La espera [The wait] by Miguel Fernández de Castro’s (Sonora, 1986) takes place in a suspended time, where bodies and forms remain exposed to the elements, to weathering, and to surveillance. Far from alluding to disappearance, the work focuses on structures and remains incorporated into the landscape, identifying in them a dissonance between the finding and the subsequent reconnaissance. This gap articulates a waiting period, often marked by a lack of answers, on a threshold defined by violence and institutional omission.

The installation draws on the artist’s experience in the Altar desert, where he lives and works, and where he is co-director of the Altar Research Center. This territory is a space marked by slow and prolonged times—both physical and symbolic—as well as accelerated transits and urgent passage. In this context, at the intersection of human and animal time, minimal actions emerge—walks, encounters, traces—that structure the daily operation of the desert and the artist’s work. The arrangement of the elements in La espera [The wait]—a butterfly, the replica of two molars, and a wooden chair—establishes a relationship between materials with different rhythms of erosion and resistance, and activates a dialogue between the waiting times of each process and a territory in constant tension.

The work reflects on how memory is embodied in objects and reconfigurations torn from their time, place, and diachronic continuity, but which retain their own temporal significance. In this sense, the replica of the two teeth does not function solely as a copy, but as a gesture inscribed in a temporality marked by abandonment and distance: a discontinuous, almost theatrical temporality that becomes visible when something interrupts it. The chair, made from an organic fusion of ironwood and mesquite trees—two of the densest and most resistant woods in the world, endemic to the Sonoran Desert—will take centuries to decompose, while the butterfly continues its cycle. The three elements produce a balance inherent to the living conditions in the Sonoran Desert.

Illuminated like a forensic study or a film set, La espera [The wait] can be observed from the outside: from an uncontaminated gaze that records a violence which has become part of the landscape.

(Text by Lena Solà Nogué)