What lies beneath: the living archives of Lorena Mal

Lorena Mal at the 15th Bienal FEMSA: La voz de la montaña [The voice of the Mountain], 2024. Museo Regional de Guanajuato Alhóndiga de Granaditas (INAH), Guanajuato. Courtesy of Bienal FEMSA. Photograph: Ramiro Chaves. 

by Ambika Subra, culture editor.

Unearthing the hidden narratives beneath our feet, Mexican artist Lorena Mal is revealing the deep entanglements between land and power. She is an excavator—not only of the earth’s soil and trees, but of the knowledge systems, political structures, and forgotten narratives embedded within it. Working across sculpture, performance, and archival intervention, Mal dismantles the illusion of landscape as a neutral backdrop. Instead, she exposes it as a charged site of conflict, migration, and resilience, shaped by forces both geological and geopolitical. One of the most exciting voices in contemporary Mexican art, her recent works at the XV Bienal FEMSA and Museo Jumex have cemented her place as a radical force in rethinking our experiences of landscape.

(Detail) Lorena Mal, Restregarnos tierra en los ojos [Rubbing dirt in our eyes], 2024. Santa Rosa soil from Guanajuato (MX), site intervention, 89m2.

Mal refuses to see land as separate from history. In Restregarnos Tierra en los Ojos, an installation commissioned for the XV Bienal FEMSA, she created an archive of occupation and displacement by covering the space’s surfaces with soil—a raw, living material applied in a fermented state, allowing microbial life and air to bind it into a clay that naturally cracked and shifted over the four months of the exhibition. Sourced from the Bajío, the soil bore the region’s long past of floods and droughts, colonial mining extraction, and environmental destruction. Who has the right to a land? Who determines its fate? Mal’s intervention blurred the lines between architecture and archaeology, embedding the region’s instability directly into the walls of the exhibition. The soil itself became testimony—not just a metaphor, but an active record of conflict, survival, and resistance.

Lorena Mal, Largo Aliento. Dejarse mover por el viento  [Long Breath. To be moved by the wind], 2024. Performance for 3 interpreters and 3 woodwind instruments built by the artist, variable dimensions / years. Documentation of the performance at the “Siluetas sobre maleza” exhibition at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. 

Beyond the visible, Mal’s work listens. In Largo Aliento, performed at Museo Jumex this past year, she translated tree rings into sonic compositions, using instruments made from those trees as a vehicle for a deep, resonant breath. Just as the soil preserves and reveals the memory of land through its raw materiality, Largo Aliento treats breath as a conduit for memory, where tree rings vocalize their silent histories. These rings, like layers of sediment, hold the imprints of environmental upheavals—fires, droughts, cycles of violence and renewal. By playing their breath, Mal does not impose a structure onto their histories but coaxes out their latent recollections, turning them into sound. Her instruments do not adhere to tempered scales or fixed notation, but instead respond to human interaction. This relationship resists linear time in favor of something more fluid and horizontal, creating a resonance that blurs the boundary between past and present. Both earth and breath become modes of listening—fragile yet persistent archives of what landscapes remember.

Lorena Mal, Largo Aliento [Long Breath], 2019. Woodwind instrument built by the artist with dalbergia wood that makes visible the hundreds of years lived by the tree from which it is made, indicating the dates in which they lived analyzed by dendrochronology, 19.5cm / 76 years. Courtesy of the artist.

History is not confined to human narratives alone. At its core, Lorena Mal’s work is about destabilization—of narrative, of power, of our very understanding of place. She is not interested in transformation as a fixed act but in how landscape holds and reveals its own records through its raw architecture. Mal excavates how land bears witness to colonial displacements, migrations both human and botanical, and the erasure embedded in plantation histories. By blending materials across geographies, carving new sonic pathways through time, and forcing us to confront what lies beneath our feet, Mal reframes the land as an active force—one that remembers, resists, and refuses erasure. Her practice is not simply an exploration of landscape; it is a reconfiguration of how we engage with the world itself.