The Brooklyn Rail

From a distance, the dried corn stalks which make up part of Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s installation Āmantēcayōtl might be mistaken for the silhouettes of people. Towering rows of outstretched leaves and husks, their appearance in Canal Projects’s windows seems strikingly out of place amid the car-clogged din of Chinatown’s main thoroughfare. Yet their presence here—displaced from the farm fields of Palma Rodríguez’s home region of Milpa Alta along the Teuhtli Volcano in Mexico—embodies the themes of ecocultural dislocation, material transformation, and divine destabilization that are the focus of the exhibition.

For the artist’s sophomore show in New York City, Palma Rodríguez seeks to transport viewers into the sacred agro-technological assemblage of the Milpa, a traditional Aztec form of intercropping corn, beans, and squash that is still practiced today by Azteca-Chichimecas and Nahuatl-speaking communities in the area despite the threats of resource extraction and privatization. This ancestral practice is analogous to the symbiotic “Three Sisters'' method of planting seen in other Mesoamerican and Northern American Indigenous permacultures including, notably, the Lenape indigenous to present-day New York. Palma Rodríguez asserts this millennia-old land management strategy as a uniquely Indigenous technology, and amplifies its powerful lessons of interdependence and reciprocity through a sculptural dialogue between ecological forms and machines.

Trained as a mechanical engineer and now working as a robotics artist and cultural activist fighting to protect Nahuatl lifeways in Milpa Alta, Palma Rodríguez repurposes salvaged circuitry, plastics, and wooden, metal, and ceramic cookware to depict deities from the Aztec pantheon through dynamic animatronics. At the center of the installation, a Cincoatl snake (2024) known as the “snake-friend of maize corn” performs an elaborate mechanized dance suspended over a mound of earth evoking the Milpa, gradually rising and falling as its tail unspools and isothermal blanket wings around its plastic faces that unravel and flutter shut. Framing the central micro-landscape are Chinantles (2020), colorful motorized serpents representative of the four cardinal directions. With a name that also signifies “corn fences,” the Chinantles maintain a playful yet protective presence as their fanged heads come to life with shuddering vibrations and their metal skeletons, lined with spines of cornstalk, lurch back and forth on wheels.

In one corner of the gallery sit two of Palma Rodríguez’s interpretations of the god Tezcatlipoca (2017), who is symbolized by the jaguar and known as the “Heart of the Mountain” and the “smoking mirror.” Palma Rodríguez’s Tezcatlipocas are constituted by rolling skeletal aluminum frames and heads made of radios whose antennae jerk and swing around, occasionally picking up stray broadcasts with their erratic movement. At the base of one of these Tezcatlipocas sits a coyote head (the Huehuecóyotl). In the Nahua cosmology, the coyote is a mischievous god of dance and music capable of crossing worlds, while the jaguar is a shapeshifter associated with the night sky. Tricksters and transgressors between the earth and cosmos, the coyote and the jaguar remain central figures in Mesoamerican corn creation myths. Palma Rodríguez renders these nourishing ancient tales of maize through robotics, challenging rigid contemporary distinctions between the man-made and natural through assemblages of divine techno-organic hybridity.

Although Palma Rodríguez programmed the capacity for motorized movement in these artworks, the activation of their kinetic choreography is dictated by the input of Internet-sourced climate data from the Milpa Alta region. The result is unpredictable, with every visit to the exhibition differing based on the nuanced shifts in weather conditions of an area hundreds of miles away. In one moment, only a single sculpture might move or emit a singular sound. At other times the gallery erupts into a cacophony of clicks, beeps, sputters, shrieks, and rattles. Palma Rodríguez disorients visitors’ visual and auditory perceptions by continuously diverting and diffusing one’s attention across the gallery. Each uncannily animal-like work, including several wired arrays of clay dishes and wooden spoons, emits its own motorized language, reminders that the handmade tools and the outdated electronics we discard were once also considered technological advancements.

Because Palma Rodríguez’s artworks are composed of recycled parts sourced from discarded electronics, their lifespan in the gallery is further impacted by entropic forces of wear, gradually degrading through repeated activations. While gods are believed to be stable and infallible entities, Palma Rodríguez uses their unstable sculptural embodiments to reveal the potential vulnerability of the divine, and, by extension, modern technology. Just as the preservation of Nahua agricultural lifeways requires continued collective tending of material and social networks, so, too, does Āmantēcayōtl, with constant mechanical and software maintenance performed by local programmers to keep Palma Rodríguez’s sacred cyborgs alive for the exhibition’s duration.

Indigenous technologies scholar Julia Watson once wrote that “while we are drowning in this Age of Information, we are starving for wisdom.” In our time of ecological crisis—marked by neoliberal capitalist cultures of disposability, exploitative consumption, and cultural destruction—Palma Rodríguez’s animatronics provide a lively ecocritical intervention, demanding vibrant new human and non-human interrelations that are rooted deeply in the care of spirits, soil, and machines alike. While circuit board designs are often compared to cityscapes and highways, Palma Rodríguez invites us to reinterpret them as analogous to the thoughtful geometry of planted fields along the mountainous topography of Milpa Alta. Āmantēcayōtl imagines alternative entangled agro-technocultural futures where the Mesoamerican pantheon and the microchip can co-exist as tools for sustainable survival.

In the moments of silence before another far-off meteorological event sends the kinetic artworks into an orchestral frenzy, Palma Rodríguez’s inactive robotic deities continue to emit energetic hums and flickers of light as electricity travels through their circuits. The wings of the Cincoatl shudder with the vibrating force of traffic driving by the gallery. Air-conditioned gusts cause the cornstalk leaves to rustle as if they’re on a windswept volcanic field. These artworks are caught between worlds just like the gods they portray, influenced by the dynamic energies of their New York City environment while also channeling the atmospheric activity of the distant Milpa Alta. In Āmantēcayōtl, cyborg sculptures bear witness to Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures in their mechanized embodiment of corn’s mythic origins, revealing the complex beauty of our precarious ecological interconnectivity. Even in the face of threatened cultural extinction and technological obsolescence, Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s harmonious hybrids of the human, animal, plant, god, and machine invite us to partake in the cultivation of life, to become world-makers and time-keepers of the earth.