Ahí viene el Coco / Here Comes the Boogeyman: Libertad Alcántara
The exhibition asserts that the current retreat from inclusivity to apartheid is a psychological defense mechanism against the visible failure of prevailing economic models, which has led to the shattering of the meritocratic illusion.
DON’T LOOK Projects is pleased to present Ahí viene el Coco—an exhibition that invokes the metaphorical boogeyman, to critically examine the systemic violence of contemporary global polarization and the resulting monocultural, beige aesthetic of manufactured consensus. The exhibition asserts that the current retreat from inclusivity to apartheid is a psychological defense mechanism against the visible failure of prevailing economic models, which has led to the shattering of the meritocratic illusion.
The crisis is visible: extreme poverty turns into death and capital consolidates into trillion-dollar hands, creating a psychic chasm so profound that society actively seeks an “external” enemy. As the exhibition’s premise posits, this scapegoat—a projected enemy assigned a face, an accent, and a color—serves as a stabilizing, yet toxic, fake glue. This mechanism aims to distract us from the fundamental unsustainability of material conditions and channel existential anxiety into cultural and political tribalism.
The solo exhibition features work by Libertad Alcántara (b. 1990, Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz), whose multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the essential notion of the personal as a political gesture. Libertad Alcántara interrogates this phenomenon, confronting the numbing impulses and inertia that keep reality at bay, instead expanding the field of view to embrace contradictions as a prerequisite for genuine structural change.
Alcántara’s work—spanning painting, installation, and mapping—operates at the intersection of the pictorial, the communal, and the political, weaving together memory and territory to explore collective experience.
Alcántara engages the tradition of painting while embracing its ruptures, using the pictorial space to reflect on identity and our relationship with the physical environments we inhabit. This thoughtful approach extends to her co-creative initiatives, such as Mapeos de lxs Sur and Mapeos de lo Común, where mapping becomes a critical tool for understanding shared spaces and unsustainable material realities.
Through these methods, her work quietly observes the fractures of our time, serving as an invitation to look closer, to acknowledge what is fading, and to consider what can be built from a place of communal awareness.
Ultimately, Ahí viene el Coco is a call to organization and presence. It rejects being trapped by the fake glue and, instead, urges the viewer to embrace our contradictions, let what must crumble fall, and build from the solid ground of organization, proposing that recognizing our universal capacity to change reality is the first vital step.
