Maria Thereza Alves Examines Colonial Exploitation in "An Accounting" at Martins & Montero Brussels

"An Accounting" marks the first solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves at the Brussels location of Martins & Montero, a gallery that also maintains a branch in São Paulo. The show remains on view through the end of October. Alves structures the exhibition around an asymmetry between those who collect tribute and those who pay it, investigating how the historical exploitation of certain Mexican localities remains inscribed in the landscape, in objects, and in regional memory. Her research draws on two principal archives. The first is the collection of the Museo Comunitario Valle de Xico, assembled from more than five thousand items found and preserved by local inhabitants. The second is the holdings of the Villa Aragona Pignatelli Cortés in Naples. Confronting these two bodies of material—one popular and community-based, formed by those who inherited the burden of exploitation, the other aristocratic and institutional, built from the wealth that same exploitation generated—constitutes the central gesture of the exhibition. Alves frames the project as another form of accountability, one that shifts the register of property toward the memory of those who were historically counted but never heard.