LACMA sits on land that was a nourishing marshy ecosystem for thousands of years. The location produced a trove of fossils discovered during site preparation for the David Geffen Galleries. To connect the new building by Peter Zumthor to the soil it stands on, artist Mariana Castillo Deball is creating the commissioned artwork Feathered Changes, which will spread over 75,000 square feet of the campus in an expansive meditation on time, geologic history, and the LACMA site. 

A series of “islands” scattered across the east campus will be surrounded by a brushed pattern inscribed into the Plaza with a method closely related to the way concrete is textured before it is set with a broom or rake, and the techniques used in dry Zen gardens to create patterns in sand, reflecting possible circulation routes throughout the plaza and the organic shape of the David Geffen Galleries. The concrete islands are imprinted with fragments of the artist’s feathered serpent drawings, based on fragments of ancient murals from Teotihuacan.

The Feathered Serpent is an ancient Mesoamerican symbol representing the connection between the earth and the sun, soil and water, place and transformation. 
The landscape of the installation will also be inscribed with animal tracks native to California, creating an organic drawing on the surface of the huge ground plane. With Feathered Changes, Castillo Deball acknowledges the many Indigenous people of the Los Angeles area and their connections to the larger indigenous histories in our continent.

From 2010 to 2019, St. Pölten Cathedral Square was an archaeological excavation site. During the excavations, not only were Roman and medieval buildings, but also the mortal remains of around 22,000 people were discovered who were buried in a cemetery at this site which was used from the 9th century until 1779. Mariana Castillo Deball's site-specific installation "Dead, I am Still Paper" explores the memory and materiality of the site through the history of paper production. Inspired by objects found among the bodies, the installation reflects on the ephemeral nature of materials such as fabric and paper. Deball links this theme to Goran Petrovic's novel "Paper with Watermarks" („Papir sa vodenim znakom“), which tells of the process of the "democratisation" of paper through the use of rags for its production and the history of the same material as a metaphor for vanity and transformation.

In the 14th century, European workshops began turning old clothes into paper, making it far more accessible than the parchment used previously. Rag collectors played an important role in sourcing materials, even extracting textiles from burial sites, sometimes leading to outbreaks of disease. Deball's work encourages viewers to think about the balance between preservation and decay and the stories that everyday objects tell about our identity and history. "Dead, I am Still Paper" awakens a deeper connection with the past and an awareness of the fragility of memory. And last but not least, it provides welcoming shade in a central location in the city.

Special thanks to curators Joana Warza, and Lorena Moreno Vera; to my studio team Silvia Scandola, David Reiber Otálora, Silvia Andrade and Macarena Cox; to the Tangente installation team, and to publishing house sexto piso, for publishing Papel con sello de Agua and letting me translate some fragments.

In bringing together a multiplicity of ceramic beehive shapes from various historical and geographical contexts, Firesong for the bees, a tree of clay acts as a kind of ‘repository’ that ‘re-pollinates’ the city with forgotten iconographies, technologies and architectures of apiculture, beyond the dominating modern paradigm. Between a display structure and a critical device, it invites to reflect on the human-non-human interdependencies and labour shaping the human-bees relationship to this day. Bees are the most important pollinators in the eco-system, but the ecological crisis is causing a significant decline in bee populations world-wide. The work asks us to think not only about artefacts becoming obsolete, but also about the extractive human-led processes that lead to species extinction. It is an invitation to sense and learn from the noises, smells and histories of the collective more-than-human intelligences that make the work.
In the bee-friendly city of Bruges, the artist collaborates with Biesous/ Margot Hinnekens and Uther Smis, an initiative of young bee keepers from the region, who care for the bees during the five months of Spaces of Possibility. The project is done with respect to the bees' wellbeing and the biodiversity in the park and the city. They will continue to take care of the bees after the end of the Triennial, when the artwork will be dismantled. Some of the elements of the structure will be donated to the apicultural circuit in Bruges, continuing their lives in the region.

Text: Sevie Tsampalla

To-day July 9th takes as a starting point the ongoing piece To-day,  started in 2005. The second edition was shown in 2006. This most recent piece in 2016 was the third edition.The piece will be completed after 365 editions. The present is a mixture of different temporalities, where events, objects and people from multiple times coexist.

What is the present? When does a passage become a moment? When does an occurrence turn into an event? To-day consists of a newspaper publication and a stage; hosting a fictional character that exists only in one day, but throughout the years.

The character can surf freely on this date in different years, jumping back and forth in a 24 hours spectrum around time. Each time the piece takes place; the character is shaped by this one-day history. It is important to mention that the date is decided by the situation and not by the artist.

The date always coincides with the official opening of the exhibition, in this case the 9th of July. The documentation and visual material departs from newspapers, travel logs, birthdates, obituaries, holidays, observances, and any other traces related to this particular date.To-day is an archive of events, with an arbitrary point in common.

A contemporary elective affinity the term Mesoamerica is used to describe a region in North and Central America that was shaped by shared cultural traits. It covered an area now occupied by Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. In pre-colonial times a large population lived there and various indigenous cultures emerged, including the Aztec, Huaxtec, Mixtec, Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, and Cotzumalhuapa cultures. Impressive reliefs as well as large, sculptures of animal figures, mythical creatures, and deities are among the surviving artefacts from the Cotzumalhuapa culture.

Inspired by local archaeological sites, artist Mariana Castillo Deball has created a public artwork that plays out across the streets of Eastbourne, into Towner Eastbourne's gallery building and out to the South Downs. Walking through the town I followed a pattern on the pavement that became the magnified silhouette of a woman's profile is, explains Castillo Deball, "a work that can be experienced as an image, a walking path or a narrative". On this two-hour walking route around the streets of Eastbourne, pedestrians will discover a chalk-stenciled rope that traces an unexpected route through the town, outlining the silhouette of a woman's profile. Followers of the walking trail will encounter several sculptural objects embedded in the pavement, each relating to objects that were buried with The Frankish Woman, whose ancient remains were discovered in Eastbourne at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery on St Anne's Hill. The locations for the objects are shown on the map as a loop in the rope. A third element to the work takes place at Whitbread Hollow on the South Downs where the shape of a giant hairpin, the most magnificent of the funerary objects, will be inscribed in chalk. In contrast to the nearby Celtic hill figure, The Long Mari of Wilmington which is cut into the chalk a few miles north-east of Eastbourne, Castillo Deball's geoglyph will be evanescent, disappearing over time. Visit towner.gallery/CreativeCoast for more details on this work and how to see it. Alongside her Waterfronts commission, Castillo Deball has curated an exhibition for Towner Eastbourne. A drawing, a story and a poem go for a Walk will run from 29 May 2021 to 16 January 2022.

Several things attracted my attention during the visits to the Noord-Hollands archief and the city of Haarlem, but there is a constant, which can be compared to what Svetlana Alpers defines as “The Mapping impulse in Dutch art”.

It is not a coincidence that The Dutch were the first ones who produced maps as wall hangings and probably the first jigsaw puzzle (from a map). This shows only a part of the wide production, dissemination, and use of maps throughout the society. Mapping in the 16th century was a common, even a casually acquired skill. Each man made at least a single map in a lifetime. It seems to have been an accepted way to pay one’s respect to one’s home while contributing to the knowledge of it.

The Noord-Hollands Archief, and specially the Atlas section, contains a vast collection of maps, engravings, photographs and other visual material.After going through the cartography collection, it is striking to see how the countries landscape has been changing throughout the centuries. This development has two faces: the actual transformation of Dutch geography, in an attempt to gain land; and from the other hand, the quick development of cartography since the 16th century.