The four Untitled drawings (one subtitled Yucatán Jungle Landscapes and the other three Yucatán Jungle Plants), dated during the pandemic in 2020-2021, are executed with a peculiar technique closely related to the processual character of Fritzia Irízar’s production. This is ink made from dollar bill ashes on cotton paper. The conversion of dollar bills into various artistic materials (carbon ink, as in this case, or tiny pieces of paper, as in her project on Guernica) points to one of the constants in Irízar’s oeuvre, the physical and symbolic transformation of matter, and especially those materials appreciated more for their economic and status value than for their true utility for the subsistence of the species. Nearly all her production revolves around the critical analysis of another art, chrematistiké or the art of earning money, particularly when practised through an extractive economy that privileges the exchange value of the planet’s raw materials without regard for their use value.

On one of the plates, we see a detail of the vegetable landscape of the jungle of Yucatán. The other two imitate the style of the pages of a classic treatise on botany and show two different species of shrub on which we read the words kucheel and tank’as aak’ in gold lettering applied with manual calligraphy.

Kucheel or kuche is the Mayan name for the cedar (Cedrela odorata), and derives from the conjunction of the particle ku, used to refer to the divine, and che, which means ‘wood’. The cedar has a fragrant wood whose properties make it especially suitable for carving, and it has therefore traditionally been used in the Maya culture for sculpting sacred images or objects. Tank’as aak’, another Mayan term, is the name of a climbing plant which, like the cedar, has medicinal uses. In its eagerness to order vegetable and animal species, western science devised new names and applied its systems of classification without regard for those used by the native populations of the regions constituting the habitats of those species. The elegant italic calligraphy of Enlightenment origin, similar to Copperplate, used by the artist in these drawings, together with its gold colour and its openly western character, produces a sharp contrast with the Mayan words and subtly refers us to conflicts of a post-colonial nature. In many of the projects and installations of Fritzia Irízar, it is not only the arrogant and useless nature of the processes of economic exploitation in her country, Mexico, that is called into question, but also the foreign origin of the firms that reap the profits from them, which moreover cause economic, social and ecological harm to the inhabitants of these regions.

The three drawings of species from Yucatán form part of the project “Chicxulub, studies of a landscape”, an investigation on the crater of the volcano of the same name in Yucatán that was carried out during the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown. In the artist’s own words, “it attempts to provoke reflection on the idea of extinction and power relations between species.” The state of emergency caused by the pandemic is thus linked to the Chicxulub crater, formed by the asteroid that put an end to the era of the dinosaurs and gave rise to “the last great reorganisation of power among species, which placed human beings in a privileged position that we have retained up to the present day.” This is a reflection on the imbalance between the costs and profits of the current urban and tourist development projects in Yucatán, one of the most fragile and authentic ecosystems on the planet, and precisely the territory where the last great extinction took place. The drawings of this series show endangered or extinct natural areas and plant species in the state of Yucatán.

Maite Méndez Baiges