paca pa’ alla

solo show at Salon Acme under the curation of Valeria Montoya cdmx, February 2024

At dawn, a leg expands, blending its shape with a terracotta path that crosses a river and a desert. The crossing’s chronicles of bodies in constant transit reveal an industry in the service of textiles. With second-third hand clothing descending from Texas to the southernmost part of this continent, Liza Zaldivar explores textile landscapes, recovering some materials from the journey of ‘garbage’ clothing which is distributed in the mobile markets of Mexico City.

For Liza, the act of cutting and pasting clothing represents a subversion of an idealization. In the tumultuous landscape of fast fashion, the maquila intertwines elements of modernity and style, crafting an ideal of progress with clearly defined boundaries. The yearning to cross signifies a pursuit of fusion, where amidst the marginalized, it contributes to the productive force of another country. For those traversing Mexico on foot and for the goods descending from the north, finding their way into labor and, on the street markets of Mexico City.

Faced with precarity, war, and scarcity due to the excess of maquila production, the question arises: how to escape that yearning horizon?

Zaldivar invites to sublimate the desire for progress without the need for a northward-mobilized crossing. Perhaps what her pieces propose, through the fusion of collage and painting, is a possibility to reconstruct that transient landscape, which also inserts itself into our logic of production and distribution of spaces, bodies, and sensitive products, much like the artistic practice.

Valeria Montoya