Uprooting the Archaeological
(2021), Vick Quezada. Sculpture, ceramics, rope harness, soil, Opuntia Cacanapa. 18” x 16” x 14”
Vick Quezada (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, explores hybrid forms in Indigenous-Latinx history and the function of these histories in contested lands, primarily in the U.S.-Mexico Border. They work with a variety of mediums: video, performance, sculpture and ceramics. They incorporate found objects (man-made) and natural elements, like dirt, soil, flora, corn and combine them with found objects like bricks, reclaimed trash, chains, cans, and barbed wire.
Quezada categorically is a Rascuache Chicanx artist, one who repurposes and stylizes found objects. Rascuache engineering is not just a skill, it is a lifestyle and a practice of liberation. It is a creative strategy for insurgent survival in the post-apocalyptic settler colonial world.
Quezada’s work is a cultural intervention of dominant, modern Western relationships to Aztec Indigenous philosophy.
Uprooting the Archaeological, is a waist harness, an apparatus built from a microcosm where Mexica Indigenous beliefs, settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism occur. According to Peter Sigal in The Flower and the Scorpion, Pre-Columbian Indigenous Aztecs (Mexica) had no concept of Western sin. The Mexica worshipped two spirit gods and they believed Chicomecoatl/Centeotl, the maize/corn was a dual spirit god, that being both woman and man. Science confirms that corn is in fact a monoecious plant, having both male and female attributes on the body.
Cloud 13, a triangular altar honors the Aztec deity Ometeotl the dual gender creator of the universe who lives in the Thirteen Heavens. Through historical research you can see how Aztec philosophy and the metaphor of plants and corn destabilizes these divisions, these borders, and binaries are in fact a modern colonial concept. In the queering of the archaeological, Quezada desire to offer an understanding of gender and sexuality outside of the dominant narratives and build an alternate world.
Quezada’s work explores liberation through an approach that is rooted in queer and Indigenous knowledge, histories, and aesthetics. They draw on an Aztec-Nahuan religious doctrine that affirms a “two spirit” tradition in order to make the Latinx and Indigenous transgender body visible through history, trauma, and pleasure.