La espera

La espera [The Wait] by Miguel Fernández de Castro  unfolds in a suspended time, where bodies and forms remain exposed to the elements, to wear, and to surveillance. Far from alluding to disappearance, the work attends to structures and remnants embedded in the landscape, identifying in them a dissonance between their discovery and their subsequent recognition. Within this gap, a form of waiting takes shape—often marked by a lack of answers—at a threshold defined by violence and institutional omission.

The installation develops from the artist’s experience in the Altar Desert, where he lives and produces his practice, and where he is co-director of Altar Centro de Investigación. This territory constitutes a space marked by prolonged temporalities and slow processes—both physical and symbolic—as well as by dynamics of accelerated transit and urgent passage. In this context, at the intersection of human and animal temporalities, minimal actions—walks, encounters, traces—emerge that organize the desert’s daily operations and the artist’s work. The arrangement of elements in La espera—a butterfly, the replica of two molars, and a wooden chair—establishes a relationship between materials with different rhythms of wear and resistance, activating a dialogue between the times of waiting that structure each process and a territory under constant tension.

The work reflects on the ways in which memory is embodied or represented through objects and reconfigurations detached from their time, place, and diachronic continuity, yet which retain their own temporal charge. In this sense, the replica—of the two molars—does not operate merely as a copy or reproduction, but as a gesture inscribed within a temporality marked by abandonment and distance: a discontinuous, almost theatrical temporality that becomes visible when something interrupts it. The chair, made of palo fierro (Olneya tesota)—one of the densest and most resistant woods in the world, endemic to the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, and Baja California—will take centuries to decompose, while the butterfly continues its cycle.

Lit like a forensic study or a set, La espera can be observed from the outside: from an uncontaminated gaze that registers a violence that no longer imposes itself because it already operates as landscape.

Brief conversation between Miguel Fernández de Castro and Lena Solà Nogué:

What kind of ethical or political relationship emerges in your research process?

They are two questions.

Regarding ethics, my process is not organized around protocols of correctness or total transparency, but around an ethics of non-extraction and non-translation. The remains, objects, and gestures I work with are not activated to produce information, testimony, or symbolic repair. The central ethical decision is not to make speak that which has already been violated: not to reinscribe it into a circuit of meaning—legal or affective—that would render it useful again. The piece seeks to sustain ambiguity and assumes the risk of opacity as a form of care. My work does not aim at the performative fulfillment of ethical criteria.

The political dimension does not lie in denouncing illegality or simulating restitution, but in remaining at the threshold where legality, ritual, and abandonment become entangled. The work does not collaborate with a regime of visibility that demands evidence, narratives, or pedagogy, but rather suspends that mandate. In this gesture, the chair, the dental remains, and the butterfly neither align with the law nor explicitly transgress it; instead, they shift the political question toward the regimes that administer visibility, evidence, and time—and toward what remains outside them.

In La espera, we find a butterfly resting on a replica of two molars, which in turn rest on a sturdy wooden chair. Do you consider that the image of the moment in which a butterfly pauses during its migratory cycle can be read as symptomatic of our times?

Yes, but insofar as that pause can no longer be read as a natural gesture or an organic break. The butterfly that stops does so activated by a mechanical mechanism, inscribed within a simulation that reproduces migratory movement without sharing its material conditions. This artificiality is not a formal device, but a structural element: the cycle continues, but only as choreography, separated from the systems that sustain it. In this sense, the pause does not signal balance or care, but rather the way contemporary temporalities incorporate stoppage as part of their functioning, producing regulated movements, administered pauses, and ritualized gestures that no longer guarantee orientation or return. At this threshold, the butterfly does not represent a damaged nature, but a movement that persists even as its frameworks of meaning have been displaced, operating between the living and the technical without resolution.

La espera is the result of walks, encounters, and conversations in the territory of the Altar Desert. Do you think your work operates between fiction and documentation regarding the conflicts and tensions that permeate the place from which you work?

I do not work with fiction and documentation as separate registers or as poles in tension. Both emerge as forms derived from lived experience in the field, produced by the prolonged time of being, walking, waiting, and—at times—returning to the same places. What is often read as documentation does not respond to an impulse of verification or archiving, but to a practice of situated attention; and what might be understood as fiction does not introduce distance or invention, but rather a way of sustaining that which does not fully settle into a stable narrative. In this sense, fiction operates less as representation than as a force of variation—a way of rendering sensible that which insists within the territory without becoming fully legible. The work does not seek to represent the conflicts of the Altar Desert, but to remain close to them, accepting that direct experience of the place produces forms that oscillate—without resolution—between record, drift, and construction.

The work remains at a threshold where the remains are neither scientific evidence nor recognized archaeology. Is there an intention to monumentalize or sacralize certain elements within the piece?

There is no intention to monumentalize or sacralize the elements of the work. On the contrary, the work seeks to withdraw them from regimes of value—monumental, ritual, or patrimonial—that tend to stabilize remains through institutional or symbolic recognition. The objects are kept in a state of displaced use and ambiguous presence, closer to informal economies of care, circulation, and waiting than to consecrated forms of memory or veneration. As in certain contexts where ritual does not produce sanctification but rather a pragmatic coexistence with uncertainty, the work refuses to turn remains into relics or emblems.

I do not propose a space of reverence, but rather a closeness without ceremony, where what matters is not to elevate or preserve, but to let objects remain within an unstable threshold, outside narratives of transcendence. This condition is not defined solely within the exhibition space: the work also exists elsewhere, in the Altar Desert, where the grave remains unexcavated, outside circulation and recognition.

Upon entering a space of visibility and circulation, this condition is not resolved. No position is asserted, nor is the distance between the two sites corrected; rather, a form of inoperativity is sustained, in which the work remains in an impassable space, exposed to wear. Friction persists as part of its form, without offering resolution.

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Miguel Fernández de Castro (Sonora, 1986) is a visual artist based in the Sonora–Arizona border region. Through photography, video, sculpture, and writing, he investigates the ways in which ecological and violent regimes intertwine in the production of space and memory. In Mexico, his work has been presented at Museo Tamayo, Museo Jumex, Casa del Lago, Museo de Arte Moderno, and Museo MARCO, among others. Internationally, he has presented his work at the Shanghai Biennale; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Storefront for Art & Architecture; Ballroom Marfa; Frac Centre-Val de Loire; Whitechapel Gallery; Spazio Veda; Wren Library; Museo Artium; and Ashkal Alwan, among others. He was a fellow of the FONCA Jóvenes Creadores program in 2012 and 2019. Since 2018, he has collaborated with various search collectives documenting clandestine graves on both sides of the Mexico–United States border. Since 2022, he has been a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators. He lives and works in Altar, Sonora, where he is co-director of Altar Centro de Investigación.