This past fall, multidisciplinary artist Clotilde Jiménez debuted La Gruta: Una Ópera en Dos Actos (The Grotto: An Opera in Two Acts) at El Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Spun from magical realism and a pointedly self-reflective engagement with “Mesofuturism,” the two-part experimental production and adjoining exhibition directs its viewers toward a cosmological reorientation of space and time that expands beyond the orthodoxy of traditional opera. The Grotto follows the journey of Leopoldo, a young boy from the Mexican village of La Garra, who experiences a supernatural encounter with a group of chaneques, Aztecan anthropomorphic spirits, while playing in a river. These primordial forces beckon Leopoldo beyond conventional sentience and into an otherworldly lore. What seems like just a few minutes in the grotto is in actuality a decade away from his family.
In the darkened performance hall that amplified the show’s ominous musical score, digital screens projected film and black-and-white imagery of La Garra and Leopoldo’s enigmatic experience. Masked chaneques with blackened eyes and unmoving wooden mouths both echoed and challenged a colonial distrust of animism, underscoring the friction between spirituality and land—between the actual and the metaphysical. Raffia-adorned dancers vibrated before the digital screens, while a live cellist accompanied the part-Nahuatl, part-Spanish production.
Upon Leopoldo’s miraculous return, his family is unable to contend with the profundity of his mystical survival, and he is forced from home once again. Thus, a new odyssey of temporal solitude commences with Leopoldo’s journey to the United States as an undocumented minor. The avant-garde show has brought forth a distinct, syncretic vernacular that confronts the thorny relationship between migration, imperialism, and indigeneity. In this moment of political disquietude, The Grotto emerges with a refreshing honesty that might help us better contend with the catastrophe of colonialism.
I’M THE KIND OF ARTIST that does not really label myself; I simply say I’m an artist. So when I go to the studio, I’m not limited to just painting or sculpting, for example. This time I chose opera as my medium. When I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia, I played the clarinet, which wasn’t the coolest thing to do. So I’m not foreign to reading music. And sometimes in the studio, I listen to opera when I work. In this sense, my exploration of the form felt like a natural transition.
When I first heard the story of The Grotto, which is based on a true experience that my wife had while on a trip as a young girl, I was inspired and immediately knew I wanted to do something. The opera has to take the audience through, beginning to end. Sometimes it can end on a happy note, but it is always fundamentally a tragedy. So I thought about how the story from my wife’s childhood needed to be developed to reflect this. I knew that I was crossing boundaries, especially as a visual artist, but I had a strong conviction that this story needed to be told as an operatic tragedy.
The story begins when my wife visited her family in a village about eight and a half hours west of Mexico City. Upon arrival, my wife and her cousins went down to the river to swim. As it got dark everybody left to go home, but her cousin Leopoldo kept playing. Suddenly, two silent, nude figures emerged from the water. Leopoldo explained they had the bodies of children but the heads of old people. They beckoned for him and then walked to a grotto where they all played hide-and-seek behind stalagmites for what seems to be just fifteen minutes before Leopoldo left. When Leopoldo arrived back home his mother cried out hysterically, like she’d seen a demon. He asked her what’s wrong and she responded, “Poldo, you’ve been missing for so long we thought you were dead.” Once a village elder realized that Leopoldo had been playing with chaneques, he was exiled and sent to the United States for fear that he was now cursed. But explaining this story is like trying to describe a new flavor to someone who hasn’t yet tried it. It’s difficult.
When I was writing and producing the show, I wasn’t thinking about visual artwork at all until the chief curator of Museo Jumex, Kit Hammonds, said, “So what about the art?” I’m like, “What art? The opera is the art.” He’s like, “Well, you have all this space.” So ultimately, I realized that the inclusion of visual art would only enhance the story. That realization led to a giant video-based triptych echoing the three screens in the opera, which is used as the background and the set design. They tell the story of the Mass that the village has when they believe that Leopoldo is dead because he’s been missing for so long. It’s this beautiful scene of the village people walking by candlelight at night in the jungle, and they sing an a cappella hymn that was originally written to be accompanied by a musical score.
Opera is traditionally seen as a European art form, but my work challenges this by embracing rich non-European influences. I wrote the libretto in Spanish and Nahuatl, one of Mexico’s sixty-eight Indigenous languages, aiming to resonate with Mexican, Indigenous, and African diasporic communities. Designing the dancers’ costumes, I delved into Mexico’s history with ixtle fibers. Produced on Mexican soil by enslaved people, the fibers connect to Mexico’s role in the slave trade and to my Afro-Latino heritage. Further inspiration came from Polynesian palm weavings, which evoke my birthplace in Honolulu. This exploration revealed shared aesthetics, spirituality, and identity among these cultures. The journey led me from Afrofuturism to Mesofuturism, providing me with the tools to tell a universally resonant story rooted in the dynamic culture of the region.
