Carmen Huízar: 1 Raindrop on Dust

“…many people are frightened when they learn they are walking over the dead. Although all of us, everywhere, more or less, walk over a greater or lesser number of dead people. There are far more dead than the living; it is a simple truth, and everyone ends up turned to earth.”

Mariana Enriquez, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

Throughout history, cemeteries have fulfilled the social function of symbolically organising the relationship between the living and the dead. Situated away from the urban centre and relegated to the outskirts for sanitary and cultural reasons, they occupy a unique threshold: neither fully integrated into everyday life nor entirely separated from it.

It is from this threshold that Carmen Huízar’s photographic series unfolds. The images depict cemeteries in rural communities across northern Jalisco, where funerary structures appear as barely perceptible presences woven into the landscape. The artist photographs the same site at two different moments of the year, revealing the transformations the landscape undergoes over time. Together, the photographs evoke liminal spaces—zones of contact where life and death coexist and intertwine.

The project also stems from a personal and affective relationship with these spaces. On the one hand, it is rooted in Huízar’s intimate connection to funeral rituals through her family’s trade, which has led her to take part in and witness numerous funerals. With Aliento (2026), the artist stages the tension between different temporal scales, revealing the human as transient and ephemeral—a mere glimmer within the duration of a natural world that far exceeds it.

Jalisco’s landscape contrasts with the idealised image of a landscape in which the seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter—unfold in an orderly and visible sequence, in keeping with a cultural conception originating in the Global North. In northern Jalisco, the landscape remains dry for most of the year, with spring marking its period of greatest aridity. In summer, the rains transform the vegetation, turning the landscape green.

These differences destabilise the perception of time, revealing it as a social construct shaped in different ways according to context. Different temporalities intersect in the images: human time, agricultural cycles and the rhythms of the land. Although the seasons are far shorter than a human lifetime, that lifetime, in turn, becomes almost imperceptible against the landscape’s apparent eternity. The presumed infinity of the Latin American landscape, where all mysteries take place. The landscape is eternal—or so it is believed.

Furthermore, Huízar’s practice involves documenting signs and elements encountered across the urban and rural landscapes she moves through, later translating them into artistic forms. In this process, the vernacular emerges as a critical system of images. Using found signs, the installation Adentro/Afuera (2017) transposes into the museum phrases the artist encountered outside various churches. With a subtle yet incisive sensibility, she reveals how the patriarchal system is embedded within the structures of different social institutions and reproduced through them.

In 1 Raindrop on Dust, the physical and social ways in which different temporalities, spaces and structures organise the body, the landscape and life become visible.

Curators
Viviana Kuri Haddad, Maya Renée Escárcega e Isabel Sonderéguer