BRUSSELS.- In the archives of Naples: ledgers and lists of tribute. Rows of numbers recording, over four hundred years, the wealth extracted from invaded lands — unpaid labour on ranches and haciendas, and in mines; in the building of houses, mills, ships and warehouses; timber, stone and lime; turquoise, amber and crystal; maize, cacao, cotton and rubber; and gold, the tribute of choice after the invasion, demanded of tens of thousands of people.
Added together, these tributes formed the final sums transferred to a family in Naples, who always demanded more — more land, more tribute, more hours of unpaid labour.
It was not until the early twentieth century, as revenues began to decline, that a member of that family wrote to ask what the land and its people were like.
Xico, in the State of Mexico, is one of the places that were forced to pay tribute to them for centuries.
It is in the face of this centuries-long silence that Maria Thereza Alves asks: How does one begin a dialogue in the midst of so many ledgers?
An Accounting is Maria Thereza Alves’s first solo exhibition at the gallery in Brussels. Working from this asymmetry — between those who accounted for the distance and those who lived the tribute — the artist examines how the colonial exploitation of these towns in Mexico, sustained through centuries of unpaid labour and the extraction of goods, remains inscribed in the region’s landscape, objects and memory.
For example, the tribute relationship between Xico and the noble family dates back to 1529, when King Charles V granted the conquistador Hernán Cortés the peñol of Xico — a rocky islet in the middle of Lake Chalco — along with the hereditary title of Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, a domain that obliged its inhabitants to pay tribute to whoever held the title, even from across the Atlantic. Over the following two centuries, through successive marriages within the European nobility, the title — and the income it generated — passed to the Neapolitan Pignatelli Cortés family.
The hereditary tribute system was formally abolished with Mexican independence in 1821, but the exploitation of the land, in the form of haciendas, continued for generations, until it was brought to an end by the Mexican Revolution and the agrarian reform that followed in the early twentieth century — the same moment at which a member of the family first wrote to ask what that land and those people were like.
For this investigation, the artist draws on two principal sources: the collection of the Museo Comunitario Valle de Xico, comprising more than five thousand artefacts found and preserved by the region’s own residents, and the Villa Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, in Naples. Setting these two archives against one another — one popular and communal, built by those who inherited the weight of exploitation; the other aristocratic and institutional, built with the wealth that exploitation generated — is the central gesture of the exhibition: an accounting of another kind, one that shifts the register from ownership to memory, permanence and the authorship of those who were historically counted, but never heard.
Maria Thereza Alves (São Paulo, 1961) has built a research-based body of work since the 1980s, dedicated to investigating the silenced histories and circumstances of specific localities. Her projects emerge from dialogue with the physical and social realities of the places where she lives or is invited to exhibit, responding to concrete local needs. The artist has taken part in exhibitions including Documenta Kassel (13th and 15th editions), the São Paulo Biennial, the Berlin Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, the Biennale of Sydney and the Toronto Biennial, among others, and was awarded the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics (2016–2018).
