Patricia Domínguez

The Hanging Testicles and the She-Spirit of Water, 2020

Installation view: How to Tread Lightly, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, 2020, Photo: Roberto Ruiz | TBA21

Photo: Roberto Ruiz | TBA21 (detail)

Patricia Domínguez How to Tread Lightly Commissions & Productions Commissions Collection

Patricia Domínguez

The Hanging Testicles and the She-Spirit of Water, 2020

3D design on canvas

230 x 124 cm

Commissioned and produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for How to Tread Lightly
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Combining research on ethnobotany, ancient healing practices, and the corporatization of well-being, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez focuses on how capitalism perpetuates colonial practices of extraction and exploitation. Domínguez engages with activists fighting for democracy, water rights, and Indigenous justice, and also involves an educational practice carried out for over ten years with Studio Vegetalista, a platform she founded that revolves around experimental knowledge that combines art, ethnobotany, and Andean cosmologies.

An extension of La balada de las sirenas secas, The Hanging Testicles and the She-Spirit of Water delves deeper into the politics and poetics of water. Named with deliberate provocation, the work unearths the entwined histories of ecological exploitation, gendered power structures, and ancestral symbolism. The title itself references the Aztec root of the word “avocado”—āhuacatl, meaning “testicle”—subtly invoking a critique of patriarchal control over natural resources.

Set against the backdrop of Chile’s enduring water crisis—an outcome of the 1981 Pinochet-era Water Code that privatized water rights—the installation confronts the dispossession of local and Indigenous communities by agro-industrial powers. Collaborating with the grassroots organization MODATIMA (Movement for the Defense of Water, Land, and Environmental Protection), Domínguez channels activist testimony and spiritual iconography into a charged visual language.

Here, sculpture becomes protest, and protest becomes ritual. The presence of a “She-Spirit” of water gestures toward a decolonial spirituality—what Domínguez terms a “multi-species science fiction”: one that transcends conquest, centers Indigenous cosmologies, and imagines alternative futures beyond scarcity. The piece offers a visual and conceptual bridge between bodily agency, land sovereignty, and ecological grief—asserting that the fight for water is also a fight for dignity, memory, and the sacred.