Ling Sepulveda. Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo, 2015; performance at Biquini Wax, Mexico City, May 16, 2015. Photo: Ramiro Chavez.

Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo [A Live Wash Cycle] (2015) was a performance by Ling Sepúlveda on Saturday, May 16, 2015, at Biquini Wax in Mexico City. This laconic yet descriptive title created an anticipation for what was washed, why, and for whom. The sounds of the process were captured, distorted, and amplified by the artist, confirming the machine in action as a giant beast chewing and spitting, absorbed in its task, indifferent to the bewilderment of the audience. A hundred people, students and connoisseurs, were going up and down the stairs of the old house with clamors of surprise or disgust as inexplicably black water was expelled from the machine during spinning, splashing their clothes and sneakers and entering the other rooms of the house, where it damaged the belongings of both the artist and the Biquini Wax team.

The day of the performance, the artist washed a few pounds of earth as well as a one-peso coin. Sepúlveda is from Sinaloa, and he talks about the difficulty of making a living from a land that is “neglected,” descuidada—and nothing can render the audible violence of the term, the prefix “des” removing all hope from the next slamming syllables, like a care given and then removed. Sepúlveda also invokes the paradoxical infrastructure that has become narco-traffic, through its distorted but effective patriarchal solidarity. He then suggests the performance as an attempt to wash the “weight” (peso) constitutive of Mexican identity, a stereotype made of combined assumptions of cheapness and hard labor.

Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo inscribes itself into the long and sensitive tradition of “maintenance art,” art that borrows traditional forms of maintenance as symbolic means to “cure the real”—I think of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! To this extent, Un Ciclo de Lavado en Vivo could be seen as a particularly cathartic act, coming just a few weeks before important elections in Mexico that notably saw the population demand a “cleaning” of the political class after the recent dramas and scandals experienced by the country, such as the disappearance of the forty-three Ayotzinapa students. The victory of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Mexico’s historical revolution party that ruled the country for most of the last century and this one) this very last Sunday, June 7, gives Sepúlveda a reason to create many more washing cycles.

Dorothée Dupuis is an independent curator, writer, and publisher based in Mexico City. She is the founder and director of Terremoto.mx, a quarterly online magazine and blog about contemporary art in the Americas.