Adela Goldbard
March 12, 2025
Adela Goldbard is not afraid to destroy her own work; in fact, she actually considers the act of destruction to play an important, anti-colonial role in preserving traditions. We sat down with Adela to better understand what she means by ‘the poetics of violence’, learn about the history of pyrotechnics in Mexico, and get a preview of her project for the upcoming Triennial 2025.
Your artistic practice is rooted in decolonization but the Triennial subtheme your work falls under is Climate + Biodiversity. It's probably obvious to some folks that the climate crisis is tied very closely to the global history of colonialism, but I would like to hear from you how that relationship is present within your practice.
My work incorporates effigy building and pyrotechnics. My collaborators and I work with different kinds of reeds, mainly in Tultepec, on the outskirts of Mexico City, as well as in other parts of Mexico, like Michoacán, and even in Peru, in Lake Titicaca, depending on the project. Through my research, I learned that the reeds we work with are mostly Phragmites reeds—that's the scientific name—it's also the name they are known by in the Boston area. These Phragmites reeds that we've been using are an invasive species that arrived from Europe in the ballasts of different ships.
Even the scientific language is full of references to colonialism. Species are either called “native” or “invasive”. The invasive species colonize the natural environment of native species and kill them, by taking over the soil, water, and nutrients. By using this invasive species, my work contributes to getting rid of them. In Tultepec, there are traditions that have to do with effigy building and pyrotechnics using this Phragmites reed. They’ve used so many of them in Tultepec that now they have to outsource the reeds from other places in Mexico. This has actually allowed native species to reproduce again. It’s a symbolic act that also has a real ecological impact.
For my Triennial project, I am using Phragmites reeds from the Boston area. This project is an anti-colonial exercise that is collaborative in nature.
Can we talk more about the use of pyrotechnics in your work? That element creates such a powerful sensory experience for a viewer. How did you get started using pyrotechnics?
It's a long story, but it happened very organically. My work is research-based. I did a project back in 2012 or 2013. I was researching at the archives back then; now, most research is done on the web, but then I was actually going to the physical archives. Looking at newspapers has always been very inspiring and interesting for me.
I started making this collection of accidents—or so-called accidents—that were connected to the history of Mexico at that time. There was one chapter of that research that had to do with airplane crashes. At that moment, it felt like planes were just falling from the sky, not commercial flights, but small airplanes, mostly airplanes that belonged to the government. I started making this collection of newspaper clippings of these news stories. What really struck me was that the images of the crashed helicopters and planes made them look like piñatas. Instead of being these great metallic structures that should represent power, they just looked like piñatas that had been crushed.
I wanted to make piñata-like models to talk about the fragility of the systems these vehicles participated in: the political, military, and police systems.
I found this family of piñata makers in a municipality called Melchor Ocampo, in the state of Mexico, which had the Guinness World Record of the biggest piñata in the world. I knew I needed to work with them because I wanted these piñatas to be life-sized. At one point, while we were working on this project, we needed help from other makers in the next municipality, Tultepec, because this structure was made of reeds, and they had experience with that. I started to go to Tultepec. That was where I got to witness their pyrotechnic traditions in action. I already knew about them but seeing them was a completely different experience.
Previously I had been doing landscape interventions with the crashed airplane models. After connecting with these people, I decided to transform this work into performance. That's how I got started with pyrotechnics.
I know that you’ve done a lot of research into what you call ‘the poetics of violence’. Can you share what that means and how it figures in your practice?
If we go back to the newspaper clippings, which I started collecting around 2006, when the war on drugs in Mexico started, something that I noticed when I was collecting all of this information was that violent acts would be reported on differently by different newspapers. For example, when cartels would use blockades to get attention, they would have big trucks, big guns, and be extremely violent. At the same time, an Indigenous community might be out protesting something and blocking a small highway with just rocks. But when you read about it in the newspaper, it was as if the violence was the same in both situations. I was starting to wonder, why don't we have different names for all these events we put under the tag of ‘violent events’? It's not fair because it's not the same. We need to start figuring out other ways of talking about these events that actually distinguish them because the goal of putting them on the same level is clear: it's to criminalize protest and resistance.
I started to think about the symbolism embedded in our language and how we could be more vocal through art when talking about these different kinds of violence. You could say that I de-territorialized it in a way, meaning that I started thinking about violence as a new term. The people who are resisting using violence are doing that because it's the only thing they have left. I was talking about blockades by protesters with an Indigenous professor from Arantepacua, who pointed out that violence is often the only way to get attention from the media. That's all we have left. Violence as the last available tool for resistance is very different from violence as a strategy for power and control.
Another aspect of my research within this poetics of violence is that I perceive performative confrontation as a tool. It’s easy to romanticize collaborative work but real conflicts do arise when collaborating with others and they need to be acknowledged and addressed. It's important to think about collaboration as a process of negotiation, confrontation, and, in the end, friendship. Friendship and love are never free of conflict.
That’s a good point, collaboration is not necessarily easy but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Collaborating with other makers is so central to your practice, not just because of the expertise they can bring but also because of the experiences they can introduce you to.
I love working with other creative people. Craft is very important in Mexico. Artesanía is what we call it here. All these craftspeople are amazing, whether they make textiles, sculptures, ceramics, you name it. And there has always been this fake division between art and artesanía, which is very hierarchical as well as racist.
For my Triennial project, I am working with makers from the Wampanoag tribe. They use different kinds of weavings with a variety of grasses to make utilitarian as well as sacred objects.
It just makes sense for me to bring all of that together. I am also bringing my collaborators from Mexico because they're very good at building structurally and developing something at the nexus of tradition and technology. We'll probably use LED lights to light everything at night, but the weaving will be done with reeds. We’re bringing together materiality and traditions through this collaborative building process.
How do you anticipate your piece being received in Boston? The performance itself will be spectacular — the spectacle of it is so important to the overall project.
These traditional events are very intense, fun, and cathartic. There are usually a lot of emotions involved. A large part of understanding the work comes through the sensory elements of the piece. It's important for the audience to understand what the work is about without us having to say it out loud. Just being there for the performance is anti-colonial work.
Pyrotechnics originally arrived on the continent as tools of oppression. The first documented use of pyrotechnics in what is now Mexico was at the beginning of colonial times through something called autos sacramentales, which were essentially outdoor theater productions put together by the Church to convert people to Catholicism. One of these plays was called The Last Judgment. One character, Lucia, needed to be punished for having too many husbands. Hell appears through pyrotechnics. If you read the description in the historical documentation of this event, it says “a serpent of fire” was going across Lucia. Those were pyrotechnics. They were being used to frighten people, but soon after that, the same population that pyrotechnics were meant to frighten started using them for their own traditions. They flipped the tool of oppression into a tool of resistance.
Destruction can be a very powerful method of memory-making. What I want to be understood about the spectacle that my work creates is that this is not just about pyrotechnics for ornamentation’s sake. Nor are these patriotic pyrotechnics, seeing as that's the usual way that they are used in the U.S. This is something else, something with communal significance.
Can you say more about that? How does destruction act as a way of preserving memories? That is such a rich paradox.
I started my artistic career as a photographer. I was creating these sculptures that I would transport in pieces, remake in a landscape, photograph, and then disassemble. At that time, I encountered these people who were putting all of this effort into building these effigies that would then be destroyed in a couple of minutes but it wasn’t a problem for them. They would never get attached to the object because the idea was that the object was meant to be destroyed. That was when I started to understand this idea that even when an object disappears through a destructive act, it can fulfill a function beyond its actual presence. Time functions like a spiral when it comes to these traditions.
We still document these performances through videos and photographs. That documentation leads to interesting forms of sensorial archives because they're non-written. It’s a tool of memory-making but not the Western colonial mode of memory-making or archiving which is usually linear and written or verbal. The documentation of my projects is mostly sensorial, allowing the experience of the destruction to stay in your mind. Other forms of craft, like textiles, are also forms of memory-making or preservation that are nonlinear and nonverbal.
My work also functions as an act of protest. The performances are acts of resistance because they subvert the way pyrotechnics were used. There are lots of people in Mexico, for example, that want to prohibit pyrotechnics because they're dangerous or a nuisance, but usually these people that complain are middle or higher class Mexicans that don’t want to be contaminated by these traditions that come from the outskirts. It’s a noisy form of resistance. And it's fun! It's a way of protesting by celebrating.