I’ve been thinking about some of the things we’e been speaking about particularly the connections you noted between histories of human eugenics and genocide in relationship to the cultivation of plants, but also the way you think about these histories at a scale beyond the human. In thinking about your work, I wanted to talk about the way you shift hierarchies of importance with your interest in posthuman scales of time and queer matter.
BEATRIZ CORTEZ: I have been thinking a lot about how your work enters the posthuman by dismantling the possibility of thinking of ourselves as impermeable individuals, by making visible how bodies are vulnerable to each other—breathing each other, as in the case of your fog machines with Patrick Staff, or drinking each other, as in the case of your piss tea. I think we are both interested in the place where it is no longer possible to imagine the other as a completely separate being, because we have consumed each other, breathed each other, perceived each other as porous beings and come to be the other as much as ourselves. This moves away from subjectivity toward away of being that dares to be collective or to disappear, to not be an individual, to be decentered in importance. This is a way of being that is queer not only in terms of gender but in every aspect of being, to be queer matter. I think you are my dark twin, and often times your work makes me question if I am being naive with all the optimism about the future or if you are being darkly optimistic as you make words like contagion or piss sound so cheerful.
Beatriz Cortez, Trinidad: Joy Station, 2019. Steel, chain link, mylar ribbons, and plants indigenous to the Americas. Installation view, Trinidad: Joy Station, Craft Contemporary Museum, January 27–May 12, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Gina Clyne.
LIN: (Laughs.) I love the idea of being your dark twin. I would be honored. Your work does have an incredible optimism and generosity in it even while it addresses violent histories of war, displacement, and colonization. I was thinking about how there is something that we are both doing with plants (and other materials)that is about language as well as matter. I’m thinking about my interest in racialized language around materials on the one hand, and how matter itself is embedded in legacies of circulation, trade, use, and misuse. This seems similar to how I see you working with the historical and current meanings of matter and form, for example in your use of the geodesic dome in Drop City1; the mylar, which is both an aerospace technology and the material given as blankets to children in ICE detention centers and other migrants around the globe; the plants Spain tried to ban in its colonies; and, of course, steel with all its history and contemporary presence. I think we are both interested in the queer and entangled lives of matter, thinking about these materials beyond where they enter the human sphere. Your work builds off the assumption of this posthuman aliveness in all matter, including inanimate matter, like rocks, and also plants and metal. You seem to be interested in an accounting of history and the future, where the human is deprioritized, where you ask “why matter matters,” through using plants that sustained Indigenous civilizations and rocks that emerge from under the Earth’s crust. I know from our earlier conversations that you are deeply influenced by philosophical ideas, and that your lived experiences as an immigrant and survivor of war are also present in what you are making and thinking about. Can you tell me about the influences that have shaped your interests?
CORTEZ: I experienced a crisis, and speculative philosophies and posthuman imaginaries gave me a floating device in the middle of the melting ice. The crisis I experienced was due to the contradictions I was not able to solve between my intellectual and artistic work, if those could be separated at all. You see, I am a Deleuzian scholar who believes in nomadic thinking and practice, and one of my favorite pastimes is thinking about how to ruin chronologies and predetermined diagrams. From this perspective, the past is set, although it must be reinterpreted, and the future is open. But I grew up in a war. Surviving a war brings guilt (why me?), anger (why is there no justice?), and gratitude (towards the dead and the living and their numerous acts of kindness). And I migrated in a rushed two-hour decision, which brought its own traumas. So, I began making art that was greatly impacted by the traumas of my past. And it was difficult for me, because my intellectual side would often tell my wounded side that we were not really being nomads, that we had an anchor, that we were drowning in a rigid past, that the future requires flying capabilities.
LIN: It’s incredible to hear how embodied and lived these abstract philosophical theories are for you, as they are put to the test through the traumas of war and migration. I imagine the feelings of uprootedness, loss, alienation, and displacement must continue to impact not only how you think about your subject matter and materials but also how you think about time and location. I’m thinking about your interest in simultaneities. It’s interesting to consider the ways we reckon our lived experiences with the lives of others, whether we encounter them through meeting people or through reading their work and ideas. You’ve been incredibly active working on various projects and exhibitions. Your haunting show at the Craft Contemporary(formerly Craft and Folk Art Museum) in Los Angeles seemed to be simultaneously a ritual space of memorial—”with its dim lighting reflecting off of the woven mylar beds and metal book and welded dome structures, with a sense of stillness and darkness within them—and a vibrantly alive and future-thinking space, with pink grow-lit seed beds and welded structures that seemed to reference water tanks, filtration systems, or waste management systems, which I later learned were toilets. What have you been working on recently?
CORTEZ: In the coming months, I plan to spend some time in New York, working in the Museum of Modern Art archives in preparation for an exhibition about Artists Call, which was an effort by the New York art world in 1983 and 1984 to stop US military aid to Central America.2Then I am excited to visit Williamstown, Massachusetts, and think about a possible exhibition there and a collaboration with curators Marco Antonio Flores and Lisa Dorin. I am also working on other projects, including making a new sculpture for a show about food at TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica, curated by Adán Vallecillo. Also, Rafa Esparza and I are working with the 45 Salón Nacional de Artistas in Bogotá, Colombia. The curatorial team, known as La Usurpadora, will replicate our space capsule, Nomad 13, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO). The idea of sharing the blueprints of our space capsule with others in the Americas is very exciting to us, since typically nations don’t give other nations the secret blueprints for their space programs. Our space capsule carries with it a gift that all of us inherited from ancient Indigenous peoples in the Americas: the seeds of edible plants that the Spaniards attempted to forbid but which were secretly kept alive by Indigenous communities and passed down from generation to generation.3 So it makes us so happy that we will be sharing our blueprints with them, and in this way, we will be able to question nationalism and recirculate and celebrate Indigenous knowledge and technologies. I am also reworking some of the components of two of my works for the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. We will install Memory Insertion Capsule (2017) and also a sound installation titled The Multitude (2014) about the Massacre of El Mozote in El Salvador.4 I’m pouring most of my energies into a new project I have in mind for my first solo show at Commonwealth and Council in spring 2020. For this show, I am recording the subterranean sounds of plants, and I am imagining a sort of symphony that is taking place under the earth. This sound is not meant for humans, humans cannot hear it; in fact, I have to change the range of the sounds to make it audible for humans. There is an entire world not meant for us.
LIN: It is interesting that you mention nomadic thinking and practices as a tenet of your work, and you are working in an itinerant manner, not only across geographies in space but also across different histories and spans of time from the precolonial to the 1980s to the future. You are indeed breaking chronologies, as you say, or maybe fragmenting them so the pieces can be put together in new compositions where unseen relations become visible.
CORTEZ: I am also excited about having a conversation with a philosopher whose work I really like: Emanuele Coccia. The conversation will be linked to an exhibition titled Walk towards the Paroxysm of Sublime, curated by Anna Milone and Ana Iwataki, at LACE in the fall of 2019.
Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza, Nomad 13, 2017. Adobe bricks, steel, plastic, soil, and plants indigenous to the Americas. Installation view, Trinidad: Joy Station, Craft Contemporary Museum, January 27–May 12, 2019. Courtesy of the artists and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Gina Clyne.
LIN: Emanuele Coccia! I’m laughing to hear you are having a conversation with him, because I remember our different opinions about Coccia’s book The Life of Plants(2018). I thought he seemed like someone who had never met a plant, whose hands never got dirty or touched soil. But I know you got a lot out of Coccia’s writing. I have never been one for philosophy, and I admire your ability to take texts that seem too dense and abstract for me and put them in the earth to grow some of your wild, enchanted weeds.
CORTEZ: It would be really interesting to ask Coccia why he speaks about plants in a cosmic way and their relationship to the planet, to the earth and to the cosmos, instead of their need for water. That is interesting tome, especially because a lot of the sounds that plants make under the earth are generated by water bubbles moving through their capillaries.
LIN: Yes, water! And also soil, and the microbes and fungi in soil that provide the plants with nutrients, moving what is often the decomposed bodies of others, or the sperm of other plants, or the delicious shit of animals to become a kind of food. I have always loved the idea of communicating and becoming the other through shared food, a whole communion and redistribution of nutrients—resources essential to life! I will be so curious to read your conversation with Coccia and to see how he responds to the questions you raise.
CORTEZ: You make me laugh because you say “the delicious shit of animals” and talk about the beautiful markings made by piss. It is so true, I always love that so much about your work. (Although it makes me a little scared each time that you say, “Try this.”) It explores our communion, our becoming a collective subject through our shared food. I thought of you a couple of days ago when I heard that humans are now allowed to become compost in the State of Washington. It’s funny, because we have always become compost, but now we can legally become compost.
LIN: That is amazing. I never thought we would get to be compost legally. Good for you, State of Washington. Thinking about compost and what becomes earth and what’s buried underground, you seem to be thinking a lot about the subterranean—with the ideas you earlier mentioned about lava and this new idea about the sounds of plants inside the earth. It’s interesting to me that you are thinking about sound in the humanly inaudible realm of the plant project, and also in relationship to The Multitude. I had not heard about this massacre before, and I wonder if there’s a connection here between the two projects in describing a range of different types of inaudibility? What becomes unheard through being buried in the margins of history, and what is not heard because it falls outside the realm of what we deem important in our focus on our own species, our own narrow ways of defining kinship? The primacy of vision itself seems so human, so to focus on other senses is a gesture in itself that points to other ways of knowing. Is this a shift for you? I think there is so much striking visuality about your steel sculptures; I’m remembering the light playing off of the reflective mylar in the “bed” sculptures, while there is also a tactile and immersive quality, the smell of soil and the occasional sound of gears churning. I don’t remember if you have worked with sound extensively and am wondering what its presence means with these newer projects?
CORTEZ: I love what you say about the inaudible, that is precisely what I am trying to explore in my work: different types of inaudibility. That massacre was the largest massacre in the Americas, it was paid for with US dollars, it was carried out by an army trained by the United States. In my country, this week, Congress, which over there is called Asamblea Legislativa, is voting on a law to protect the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, such as this massacre. Life is so unfair, there is no justice. But this is when speculative posthuman thought opens up new alternatives for me, and so does [Baruch] Spinoza’s work. I like reading, and I think of philosophers as my interlocutors. I like to talk to them. It doesn’t matter if they are dead, their ideas are there, available, saying interesting things, interjecting intoour conversation. Their interactions are also a way to break chronologies, to cross through time and space to help us sort out our concerns. This allows us to have untimely conversations. Among these philosophers, I love talking to Spinoza. I don’t know for sure if I am talking to Spinoza, the philosopher in the seventeenth century, or the Spinoza that[Gilles] Deleuze channeled in that beautiful book called Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy (1970). But Spinoza always helps me overcome guilt, his ethics are so awesome. Spinoza would say that it is not about recognition, that it is not important for others to recognize that this massacre was significant, or that the hundreds of children, babies, that were murdered were important. They were killed in a preemptive move. Their killers have not paid for what they did, even though Rufina Amaya, a woman with enormous courage, survived the massacre by jumping into a ravine, and told the world many times about what she had witnessed.
Spinoza would say that they were important, whether others recognize it or not. I think in a way I am trying to understand the world outside the realm of Western humanism. The earth holds all the dead from the wars, the bones of our ancestors, the Anthropocene, all of it slowly becomes planetary. And so, what I am thinking is going more in this direction: There are infinite conversations happening on the planet and in the cosmos that are not meant for us, that are impersonal, that are for others, for nonhuman others. Our ears are so limited, and these conversations have been happening without us. I am interested in making these conversations audible, matter audible, bones audible, books audible (books were buried during the war in El Salvador, out of fear). Maybe even allow for the untimely interjection of humans, but I also want to note that these conversations are not meant for us. That even if the Asamblea in El Salvador passes a law that declares the perpetrators innocent, the bones have become part of the remnants of the Anthropocene. The shards of the bones that were left. There is another justice, a planetary justice, it is recorded under the surface of the Earth and in the atmosphere.
In 2014, I made Armor for Rufina Amaya; it is on view at the Museo MARTE in El Salvador. It includes a sound installation titled The Multitude that is the piece that I plan to install at the Henry Art Gallery in the fall.
LIN: Yes! So much with what you are saying about the limits of Western humanism and trying to use these other modes of working, thinking, reframing, and listening to move beyond this framework resonates with me.
Beatriz Cortez, Armor for Rufina Amaya, 2014. Steel, black lava, photograph, and sound installation. Installation view, Donde hubo fuego: Arte contemporáneo de El Salvador, Museo de Arte de El Salvador, San Salvador, January 19, 2018–January 18, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Walterio Iraheta.
CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.
[Cortez and Lin pause to listen to The Multitude (La multitud), which is on the artist’s website, https://beatrizcortez.com/armor-for-rufina-amaya/.]
LIN: Since I don’t speak Spanish, I don’t know what they are saying, but the word I hear several times is claro, claro—for clarity? Understanding? The whispers almost become like the sound of water, and the cicadas and other insects buzz into a swarm of sound, slightly menacing, slightly like white noise that one might ignore or use to lull oneself to sleep, but they are pushed just beyond pleasant lulling to feel more insistent, more disruptive and urgent. It seems very much to speak to the idea of hearing the inaudible, as you describe.
CORTEZ: Actually, it’s really interesting to me that you understood the sound piece as Spanish text because in reality it is made of the names of the dead, but it is also about the inaudible. So many people were related in the town of El Mozote that a lot of their last names were repeated as we read the names of the dead, and the first person that we mentioned is Domingo Claros, Rufina Amaya’s partner, then their children, who also had his last name. The sound piece contains the names of the people who were killed in that massacre, basically the entire town of El Mozote, that week in December 1981, as I was turning eleven. But the children, so many of them were nameless because almost all the adults in the town were killed. And many babies were days or months old and so their bodies were not identified. Although their bones were counted. In each of those cases, we said “child.”
LIN: Oh, my god, that is horribly sad and haunting. I’m ashamed that my mind so quickly went to the category of foreign and not-understandable that I could not even recognize that these were names. But this also reminds me of perhaps the more human way we think of the underground as the realm of death, burial, and decomposition in recognized mourning memorials and funerals, but also as a place for hiding and disposing of bodies that have been killed and unacknowledged. So perhaps that human presence of death is there as another sound the plants make as they eat the soil that breaks down material that was once a human life?
CORTEZ: Regarding sound and materials, there is another connection because steel also comes from under the ground. The Underworld is sacred for the ancient peoples in the Americas, like Heaven might be for Christians. And I am fascinated by the idea that there is an entire world that is not meant for us, not about us, even if we extract it, manipulate it, it is not ours. I guess for a long time now I have been interested in the conversations that are happening under the ground, among other reasons, because they are not meant for us. Of course, we have been hearing the inaudible for a long time: the sounds coming from space, for instance, through space microphones, and the sea, even using ultrasounds. I think that hearing these conversations is actually important for us, they can invite us to think about lives and dimensions that are parallel to ours.
LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work. I remember how concerned OxyArts was that your T’zolkin sculpture had marks of rust and staining where someone had poured beer or pissed on it, and your nonchalant embrace of these changes to the sculpture as part of the work.
I’m curious about how this view of the world—as being larger than oneself, as being changed from outside and internally by material and its processes—finds its way into your art making. How does this thinking exist with the intense craftsmanship of your work? I’m thinking about the way you are able to fold and bend metal to look soft, like fabric—for example Armor for Rufina Amaya—and also your structural craft, your ability to build architectural forms that are both welded and held together by zip ties. I think of craft as being something that is about functionality but also about a kind of mastery of material, a technical, hands-on know-how that enables the maker to transform materials into objects of use or beauty. You have talked about an immigrant’s sensibility in your ability to tinker with and transform materials in a resourceful, non- professionalized way. And I wonder if there is something also. about homage or memorialization, giving love and care through the act of intensely well-crafted fabrication?
CORTEZ: One day, during Made in LA 2018, we had a conversation with Claire Colebrook next to my work. She is a thinker whose work has impacted my work so much precisely because she displaces the human (and capitalistic) master narratives to imagine a world that is nonhuman, a vision that she calls impersonal. And that day she said to a group of people, who looked a bit surprised, something like: in the future this museum will no longer exist, but these works of art will.
To answer your question, I don’t see the craftsmanship that symbolically carries both the markings of immigrant labor and a nonhuman sense of mattering as a contradiction in my work. I try to think about the long span of time, a timeframe that is much longer than one human life, what the Maya theorized as the long count of time, or what Timothy Morton theorizes as a hyperobject’s temporality. I love to think about the acts of generosity that cross those long counts of time, for instance, ancient Indigenous peoples preserving the life of a plant, such as quinoa or corn, under persecution bythe Spanish colonial authorities. I love understanding this courageous act as an act of generosity crossing through space and time, a gift the ancestors offered for humans that had not been born yet, an act of generosity towards someone they did not know. I receive it with gratitude.
In the future, even in a future after humans, it is possible that Claire Colebrook is right and some of this work made of steel will survive. In that future without humans or with other types of hybrid humans, or with other humans who are returning to Earth, in a future where other creatures with better capabilities to survive roam the Earth, or in a future populated by machines, these works will not only say that in the Anthropocene there were acts of generosity towards other humans, that someone cared so much to make these, but they will also move across time as acts of generosity towards other future beings. So, that craftsmanship, that beauty, is thrown out of my studio into the universe, and propelled into the future, as an act of generosity towards others that I will never meet.
Also, by placing my work in uncomfortable locations for humans, I am often displaying these works for non-human others, for the birds and the coyotes at the Bowtie, for the bees, for the dogs that piss on my sculpture all the time, for the rivers, and for unknown others in anticipation of a future when the art and the Earth will still exist but humankind as we know it will not.
Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She lives and works in Los Angeles and is a member of X-TRA’s Editorial Board.