Pastizal Zamudio

Pastizal Zamudio is an artist from Mexicali, Baja California who develops work between the natural landscapes of their surroundings, including rural contexts and different agricultural fields in the United States, and the domestic spaces they inhabit intermittently, either in their hometown, or during the trips that they constantly make in the region. Their nomadic condition has led them to become interested in the choreographic possibilities of the body from routine and everyday actions. Based on labor, ritual and social processes, the artist performs actions of prolonged observation, long walks, and exhaustive journeys of physical resistance under the sun. During these experiences, Zamudio builds extensive load-bearing prostheses, assembles talismans and organic fetishes, and captures the transition of inhospitable landscapes.

For the artist commission of The Sedentary Effect, the artist has formulated one project in three parts in which their own family, work and affective history are intertwined with stories of migration, spirituality, and architecture.

For the first artwork, Pastizal Zamudio conceived the image of a sculpture in the shape of a twelve-pointed star-sun. For a decade, the sun has been a distinctive sign of the artist's practice, which is largely oriented towards making a series of studies and speculations about the movement of the sun through drawings, collages, sculptures and prints with which the artist intervenes different surfaces and landscapes. In the case of this commission for INSITE, Zamudio imagines that the sculpture would symbolically personify one of the artist's closest friends, who passed away last year, and by finding it a permanent refuge in the landscape that could become a permanent habitat for the organisms around it.

For the second work, the artist is collaborating with three bull riders from Michoacán, currently living in the United States, who constantly emulate the movements and routines of the rodeo while working in the fields and without the presence of the bull. Zamudio is interested in these gestures and postures as unconscious choreographies, where the behavior of the body reflects a memory of the invisible animal and of their hometown. For this work, the artist crafted a wooden bull with found objects and recycled springs from Tulare, CA, and proposed to the rangers to make various films of them riding this sculpture. In the films, the bull disappears again, revealing only the contractions and contortions of the body as if it were a distant vision of the rodeo. For the films, the artist has also recorded various landscapes of Baja California and invited musicians from Mexicali, Baja California to collaborate on the musical score.

Pastizal Zamudio was born and grew up for the first ten years of their life in the Orizaba Housing Complex, an experimental social housing project built by the Viennese architect Christopher Alexander between 1975 and 1976, also known as the “Mexicali Project”. After twenty years, the artist has returned to recognize the spaces of his birthplace—today a community health center—to carry out a work that evokes the memory of his father, who died of a lung condition in the year 2015. Zamudio is interested in temporarily inhabiting the spaces of the house to link the relationship between architectural construction, developed from Alexander's theories on the sense of place and the human condition, its current operation as a health center, and the fragments of their father’s memory.