For his latest series, La Cucaracha, South African photographer Pieter Hugo has been visiting Mexico.
I first came to Mexico at the invitation of Francisco Berzunza. He was curating an exhibition of South African art at a museum in Oaxaca and wanted me to make new work for the show. The exhibition was titled Hacer Noche (‘Crossing Night’) and dealt with the liminal space after death. His only brief to me was that the work be about sex and mortality.
Mexico has a particular ethos and aesthetic; there is an acceptance that life has no glorious victory, no happy ending. Humour, ritual, a strong sense of community and an embrace of the inevitable make it possible to live with tragic and often unacceptable situations.
There is a very different relationship with death here to what I am used to. If one looks beyond the clichés of dancing skeletons and sugar skulls, there’s a deeply complicated connection with mortality. This necropolitical dynamic is most visible in contradictory expressions of honouring the afterlife, in the Day of the Dead celebrations and the brutal dismemberment of bodies by narco traffickers.
Alongside the flamboyance and high-pitched register of this series, there is the ordinariness of the everyday. I am drawn to the fabulousness of the banal and the banality of the exotic.
La Cucaracha is showing at New York's Yossi Milo Gallery from January 10th.
Zapata and Adelita, Mexico City, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Nature’s malice, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Undercover police officer, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Inside the Institutional Revolutionary Party headquarters, Mexico City, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
The advocate at home, Mexico City, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
The bricklayer, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2018 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
The wedding gift, Juchitán de Zaragoza, 2018 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Bordello, Oaxaca de Juárez, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Coyote, Tijuana, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Farm labourer, Hermosillo, 2019 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Muxe portrait #2, Juchitán de Zaragoza, 2018 © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
Pieter Hugo previously:
Comments