La Jornada: Artist transforms disused balls and bills into pre-Hispanic deities

The multifaceted artist Gabriela González Leal found in soccer an apt language, that is, a system of symbols and signs, to talk about other concerns, such as the fate of the Earth because “without a planet there is no game.”

A part of round goddessan artistic project by González Leal that addresses football as a contemporary ritual and a global symbolic system, is exhibited in the group exhibition Soccer and art: That same emotionat the Jumex Museum. The bulk of the series will be presented in the form of the individual sample Round goddess: Anthropotextiles and soccer, at the Museum of Mexico City, starting May 23. It consists of sculptures, textiles – monumental t-shirts made with fragmented balls on synthetic leather – and pieces built with disused soccer balls, paper money and organic materials.

González Leal is not a “devotee of football”: “I like collective passion. Everything that is born from that football emotion that is just like the brotherhood and identity that this idea of ​​belonging produces. I don’t like football in itself, I don’t go to any team, I don’t have a fan.”

The project dates back to 2018, when the exhibitor began to explore “between the balls and the bills” because the Banco de México Museum had invited her to participate in an art and waste project that revolves around disused paper money that is shredded. “Starting from a demonetized 20 peso bill, which on the back bore the image of the Zapotec deity Pitao Cocijo, associated with rain and the fertility of the earth, wearing a large headdress, I began to associate it with a soccer ball that a homeless man had given me. There began the exploration with materiality.”

The first thing that González Leal created were masks for children, with the idea that they would use them, then be portrayed by the artist and then transferred to the pictorial plane, because at that time he did not have a great artistic motivation: “I wanted to continue painting, I came from lithography, but at the end of the day, two-dimensional was no longer enough for me. I started with a mask; however, I realized that as an object in itself it was already a piece that filled me and told me more than painting could.”

He developed this project during a residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the end of 2019. “It was wonderful to see how it developed in a country farmer. There the ball, as in the entire world, is a very powerful symbolic object. When the children put on the masks to be photographed, they were amazed at how a ball can carry and contain power, as it told them about the natural forces of our Mexica deities, which moved them very much.”

With the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic, González Leal continued with the project because he wanted to do something more solid. Going from masks to sculptures and t-shirts “I did it based on my investigations in ancient Mexico. Our deities had an intimate relationship with nature. They did not talk about ecosystems, but about natural forces – water, wind – that they personified through masks.

“I began to question how this link with nature has been lost today. All natural spaces have been transformed. The Anthropocene arrives and we place ourselves at the center of our Earth, we no longer cohabit it. With this questioning I began to work, in order to investigate to what extent this has been lost and how I can address it in a way that is collectively understood. I found in soccer the exact idea on which to rely to talk about deeper topics, that were not the ball or the game, but of the territory and the natural that is lost.”

González Leal’s main material is used balls that he gets from the “garbage lord because they have to be very broken to be found lying on the street.” The artist uses this material that she unstitches and sews again to transform it “into a kind of textile that has helped me talk about nature. I transform it into flowers or things that refer us to nature, that refer to the wear and tear of the planet, so a worn and mended ball is this repair of the world.”

González Leal currently has a scholarship from the National System of Art Creators, 2024-2027 to develop the project round goddess. The first year he made a first part, undress the earthnow a second one works, bodies of waterin which it will address the drying of the lakes in the state of Mexico and its surroundings.