Mazenett Quiroga

Mazenett Quiroga

Gente Serpiente – Snake People, 2022

Two bicycle wheels, acrylic paint, and bronze casting

60 x 60 x 35 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Gente Serpiente – Snake People, Mazenett Quiroga continue their exploration of the intertwined relationships between ecology, mythology, and material culture. This sculptural piece, composed of twisted bicycle wheels painted to resemble the skins of venomous tropical snakes, invokes both the mundane and the mythical. Cast bronze elements, resembling twigs or skeletal fragments, punctuate the composition, suggesting a hybrid form that is at once organic, industrial, and symbolic.

The duo’s practice is grounded in a decolonial and ecological perspective that bridges Western scientific inquiry with cosmological and indigenous knowledge systems. Their work consistently oscillates between past and present, nature and culture, ritual and rationality—resisting the binaries imposed by colonial thought. In this piece, the snake, a recurring figure in Amazonian and global cosmologies, becomes a symbol of transformation, continuity, and eternal return.

By appropriating the bicycle wheel—a quotidian object tied to urban mobility and petroleum-derived industry—and reshaping it into a serpent’s undulating form, the artists prompt reflection on the geological and cultural timescales embedded in everyday materials. What was once a marine organism, then oil, now becomes a wheel—and here, a snake again. This cycle of transformations connects mineral, animal, and human realms through a single object.

The title Gente Serpiente – Snake People underscores the artists’ insistence that environmental catastrophe is not an endpoint, but a transitional phase in which other epistemologies, particularly indigenous ones, must be centered. Their work critiques extractivist paradigms—especially in the context of mining in Latin America—and instead honors Amazonian thinking as a guide toward sustainable, respectful, and reciprocal ways of coexisting with the more-than-human world.

Mazenett Quiroga ask: how can we remember the serpent people in the city? How can we learn from ancestral knowledge systems to face today’s planetary crises? This sculpture offers one such gesture of remembrance and re-enchantment, a call to recognize the sacred in the synthetic and to honor the cyclical pulse of life beneath the machinery of modernity.