BIO

Video stills © 2025 Paloma Ayala, All rights reserved

Take anything but our tongues and feet

One channel video, 28 min 2025

This video work was filmed in one of the first ejidos in Mexico: Ejido Zaragoza.

Ejidos are the rural settlements that were part of the modern project of nation constructed after the Revolution in the first decades of the last century. The government of the Revolution included agricultural communities as a part of their utopia of progress. Rurality was an important source extracted for the fabrication of a national sovereign identity that looked back at the pre-colonial myths of creation and that paid attention to rural/indigenous cultural heritages to establish what is now considered “traditional”.

Within the complexity of post-war, rural populations throughout the country went from working as servants of latifundios, rich family-owned vast lands, to be small-property owners. The government allotted “unused” hectares to agricultural workers who through legal contracts, became ejidatarios, or cropland owners.

Ejido Zaragoza is where my family came to work as independent agricultural labor and to develop into humans of the delta of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande. It is also an environment affected by the herida abierta, the open wound that the MX/US border is, as Gloria Anzaldúa names it. Ecological impacts produced by political and economical powers, are not only damaging the soil and the livelihood of rural populations, but ending the life of ejido communities, at least as they were envisioned in their revolutionary beginnings.

The story of this video is guided by the emotional and economical landscape that my family has known for generations. It portrays the actual state of el rancho, their farm house, narrated by me in my position as a daughter that follows their imaginations, domestic practices, memories and death. I observe the decadence of our main economy and culture. I emphasize that this space is now taken care by older people and that their environment has radically changed due to the growth of the nearby city of Matamoros, the lack of irrigation water, and the progressive salinification of soil. 

Que no nos quiten

ni la lengua ni las patas​

• May-July 2026 @Villa Bernasconi Centre d'art de la Ville de Lancy, Geneve . Group exhibition Más acá de lo (I)Real, curated by Helvetrópicos

• Nov 2025-Jan 2026 @Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Werkschau 2025, curated by Jelena Delic-Müller. ** Recognition Price!

• Oct 2024 @Karachi Biennial, Curated by Waheeda Baloch
• Sept 2024 @ Espace 3533 : group exhibition “With the Fields”, Geneve