La Jornada: Aurora Noreña uses her creative resources to restore the plundered national heritage

Oaxaca, Oax., Trodden Land: Manual for Cultivating Ruin is the most recent exhibition by visual artist Aurora Noreña, which is presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Oaxacan Cultures (Macco). The sample presents more than 20 pieces that include installation flowery backyard, which, according to the curator, Luis Hampshire, is a “hybrid garden designed for rest, reading, coexistence and exchange.”

Noreña added: “the exhibition consists of two parts, one in the room and the other is an installation in the patio. It has to do with two interests of my work: the gardens and the symbolic restitution of heritage.”

Originally from Mexico City, the artist indicated that the exhibition includes two-dimensional and three-dimensional work. Among the pieces, a screen located in the center of the room stands out; However, the exhibition, he said, “has to do with my interest in the symbolic restitution of heritage that was plundered.”

She commented that for her it has been a personal discovery that a loss does not remain just that, but is a “song” of opportunity, which can be explored creatively, as she does in her works.

He mentioned the situation in Mexico, where theft and trafficking of archaeological remains abound. “With art there are more possibilities to bring back those pieces that came out, thanks to the creative resources that allow us to bring those works that came out back into the imagination.”

For example, he explained that anyone who sees the screen at Macco will realize that “it is a playful piece; it is a Totonac piece: it is a box with a turtle”; However, as a sculptor she said that she was interested in experimenting and transforming a solid piece, the box, “in a sequence in time.”

But this does not end there, because for Noreña, creating works that evoke artifacts or archaeological finds also serves “to speak metaphorically about the passage of time or a continuum between past and present.”

The works, Noreña added, are not copies of the vestiges, but a reinterpretation, since they seek for the past to come to the present in a renewed way; In the case of looted objects that are exhibited in other countries or that are part of private collections, he seeks to return them to Mexico through his art.