Re-membering Castration:
Bloody Metaphors in Aztlán
Installation by John Jota Leaños | Whitney Biennial, 2002
Description:
Remembering Castration: Bloody Metaphors in Aztlán is an immersive, multimedia installation that excavates colonial violence, historical erasure, and cultural memory through the speculative recovery of a long-lost archive. Exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the work presents itself as a historical reassembly of the forgotten research of 19th-century German archaeologist Helmut Mythusmacher, who mysteriously disappeared in 1848 during his excavation of what he believed to be the Aztec ancestral homeland, Aztlán.
Drawing from this fictional-yet-believable ethnographic frame, Leaños constructs an archaeological satire rooted in Chicanx futurism and decolonial critique. The installation layers sculpture, animation, found footage, and fabricated artifacts to reimagine Mythusmacher’s rediscovered field notes, journals, and photographic “evidence”—all of which point to a provocative thesis: that the Aztec warrior’s castration became a ritual means of regaining memory and reconnecting with forgotten origins.
Conceptual Framework:
The title invokes the violence of conquest while also reframing castration as a metaphor for epistemic rupture and recovery. According to the Mythusmacher archive, Aztec emissaries seeking Aztlán were denied access to their lost homeland until they submitted to a transformative ritual: castration by the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui. Rather than representing loss, the act was said to unlock ancestral memory and spiritual clarity. This radical reimagining foregrounds castration not as mutilation, but as mnemonic release—a severing from the amnesia imposed by conquest and patriarchy.
Through this lens, Remembering Castration critiques how colonial history is written, archived, and mythologized—particularly in relation to masculinity, violence, and memory. By adopting the language and display techniques of Western anthropology and museology, the installation parodies the authority of institutional knowledge and challenges the viewer to question whose histories are remembered, and at what cost.
Cultural & Curatorial Context:
Staged just months after 9/11, during a time of resurging nationalism and institutional silencing of dissent, Leaños’ installation resonates with broader critiques of American imperialism and historical denial. In the context of the Whitney Biennial, it subverted the assumed neutrality of museum display to foreground how cultural memory is policed through aesthetics, language, and spectacle.
The project is deeply informed by Chicanx and Indigenous epistemologies, operating at the intersection of speculative historiography, visual anthropology, and ceremonial parody. It reclaims the gallery as a site of ritual and reinvention—where the boundaries between myth and history blur to reveal deeper truths about colonial trauma and resistance.
