Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas: The Blessings of the Mystery

Production | Acquisition Grant

In The Blessings of the Mystery, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas draw attention to a remote region of the southwestern United States, shifting focus from the fable of Big Oil to the stories of indigenous communities and natural ecologies whose precarity is a threat to our future wellbeing. This entirely new body of work explores how the Far West was spatially planned and developed since the 1800s, and how this imbrication of settler and indigenous knowledge unfolds into the present. The exhibition centers around an eponymous film that traverses the region’s troubled histories of colonization, migration, and biocultural ecology. Drawing on a wide cast of characters who offer myriad entry points into the story, Caycedo and de Rozas’ cinematic journey seeks to generate a broader understanding of how the western United States has been visualized and subsequently utilized. Other elements of the project include an installation of surveying flags and tools, astrological instruments, and a 1930s rarely seen collection of watercolors documenting Lower Pecos rock art before it was flooded by the Amistad Dam. Indeed, the Amistad Dam, emerges as a powerful example for the artists of how water has been mediated by both indigenous forms of embodied expression and modern feats of scientific engineering. These knowledge systems overlap in the Rio Grande Basin and The Blessings of the Mystery seeks to expose their proximity by activating a new constellation of collaborators across ethnicities, disciplines, and politics.