Gala Porras-Kim. The motion of an alluvial record.

A hothouse in Manhattan

From 19 September to 7 December 2024, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York showed Gala Porras-Kim's The motion of an alluvial record. Porras-Kim was born in 1984 in Bogotá, Colombia, and lives and works in Los Angeles and London.

To enter, visitors pushed through heavy plastic flaps held together by magnets. Inside was a shed like room, almost a hothouse. The temperature was kept around 27 degrees Celsius. Humidity at 84 percent. The air was heavy and wet and clung to the skin.

The room was tuned to the climate of the wetlands of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Not for the visitor's comfort, but so the work could live in its own conditions.

The Brooklyn Rail reviewer wrote that before she could look at anything, she smelled something earthy and mineral. It was the smell of wet clay.

A trough of clay and two plexiglass sheets

In the middle of the room ran a long open vitrine filled with clay from the Yucatán wetlands. The clay was laid down over centuries, sediment upon sediment. It holds the geological history of the land and traces of the people who lived there.

In the hot, damp air, the clay does not dry. It stays soft, able to flow, able to change. In water, its particles do not stay in chronological order. They mix; old layers rise, new ones sink.

At either end of the room hung a plexiglass sheet. One showed a water lily serpent, a common image in Maya art, and was coated against fog. Visitors could still see the image through trails of condensation.

The other was titled Rain portrait, with the subtitle Chaac's lacrimatory. Chaac is the Maya god of rain; a lacrimatory is a small vessel for tears. This sheet was left uncoated. Moisture gathered on it until the image vanished into mist. The portrait of the rain god was hidden by rain.

When moisture is a material

Porras-Kim has long asked how museums keep objects, and by whose rules. Many artefacts in Western museums were taken from elsewhere under unequal conditions, then kept behind glass at standard temperatures and humidities set by the museums themselves.

This work turns that around. Instead of bringing the object into museum conditions, Porras-Kim brings the conditions of its origin into the gallery. The room serves the clay, not the other way round.

It also raises a question of energy. Keeping a New York room as hot and humid as the Yucatán takes power, as does keeping a museum store cool and dry. The review notes that the climate standards of Western institutions are themselves a sustainability problem.

In the room, moisture is no longer something to remove. It gathers, runs, blurs. It decides what the visitor can see. The reviewer describes condensation becoming a material with a life of its own.

Time that does not run straight

The exhibition's newspaper links the room's moisture to a Maya view of time: not a straight line but something fluid, circling, returning. Alluvial clay is like that. It does not keep the past in order like a book. It keeps it the way water does, all mixed.

The show belonged to Swamplands, Storefront's year long programme on the wetlands around the Gulf of Mexico: Louisiana, Texas, Yucatán, following exhibitions by Fred Schmidt-Arenales and Imani Jacqueline Brown. From the Louisiana swamps, Candice Lin made Swamp Fat, another work in which smell is a way to remember.

Swamps are often treated as empty land waiting to be filled and built on. Porras-Kim shows the opposite. A trough of wet clay in a hot room is an archive in motion. To read it, you must keep it wet. And you must begin with the nose.