de aquellos barros, estos lodos

Asunción Molinos Gordo’s practice lies at the intersection of art and research. Her projects arise from historical, anthropological, and scientific inquiry, which the artist translates into objects, installations, and sculptures by transforming materials—wool, ceramics, stone, or glass—into vessels of meaning. She chooses materials that possess agency, and the processes she employs to work with them—casting, weaving, molding, reproducing, mixing—are in themselves acts of transmutation that physically condense what history has left without a visible form.

De aquellos barros, estos lodos revolves around the historical dynamics linking the destruction of Mayrit with the destruction of Tenochtitlan. Both cities—the ancient Al-Andalus city upon which Madrid was founded and the Mexica capital upon which Mexico City was built—shared overlapping histories and were subjected to very similar processes of erasure. In both cases, a sophisticated civilization was displaced, and its memory systematically suppressed.

The exhibition also explores the denial of cultural hybridization that gave rise to the official narratives. Following the expulsion of the Sephardim (1492) and the forced conversion and expulsion of Hispanic Muslims and Moriscos throughout the 16th century, the “purity of blood” statutes institutionalized this denial: they barred access to military, academic, religious, and civil spheres for those who could not prove descent from Old Christians, and restricted the emigration of converts, Moriscos, and their descendants to New Spain. The identity that was to found the “New World” had to be, in theory, singular, Catholic, and pure. To this day, the hegemonic order rejects difference to the point of rendering it invisible, and new generations grow up knowing no other social, cultural, or political landscape, because they have never seen another.

The exhibition’s title draws on an old saying that establishes a direct link between past actions and their consequences in the present. De aquellos barros estos lodos: you reap what you sow; what is silenced returns. The six bodies of work that make up the exhibition address this idea from different angles—architecture, geology, migration, water, livestock, and law—but they share a common conviction: that hybridization is not an anomaly but the natural condition of every culture, and that its denial has consequences that endure for centuries.

The memory of Mayrit and Tenochtitlan did not disappear entirely: it was embedded in matter and in bodies, in the knowledge that survived, not in the books written by the victors, but in gestures and crafts. The vestiges of both cities reappear in the composition of their stones, in the objects their inhabitants hid before being expelled, and in songs that crossed oceans. De aquellos barros, estos lodos proposes viewing this shared history as a way to understand the present and imagine the future.

Alongside historical, archaeological, and scientific research, Asunción frequently turns to speculative fiction as a creative tool. Her works are not limited to documenting what happened but open up a space to imagine what did not happen—or what could still happen. The artist poses questions that official history has been unable or unwilling to answer: What would have happened if, instead of what has been sold to us as processes of cultural and racial mixing, the birth of a single, homogeneous nation—we could speak today of genuine coexistence and recognized diversity?

What would our languages, our cities, and our ways of managing water and land be like? What would our society be like if states respected and celebrated the many nations and identities that inhabit their territory?

– Claudia Llanza

 

1521. Mayrit / Tenochtitlan
Tezontle and glazed ceramic floor, 2026

The title of this work refers to a year of simultaneous destruction in two distant geographies. In 1521, the troops of Hernán Cortés take Tenochtitlan and begin the systematic demolition of the Mexica city. That same year, the town of Mayrit is besieged and occupied by royal troops following the defeat of the Comuneros at Villalar. Four decades later, in 1561, Philip II establishes the court in Madrid and begins the deliberate eradication of the city’s Andalusian origins.

The coincidences between both cities defy chance. Mayrit was founded by the Cordoban emir Muhammad I in a location chosen for its access to water and agricultural capacity. Tenochtitlan was founded on a lacustrine islet and developed its own “floating farmland” through the chinampa system. Both served a dual religious and military function: Tenochtitlan as a city-state, Mayrit as a ribat (a religious and military community in equal parts). Both were built on water: Tenochtitlan on a living lake, Mayrit on a fossilised lake converted into an aquifer. And both shared the same founding forces: water and fire. The legend of Mayrit states it precisely: built upon water, your walls are of fire, referring to its underground waters and its flint wall. The tutelary gods of Tenochtitlan were Tláloc, god of water, and Huitzilopochtli, god of war and the sun.

The installation translates these correspondences into a material and spatial language. Across a carpet of tezontle, nearly two thousand ceramic pieces are deployed, made from moulds of real cow and lamb bones. Tezontle is a volcanic rock formed when magma reaches the surface during an eruption, the same material used to build the Templo Mayor and which the builders of New Spain reused to erect colonial buildings. Knucklebones or astragali were humanity’s first dice, linked to chance and divination through astragalomancy. The choice of clay to reproduce them is significant: glazed ceramics arrived in America as a technique of Islamic tradition, transmitted by Andalusian master builders, and merged with the pottery knowledge of indigenous peoples. Across the tezontle, these pieces trace successive compositions of the eight-pointed star, a Mudéjar motif known in Arabic as Rub el Hizb, associated in Islam with the image of paradise, surrounded by eight mountains. The Basin of Mexico does not have exactly eight mountains, but it is a basin enclosed by mountain ranges among which eight peaks stand out: Monte Tláloc, Cerro de la Estrella, Cerro del Tepeyac, Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl, Ajusco, Cerro Xico and Cerro del Chiquihuite.

The eight-pointed star appears on ceilings and façades of colonial buildings, such as the Casa de las Ajaracas, built in the late seventeenth century. The name derives from the Arabic al-jaraqa, “movement”, and was once again brought by the first builders arriving from Castille, who did not necessarily know that this knowledge was of Muslim origin. Paradoxically, in the letters of relation sent to the Crown, the conquistadors referred to Mexica temples as mosques — the only category available in their mental horizon to name a sacred building that was not Christian. The erasure began in language before it began in stone.

The ground is that thin layer of the earth’s crust that supports, in its first twenty centimetres of depth, the entire weight of life. The foundation of any structure and any urban plan, the physical principle of property and territory. By extending Mudéjar geometry and Tenochtitlan’s tezontle across it, the work places the viewer literally on top of the layers that History decided to bury. Towards the back of the room, that geometry begins to dissolve: the ceramic pieces progressively disappear and the pattern breaks apart. The structure that provides foundation fades away, as the two worlds this work commemorates faded away.

 

SiO2 & SiO2 Fe2O3 AI2O3
3 glass mosaics, Byzantine technique, 2026

These three works depart from images obtained through microscopic photography: two of them record the internal structure of flint extracted from the same geological area as the rocks used to build the Arab wall of Mayrit; the third reveals the interior of tezontle, the volcanic rock with which Tenochtitlan was built.

The resulting images were translated into glass mosaic using the Byzantine technique, a choice that is not neutral: on one hand, Byzantine mosaic is itself a language of cultural hybridisation, developed at the confluence of the Greco-Roman, Christian and Islamic worlds, and with a significant presence in the art of the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala. On the other, glass is obtained through the fusion at over 1,300 degrees Celsius of silica, metallic oxides and other minerals of natural origin: an almost alchemical process in which raw materials extracted from the earth are transformed by fire into a new material. Stone and glass share an origin: both are earth transformed by heat.

Flint is a sedimentary rock that, in its process of solidification, accumulates microorganisms and incorporates preceding rocks: an element born, in its own geology, of hybridisation and mutability. Known as the fire stone for its capacity to generate sparks and withstand extreme temperatures, flint is also a fundamental component in technological data storage devices. According to recent research on 5D technology, the thermal stability of its quartz crystals would allow information to be preserved for 13 billion years –the age of the universe– provided the temperature does not exceed 190 degrees. Tezontle forms when an erupting volcano propels lava and traps gases in its solidification process: the energy of the volcano remains contained within the porous structure of the rock.

As pre-technological geological devices, flint and tezontle could preserve the collective memory of the place to which they belong, including the mutilations and erasures to which they have been subjected. The question these works pose is simple and radical: how to access it? Asunción proposes drawing close to the scale at which human history disappears and only the structure of matter remains. This scale of observation proposes a form of alternative historiography: flint and tezontle existed before the civilisations that used them; the images reveal not only interior landscapes of unexpected complexity and beauty, but also a prior time, preceding any human project. What was not recorded in the documents written by the victors was inscribed in the molecular structure of matter. Colonisation could not destroy matter, but it could interrupt the transmission of the knowledge that gave it meaning. What these works propose is to access that knowledge by a route that the processes of erasure could not reach.

Los Antiguos
6 sculptures. Fibreglass, cement, clay, resin, esparto, pigments and varnishes, 2024

Six sculptures installed in the exhibition’s transitional spaces replicate common swallow nests. The migratory nature of these birds establishes a connection with human displacement, forced or voluntary, throughout history. But what these works emphasise is not the journey but the dwelling, the nest remains when the bird has gone, available for the next to arrive. Swallow nests belong not to an individual but to a community, and outlast those who built them: they are trans-temporal shelters. The passage of swallows through different geographies and cultures also links them to liminal states, the transition between life and death, and transformation. Los Antiguos evokes the dwelling of those who are no longer here: those who preceded us and whose spirit continues to inhabit the space of those who remain.

In this exhibition, Los Antiguos exemplifies the processes of cultural hybridisation. La golondrina, an emblematic Mexican song composed by Narciso Serradell Sevilla in 1862 and traditionally sung as a farewell hymn, has a more ancient and complex origin: it is attributed to a poem in Arabic written by Aben Humeya, the last Abencerraje king of the Alpujarras, who put into verse his lament for the loss of his land upon being defeated. The poem was discovered by a French researcher in Marrakech, translated into Spanish by the Basque writer Niceto de Zamacois, and finally set to music by a Mexican composer in exile in Cuba. In everyday Mexican speech, “cantarle las golondrinas” to someone means to dismiss them from their job, to be removed from the place to which one belongs.

Hisn Yakka
4 sculptures. Glazed ceramics, 2026

The project Hisn Yakka addresses the right of return, whose principle recognises the right of populations displaced through colonisation and war to return home. This right encompasses not only the guarantee of return, but also the recovery of properties and material goods, a basic and inalienable human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The name Hisn Yakka refers to the ancient Muslim city that preceded the present-day Yecla, whose population was expelled following the Mudéjar revolt of 1266, when the city was made a vassal of the King of Castile and its population rose up against the seigneurial regime imposed by the Christians.

Archaeological excavations carried out at the Cerro del Castillo by Liborio Ruiz Molina and his team brought to light a set of ceramic household goods that had been deliberately buried in very particular locations. It is believed that these objects were buried there by the Andalusian inhabitants who, before being expelled and wishing to ensure their return to their city and homes, left hidden the essential elements of daily Andalusian life. Ataifores, anafes, candiles, jofainas, marmitas, aguamaniles… make up these sets, which amount to a kind of “reset kit” of basic resources to guarantee food, water, warmth and light upon return.

Inside these vessels were found coins, textiles, grain and similar elements intended to serve as currency or objects for barter. Upon their return, the population would also need objects of exchange to restart basic commercial relations.

The ceramic pieces that make up Hisn Yakka are the result of a process of transmutation into clay of this historical event, drawing on the fragments, accounts and archaeological remains contained in the publication El ajuar estaba en el contenedor. The profile, elevation and plan of each hidden –and subsequently found– kiln has been reconfigured into a new ceramic object capable of restoring the three dimensions of its history.

Although those objects were never recovered by their owners and the population of Hisn Yakka was ultimately unable to return to their city, today their vestiges are revealed, made manifest, rising again to the surface to remind us of our history, shared and common to that of many other peoples.

¡Cuánto río allá arriba!
3 sculptures. Ceramics and mirror, 2021

The three sculptures form part of the eponymous project that Asunción Molinos Gordo has been developing since 2021. The title takes a line from the poem El cántaro roto (1952) by Octavio Paz. The pieces were produced in Ecuador by various local craftspeople and draw from the Valdivia, Machalilla, Chorrera, Tolita, Jama Coaque, Bahía, Guangala, Milagro-Quevedo and Manteño-Huancavilca cultures. Alongside these pre-Hispanic ceramic reproductions, the totems include pieces from the Spanish colonial period that feature breaks and imperfections, generating a significant dialectic between both historical moments.

Most of the pieces reference the transport, storage and consumption of water. Some, with their vegetal, animal and anthropomorphic forms, reactivate symbolisms linked to a more conscious and responsible relationship with nature. This body of work condenses the research the artist has developed over recent years around the equitable distribution of water and its importance for maintaining social peace. Through these objects, Asunción accounts for the vestiges of an ancestral ethical system of cooperation and solidarity in the management of the planet’s resources, a model of self-governance that has become especially urgent today, as communities, both urban and rural, accumulate lived experiences in the wake of climate change.

In the Valley of Mexico, perhaps the greatest rupture in the transmission of knowledge was the systematic denial of the first of the two essential concepts of the Nahua world: atl, “water”. The Spanish and the Creoles, with their ideal of a city forged from arid lands like those of Extremadura, had little tolerance for the aquatic world designed around Aztlán, and their vision of Mexico City as an urban centre without flooding –meaning a valley without water– led to the agonising drainage of the city over the following four centuries. The sculptures are presented on a mirror evoking a body of water, a reference to the ancient lakes of the Valley of Mexico upon which Tenochtitlan was founded and which the colonial city progressively drained until their near total disappearance. This installation thus sits at the centre of a volcanic landscape: water surrounded by solidified lava, the same geological and founding image that gave rise to the two cities this exhibition examines.

 

Mil Leches
4 canvases. Felt made from the wool of all sheep breeds of the Spanish State, cedar wood stretcher and frame. 2024

Mil Leches has its origins in the research Asunción developed during her residency at Mutur Beltz, in the Carranza Valley, Basque Country, where she studied the concept of breed as applied to sheep. Like human races, ovine breeds do not exist scientifically: they have been created as a device for the economic exploitation of all living things, within what some authors call racial capitalism. Blood purity is, in biological terms, an anomaly. Scarce mixing between varieties generates genetic poverty and weaker, more vulnerable animals. Blood purity is inversely proportional to the animal’s capacity for survival. Crossbreeding, by contrast, produces resilience and greater capacity for adaptation.

The title of the work reclaims an insult widespread across Spanish territory to refer to those of diverse origins and, therefore, considered impure. The choice of wool as a material invites reflection on human coexistence at a time when the defence of pure identities is once again at the centre of the most radical political discourses.

The sheep carries a strong symbolic charge: it is a sacred animal for all three monotheistic religions and has held a sacrificial role across different peoples and cultures. It was also a fundamental colonial tool in the expansion of the Spanish and British empires. During the seventeenth century, fine national wool was the only Spanish product traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. That wool, known as the “white gold of Spain”, came exclusively from the Merino sheep, the result of crossbreeding North African sheep brought by the Benimerines with the indigenous sheep of the Peninsula. The word merino derives from Banu Marin, a nomadic tribe from the eastern Maghreb. The most valuable product of imperial Spain was, at its origin, a hybrid.

The production of Mil Leches was itself an act of resistance against contemporary economic logic. To obtain wool from the 52 breeds listed in the Breed Catalogue of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, it was necessary to travel across the territory and negotiate directly with shepherds who habitually give away or burn their fleeces, since non-Merino wool has no market outlet. One tonne of wool was gathered during the spring-summer 2022 shearing season, paying two euros per fleece — more than double its market value. The washing was carried out at one of only three remaining open laundries in the whole of Spain: Mantexman, in Mota del Cuervo, Cuenca. The textile was produced by Albert i Sempere, a family business from Banyeres de Mariola, Alicante, with a tradition in textile recycling.

The five pieces that make up this series are presented stretched over a frame and set in cedar wood, like paintings. Their surface –dense, heterogeneous, material– is the visible result of the blend of wools of different textures, colours and origins fused into a single fabric. It is no coincidence that the sheep came to represent the divine and that its consumption is permitted and celebrated in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Nor that sheep were the first to migrate to the other side of the earth.