Aurora Noreña: Tanta piedrita me asfixia

Aurora Noreña develops a research-driven practice that links pre-colonial heritage with contemporary artistic and artisanal techniques, exploring how objects that emerge from the Mesoamerican landscapes are marked by histories of extraction, displacement, and institutional silence. Her work begins with a critical study of the pre-colonial collection of Leonardo Patterson, an archive shaped by processes of looting, falsification, and illegal trade, which the artist unfolds and reconfigures to generate new pathways for understanding the circulation of these materialities.

The exhibition brings together works across multiple media, like weaving, woodworking, upholstery, installation, collage, video, and performance, that connect patrimonial forms with contemporary expressions. In these pieces, the stone ceases to be a static relic and instead becomes part of a broader ecology that acknowledges the geographies, peoples, and cultural lineages from which it originates. The project proposes an affective ethics of reconnection between patrimonialized objects and the descendant communities of the practices that first gave them form, revealing the gaps that persist within the legal and institutional structures governing this heritage.