Episode 31: The Aesthetics of Evil with Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya (Teaser)
See here for full episode: patreon.com/aqnbIn this episode Steph speaks with Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, an interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid sculptures evoke a monstrous tactility and sense of dreadful fascination, while echoing the Aztec mythology of shapeshifting beings called Nahuales. Not quite human and not quite animal, these phantoms can move with a freedom often not afforded the Latinx migrant communities that inhabit the same desert along the Rio Grande.Born in Mexico’s Parral, Chihuahua and raised at the Mexico-United States border of Juárez–El Paso, Montoya’s cosmology absorbs the memories and information embedded in the weathered human refuse of the desert, which the artists collects, repurposes and reanimates with the narratives of their own friends, experiences and traumas.