Featured in ficciones patógenas at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the two artists offer a conversation on art, land, and the refusal to be legible in a world defined by naming.
It’s just before noon when Felipe Baeza logs onto our scheduled Zoom call from his Brooklyn apartment. Moments later, Seba Calfuqueo joins from Buenos Aires, where late-morning sunlight had already begun to cut across her face and the wall behind her.
Both artists are featured in ficciones patógenas, on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art through July 27. The group exhibition brings together artists from across the Americas to examine how colonial regimes have long pathologized queer, trans, Black and Indigenous bodies, casting them as “possessed,” “deviant,” or “sick.” The exhibition’s title, drawn from the 2018 book by Guaxu writer and artist Duen Neka’hen Sacchi, refers to the ideological myths—or “pathogenic fictions”—used to justify centuries of dispossession: of land, of ritual, of knowledge, of bodily autonomy.
Organized by curators Stamatina Gregory and Georgie Sánchez as part of the Mellon Foundation’s Dispossessions in the Americas initiative, the show places the artists included in dialogue with five centuries of extraction and erasure, from colonial medicine to modern environmental violence. Through hybrid practices drawing from Indigenous, colonial, and pop culture, the artists reimagine land and the body not as sites of pathology but of refusal and transformation.
While Baeza and Calfuqueo’s practices diverge sharply in medium and geography—Baeza lives and works in Brooklyn, Calfuqueo in Chile—both artists share an interest in how legibility itself becomes a trap. Their works both resist categorisation and interrogate the violence embedded in the very act of naming. And though they hadn’t met before this project, what emerges in conversation between them is a shared commitment to opacity, plurality, and survival on their own terms.
In Baeza’s hands, the archival becomes insurgent. His contributions to the show come from Gente del Occidente de México, a collage series created between 2017 and 2019. Each work begins with a page torn from Arte Precolombino del Occidente de México, a 1946 volume published by Mexico’s Secretary of Public Education to catalogue artefacts made by Indigenous peoples before Spanish colonisation—many of which were, by then, housed in private collections belonging to figures like Diego Rivera and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Meant to construct a coherent national identity, the book flattens the objects it presents, severing them from their original contexts and reanimating them only as symbols of state power.
In Baeza’s collages, these taxonomies fall apart. Onto grayscale images of ceremonial figurines and sculptural objects, he layers fragmented limbs sourced from contemporary porn and fashion magazines. As he puts it, exploring “how pornography also functions as a space where the body is objectified, dismembered in very specific ways, where certain parts are desired more than others.”
It’s a collision that’s both intimate and antagonistic. In his hands, the erotic becomes political, exposing the parallels between the ways bodies are consumed in pornography and the ways pre-Columbian artefacts are stripped of context, then circulated as market objects. His work asks: what happens when you take something that was once sacred and display it as if it were a collectible? And what happens when we treat bodies the same way? “These objects are now market-driven and fetishized, often compounded with what it means to be Mexican,” he explains. “I wanted to investigate extraction, not just in terms of land and resources, but also of histories, objects, and rituals.”
The resulting figures are not exact reconstructions but spectral hybrids that are defiantly grotesque and deliberately incoherent. Rather than restore legibility, Baeza conjures what Édouard Glissant called “the right to opacity,” a refusal to be made readable by the systems that have historically sought to contain and define. His figures are anti-monumental, never resolved nor fixed in time, moving through indeterminate states—between genders, geographies, and categories. What emerges instead is a queer, migrant imaginary.
Where Baeza interrogates the body as a site of projection and consumption, Calfuqueo explores it as inseparable from land, ritual, and state control. Her contribution to the exhibition takes the form of three enamel-glazed ceramic jugs, modeled after industrial water containers. Etched into each one is a single, loaded word: DOMINIO, DICTADURA, PANTANOS. Roughly translated as “dominion,” “dictatorship,” and “swamps,” the words evoke legacies of political control and ecological degradation.
“In Chile, water has been a market-driven resource since the 1980s,” she says. “We have lakes and rivers, but many people don’t have access to them. It’s an urgent issue here, but it’s not unique to Chile. It’s a global problem in every place touched by colonialism.” The jugs become vessels for political memory. Their emptiness is intentional. What appears utilitarian becomes a silent indictment of the Pinochet regime’s environmental extractions, whose consequences, Calfuqueo insists, still shape daily life. Ceramics, for Calfuqueo, is not simply a medium, it’s a materially embodied practice that requires the body in its making, that carries the memory of touch. The form itself reflects everyday realities in Chile, where plastic water jugs are often used to transport water in regions without reliable access. By rendering these objects in ceramic, Calfuqueo slows them down, invites attention, and underscores the violence of their necessity.
As our conversation turns to land and belonging, the divergence in Baeza and Calfuqueo’s personal geographies becomes more apparent. Baeza, born in Mexico and raised in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant, speaks of the land as something never fully his to begin with. “I carry a deep longing for a place that often feels out of reach,” he says. “But that longing is generative, sparking an interest in land not as something owned, but embodied. Carried. Reshaped. Imagined anew.” Calfuqueo’s perspective is rooted in the Mapuche cosmovision, where the divide between land and body simply doesn’t exist. “In the West, where landscape is seen as separate,” she says. “In Mapuche culture—mapu meaning land, che meaning people—we are the land. It’s inseparable. If you take, you give. It’s not part of our existence, it is our existence.”
Their differences are intimate, but not oppositional. Where Baeza’s work emerges from dislocation, Calfuqueo’s comes from a relationship under siege. Both are engaged in the project of surviving structures that were never meant to hold them, which becomes more apparent when the conversation turns to queerness. “Growing up queer and also an immigrant,” Baeza says. “I learned from an early age that visibility could be dangerous. But invisibility could also be a form of freedom, for both immigrant and queer communities, which is why I’m not interested in being defined by what a body is, but by what it’s becoming.” Alternatively, Calfuqueo sees queerness not just in people, but in the forest, the riverbed, the mycelium. “Nature is queer,” she says. “Plants are intersex. Fungi can be anywhere. So many different animals can reproduce in many ways. When I see this, I see myself in it.”
Their practices, too, refuse fixed categories. Both bristle at the art world’s impulse to sort, to label. “I’m not a technical artist,” Calfuqueo says. “When I create something, I don’t think about technique, I think about what I want to share with the audience, what feeling I want to convey.” Her performances engage all the senses, while her ceramics embrace contradiction. “It is the land, covered with glaze, like makeup, creating an illusion.” On the other hand, “the art world still doesn’t know where to place my work,” Baeza says. “Is it painting? Drawing? Printmaking? They even label me a “Mexican artist,” even though I’ve lived in the U.S. since I was seven.”
As our call winds down, I think of Glissant again—not just his call for opacity, but his insistence that relation itself is a form of resistance. Baeza reflects on this in real time. “What does it mean to desire something that doesn’t desire you back?” he asks. “To live inside, but also outside, the system? To survive, but also imagine something else?” That imagining, both artists suggest, is never solitary and brings us back to why we joined the call on this day in late April in the first place. “Being in conversation with other artists navigating displacement, transformation, resistance reminds me I’m not alone,” Baeza says. “My work becomes part of a shared gesture, toward a future that hasn’t yet been written.”
In this refusal to be isolated, they offer something radical: an insistence on interconnection, on carrying forward, and on viewing our individual existences as part of a whole. “As Mapuche, we believe that everything in nature has rights. The rivers, the trees, the stones,” Calfuqueo concludes. “Just like us.”
Written by Sahir Ahmed
