La Mirada de las Lagartijas: Resplandeciente (The gaze of the lizards: Resplendent)

In the series “La Mirada de las Lagartijas (The Gaze of the Lizards),” Duen Neka’hen Sacchi constructs an alternative order of fiction in the construction of colonial structures of history and representation. The work takes its title from José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel “El vendedor de pasados” (2004), narrated by a lizard’s oblique, fragmented perspective—a gaze that resists linear time and hegemonic truth, weaving dreams, fiction, and memory into an unstable reality. Neka’hen translates this lizard-perspective into a communal and transmaterial practice, embracing rupture, erasure, and reconstitution as methods of survival and world-building. The textile compositions bear the marks of migration, trauma, and contamination, embedded in material references to the histories of extractivism and forced displacement. The ceramic works extend this visual and haptic vocabulary, invoking fossilized traces, buried cosmologies, and the illegible residues of disappeared bodies and landscapes. “La Mirada de las Lagartijas” rejects the colonial archive’s claim to totality, instead proposing a spiraling genealogy of resistance and reclamation. Neka’hen calls upon punk aesthetics, erotic memory, and diasporic fabulation to construct an alternative erohistoriography, where bodies, land, and spirits escape capture, persist in fugitive alliance, and refuse disappearance. Through cosmo-aesthetic diplomacy, “La Mirada de las Lagartijas” insists on a future that is not yet written but is already imagined, dreamed, and re-membered in fragments, in whispers, in flight. —Text by Georgie Sánchez as included in the 2025 exhibition, 'ficciones patógenas'