Playing with Soil, Recoding Earth, and Disrupting Hierarchies: 9 artists from Latin America in the Expanded Field of Ceramics
By Alicja Gluszek
The status of ceramics within contemporary art is still widely debated. Despite its well-documented presence — notably in Phaidon’s Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art by Claire Lilley — market and institutional realities offer no definitive resolution. Artists, however, cherish the medium, ignoring its convoluted theoretical standing. They use clay to produce sculptures, collages, installations, performances, and mechanical objects, expanding the field through formal experimentation and, more importantly, by seeking new meanings in this ancient medium and subverting its traditional uses and contexts.
The Latin American artists highlighted in this selection extend the field of ceramics beyond utility and craft into the corporal, organic, economic, and political spheres. By linking clay’s earthy provenance to the body, they surface a deep synchronicity between the forces of nature and the forces that shape human beings. They think through and with the material, following or exposing the medium’s essence to the public.
In their practice, ceramics become multifunctional vessels that inspire relational aesthetics, in which the artwork becomes an interactive site for bonding. They foreground the ancient connections between humans and the earth, forging pathways that bring us closer to our ancestors as well as contemporaries. Moreover, ceramics’ long-standing cultural and social impact allows the artists to explore how class and gender hierarchies have changed or persisted.
Finally, these creators rework the meaning of territory in our personal and national stories. Clay stays in an immediate relation to the land it’s taken from — a movable, malleable site once used as a vessel for resources or burial, crucial in sustaining ecosystems, sacred time, and communities. Their situated practice taps this reservoir of meaning. By redirecting attention to the costs of extractivism and the devastation of soil as sacred ground, they confront the social inequalities, discrimination, and neocolonialism that destroy human and non-human life alike.
The Chilean artist Constanza Alarcón Tennen combines science and archival material with embodied experience. Her ceramic pieces double as sound devices, the result of a long process of experimentation and testing. She claims that art allows her to speculate and to address the void that quantified or qualified methods cannot capture. In her multimedia performance series Nazca/Sudamericana I and II, she reinterprets the movements of the Nazca and the South American tectonic plates, which put Chile among the most seismically active regions in the world. The Nazca oceanic plate is constantly being pushed beneath the South American continental plate. This movement, though invisible to the naked eye, builds up immense stress in the Earth’s crust, which, once it reaches a critical point, is released as a powerful earthquake. The country experiences minor, unnoticeable tremors daily, and larger, structural earthquakes frequently — one of which the artist experienced firsthand as a child.
The project is an ongoing endeavor — the first chapter (the prologue) sets up and develops the idea of a sexual encounter. The second chapter, dedicated to the South American plate, is based on the idea that the tectonic mass retains a memory of the air. Having supported the Andes — formed through the interaction between the Nazca and South American plates — it conveyed this memory of the air down into the plate’s subterranean universe. The artist is now developing the Nazca episode of the trilogy.
Constanza Alarcón Tennen reimagines tectonic friction as a love affair advancing between the plates, narrating a visual and material poem about the erotic relationship behind their movements. Performers use the ceramic sculptures to map out and enact the sexual tension and release that comes from touch, caress, kisses, and intercourse. They blow into the hand-shaped sound devices, emitting whistles that add density to the sensual choreography.
In the first chapter, sculpted hands stand for specific orgasmic spasms or erotic stimulation between two women, lying on the floor on stone plates overlapping one another. In the second episode, the ceramic hands hang from the ceiling on ropes, receiving caresses from the female performers; they also appear in the video that forms part of the multimedia installation, where they are similarly blown and kissed, their images overlapping and followed by photographs of the Chilean landscape — as if the landmass were both the body and the ceramic sculpture. A recited poem and an audio piece tie the installation together.
A related poetics appears in 2023 Coro (Chorus), co-created with Nicole L’Huillier, which orchestrates a sensuous, carnal encounter between two performers mediated through ceramic-sculpted hands hanging in the installation and surrounded by spontaneous audio compositions. This time, the artist proposed attunement to a chorus of frequencies in the air and beneath our feet — vibrations that sound softly and deeply through matter, bodies, and terrain. Through video, audio, sculpture, and graphic works, the installation was designed and directed to cross two dimensions of embodied existence: intimacy and collectivity.
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