Dispositivo para ser poseído por cuerpos de agua, by visual artist Gustavo García Murrieta, is a performance activation presented at the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa. The artist transforms the museum into a ritual space where ancestral spirituality, feminine energy, and history are experienced through dance interpreted as trance, in dialogue with three monumental archaeological pieces: La Estela de "El Viejón”, the Trono Olmeca, and Cabeza Colosal N°1.

Under the direction of Maestra Azminda Meybelli Román and represented by Banana Contemporary, the artist contextualizes the feminine archetypes of water within the syncretic traditions of Veracruz —from the pre-Hispanic and the colonial— into a contemporary, queer, and de-colonial framework. García Murrieta, born in Xalapa, builds his practice from the observation of the everyday as sacred territory. Recognized across multiple editions of the Bienal de Veracruz and with a presence in spaces such as the Museo Franz Mayer, his work does not seek to represent the spiritual but to activate it: each piece is a social and shamanic practice that reconfigures itself in dialogue with the inhabitants and spaces that receive it.

The performance is the result of an iconographic investigation into the traditional costumes of dancers from central and southern Veracruz, interwoven with the memory of the region's water landscapes. The artist wears garments that function simultaneously as instrument and art object —a living, liminal interface— through which he enters a state of trance that articulates dance, sound art, and declamation. The artist establishes a channel between body, energy, and memory, creating a collective experience of reinterpretation of the intimate, the political, and the urgent, proposing a question: What forms of knowledge were left out when these pieces were named heritage?

The performance transforms the museum's halls into a territory where bodies enter into dialogue with the Olmec pieces surrounding them, restoring a sensory dimension that institutional frameworks —from their colonial and patriarchal perspective— tend to flatten. From an anticolonial perspective, García Murrieta questions the taxonomies that have confined Latin American art to the categories of craft or folklore, and opens the discussion toward other genealogies: those in which spirituality, the body, and ritual articulated worlds where gender was fluid and feminine entities occupied positions of power and balance. Water —across different phases of Mexican history— has been associated with femininity and the divinity of the mother. The Virgin herself, for instance, has made her apparitions in bodies of water, just as pre-Hispanic cultures perceived Nature as the divine force that establishes order in the world.

The practice of Gustavo García Murrieta proposes an encounter with alternative presents of what art can be from the standpoint of memory, collectivity, and the anticolonial. The final activation of the performance will take place on March 22nd at 12:00 hrs at the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, Veracruz. Attendance to the activation is free of charge.