Guerreros en cautiverio III [Captive Warriors III]

Betsabeé Romero’s oeuvre constitutes a critical discourse on the themes of migration, memory and hybridity. The tire, a recurring fixture in her work, plays a dual symbolic role that pits modernity and its frantic pace against the core elements of material culture and Indigenous thought, such as the circle and cyclical time. As the tire rolls, it becomes a stamp that transforms the street into a receptacle of accumulated memory. Inspired by pre-Columbian spindle whorls, Romero imagines the warrior circumscribed and engraved in the tire as a captive of modernity. She therefore sees in her work the potential to activate the loom of history to weave memory, particularly that of the Indigenous peoples, in new ways.