Noguchi Museum

As industrialized societies and wealthy entities continue wreaking havoc on the earth’s climate and displacing millions of people in a mass migrant crisis, some artists are looking back and paying homage to how humans used to– and still do– live.

Javier Senosiain, El Nido de Quetzalcóatl (1998–2007). Model fabricated by Enrique Cabrera. © Javier Senosiain / Arquitectura Orgánica

On view now at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens through February 26, 2023, “In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico” is the culmination of decades of work by four Mexican artists-architects who explored the natural landscape of caves and created them in the modern context. Taking over the entire first floor of the museum, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking look at how humans live and move today, and how we might experience the future years to come. 

The exhibition, with works by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain, questions how humans might reconnect with nature through shelter, bringing forth environments that came forth in Mexico during the 1900s. The Knockturnal was invited to the exhibition’s opening night ceremony on October 18, where art lovers packed into the museum’s first floor and were joined by the last living artist Javier Senosiain, who described his inspiration for such works and how he interacted with his fellow artists and Isamu Noguchi himself.

“To be an originalist, we have to go back to the origin of things,” Senosiain said through a translator, before asking the audience to close their eyes and imagine themselves in the womb at the time of their birth. “We are like astronauts floating in space, in a round shape with no windows, and feel this urge to be pushed through, with the lights shocking us.”

Senosiain explains that psychologists describe the action of being born as a traumatic experience, and explains this is due to the shape of where we find ourselves in.

“If we are born early, we are put in a glass box,” he says. “When we leave the square room, we take the rectangular train to our boxy apartments in New York, where we get pushed into these cradles with boarded sticks.”

“As we continue to grow, we crawl around the apartment, through the rectangular doors, and see the kitchen with boxes and squares on the wall.”

The artist continues down this path of reasoning until the very end. “And when we die, we get put into a box and lowered into a square in the ground.” Because of this, Senosiain puts forth, “we lose three very important aspects of our career: creativity, spontaneity, and freedom.”

Instead, he offers that we should reconsider how humans live on earth and how we interact with our natural landscape— in a not-so-square-ish way. By paying attention to the earth’s natural shelters and more specifically, its shapes, we can ensure humans, in general, will never lose the most important aspects of our lives, all the while helping mitigate the very crises that [some] humans helped create. 

“We can return to the earth again,” Senosiain ended. “We can become human again.”