We must give them our silence: Six Women Artists, Zona Maco 2025

     Fatiha Zemmouri Riverbed Haouz clay on wooden panel. Diam. 170 x Depth 9 cm, 2024. Image courtesy of Comptoir Des Mines Gallery.

By KAREN MOE March 2, 2025
 

We must turn away
and no matter how hard, we must give them our silence.
Without attention, they deflate, they show their nil.
We then will be retained; the spirit returned;
the body, gently, held.
- Catherine Owen

At a time when narcissism has been ramped up to a deafening roar, when men’s names bombard our homes beyond their borders, uninvited, laying claim to our countries; when men who care more about imposing their manifest destiny on Mars than cleaning up the messes they have made on earth are being listened to en masse; when men who, supported by their damaged followers who find their truth on Fox News, have bound attempts at liberty in chains, what happens when we only give them our silence? What happens if we carry on as before, turn away, and take control with our indifference?

Moroccan artist Fatiha Zemmouri continues, unwaveringly, the earth-centered work she began over twenty-five years ago. Living on the land, Zemmouri immerses herself in both her subject and materials from the natural world. Her recent work is made of the local Haouz clay and, using her hand-made tools, the artist’s process is a sovereign space confronting a culture that exists to destroy.

Comptoir Des Mines Galerie exhibited Zemmouri’s piece Riverbed. The life of the artist’s materials and process follow the climate-change-drought that is swallowing North Africa along with the exodus of peoples to the shanty towns surrounding cities. In tandem with the thirst of the land, the artist removes all traces of moisture from the clay, adds resin and then spreads it onto imposing, circular wood panels, composing an allegory of the environmental devastation that is eradicating culture, home and heritage that cannot be ignored. The artist layers the clay in varying densities, building the underlying composition which she then lays onto the land and the sun does the rest, enacting a collaboration between artist and environment. The sun-painted cracks are far from arbitrary, though; as artist and sun collaborate, they narrate the diaspora as the almost imperceptible cracks on the far edges of the 170 cm diameter artwork build towards the culmination in the denser clay extending across the piece, like the people marching towards the cities, being forced from their ancestral lands. In Riverbed, people and earth, artist and environment are one.

Adeline de Monseignat Sticky Seeds (Circle II) Cantera, patinated bronze, plywood support 140 x 122 x 3.5cm, 2024. Image courtesy of Cadogan Gallery.

Represented by Cadogan Gallery, London/Mexico City residing sculptor Adeline de Monseignat’s artwork also follows the nature muse. For her, nature is the origin that enlivens the artwork. Monseignat studies seeds, be they of plant or of body. Her Cantera and bronze sculpture is a community of Sticky Seeds, with stone seeds held together by their patinated pods like a life-giving—as opposed to plague associated—version of Ring-Around-the-Rosie. One can feel the movement of these cusps of life that animate metal and stone as a community of transience. Yet, even though the volcanic specked seeds and the pristine green pods fit together with the inevitability of a puzzle, there is no perfection in the of sense completion. Sticky Seeds dances the unity of flux and change.

Tiffany Trenda Soft Interface 9 Mixed Media, acrylic on canvas. 48.26 x 48.26 x 5.08 cm, 2024. Image courtesy of Licht Feld Gallery.

Lucía Vidales Buscadoras (Seekers), Acrylic, oil, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 225 x 172 cm, 2024. Image courtesy of Karen Huber Gallery.
 

Painter Lucía Vidales of Karen Huber Gallery is immersed in the humility of the search. In Buscadoras (Seekers), the body is central, fragmented or, if not yet, very possibly about to be. The artist paints in depths, discovering as she goes. One body is many; there are no separations, and it is as though the paint is perpetually pooling. Vidales paints with her canvas on the floor, building a multiplicity of backgrounds by randomly staining with watered down acrylic. Charcoal and pastel outline the watery forms; the drawn is but a temporal maintenance of transience. This searching, gendered female as “Buscadoras,” is wide-open with the liberation of always seeking.

a’driane nieves you have authorized our destruction, and yet still, I choose to live (en masse), Acrylic, house paint, paint marker, sanguine dry lead on Belgian linen. 127 x 177.8 cm, 2024. Image courtesy of Albion Jeune Gallery
 

In the country that has spawned those men we will no longer name, resides queer, African American artist a’driane nieves represented by Albion Jeune Gallery. As a survivor of multiple levels of trauma, nieves’ praxis is an embodiment of turning away: she describes her paintings as acts of turning her body, psyche and soul inside out. In you have authorized our destruction and yet still I choose to live, the pain of the process is livid and beautiful. Combining acrylic with house paint, paint marker with dry lead, the artist overlaps the everyday with the artworld, the crude with the refined. Her brush intuitively flurries the foundation of what could be a rib cage from which the house-paint guts will emerge; one can feel the force of application of this furor of mark-making. Yet, the pain is painted in such liberatory hues as electric blue and birthday cake pink and, woven into the process of turning oneself inside out, the artist writes the title, the reason for its making: choosing to live—her triumph giving the oppressor nothing but silence and, in Catherine Owen’s words: the spirit returned;/ the body, gently, held.

At Zona Maco this year, I found the power of turning away from the arrogance that is assaulting our global consciousness; I found artwork that expresses how, especially as women, our silence is an act of resistance. After all, we know who they are; we know what they say, we’ve had to listen to their arrogance for millennia. What we are experiencing now can be described as but a circus of an accelerated same and these six women artists will not be distracted. There is too much work to do; there is too much joy, beauty, play and wisdom to continue to find. There will be no distractions from what and who, in the big picture, are nil. WM