Jorge Galván Flores Alkanzíyya

Alkanzíyya is a full-scale tableau featuring sculpture, painting, and textiles that reimagines our material realities to present ideas about how all people might more easily traverse the planet. The gallery space becomes a site for enactments of emotional strategies for intervention and infiltration in the borderlands. The work thinks about the connections between citizenship and sexuality, specifically how personal desire might be linked to self-preservation and survival. The etymology of the word Alkanzíyya—which in contemporary Spanish is spelled “alcancía” (piggy bank)—reveals that the word comes from Arabic into Spanish and refers to a longing for treasure. Ominously, the same word can also be used to mean a ceramic pot full of tar that is lit on fire and then flung at enemies as a kind of ballistic weapon.