Sesiones con El Nigromante

Sesiones con El Nigromante (Sessions with the Necromancer in English) is an interactive installation created with the collaboration of director Jesusa Rodríguez and actor Damián Alcázar, in honor of Ignacio Ramírez, a 19th century Mexican liberal intellectual and statesman, for the bicentennial of his birth. Ramírez, who was known for publishing various newspapers championing progressive causes, using the pen name “El Nigromante”(The Necromancer). The exhibition was shown in the house where Ramírez was born in San Miguel de Allende, at 38 Umarán Street. The illuminated space darkens as the viewer approaches a reproduction of the death mask of El Nigromante. The death mask is animated by the presence of the public, a facial recognition system “steals” the visitor's face, which is then projected onto the mask. Then a voice is heard: “The dead do not speak.... Women have to be part of the electoral system.... Are you corrupt? Each “Session with the Necromancer” is different, with hundreds of possible phrases and questions.

Ramírez spoke not only of the non-existence of God but also of living beings sustaining themselves by their own means, and he did so 20 years before Darwin and 45 years before Nietzsche.