Mermaids In the basement

The original mermaids were half bird, half woman. The first written
source where they appear is in Homer's Odyssey, in Book XII, where
Ulysses, on his return home after the Trojan War, manages to avoid
the attraction of their songs by forcing himself to be tied to the mast of
his ship and the ears of his crew to be plugged with wax. The scene
has been portrayed on numerous occasions in the History of Greek
and Roman Art, through paintings, ceramics, and friezes, as well as
mosaics.
From the multiple versions of the origin of mermaids, Chueca focuses
on Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and kidnapped by
Hades, god from the underworld. To save her, her friends ask Zeus for
wings to chase after the captor god, and this legendary figure changed
feathers for the fishtail.
The mermaid protagonists of Chueca's work are women from
disparate places who sing stories about dispossession and lost land.
The first of this series was recorded in Honduras, a country most
vulnerable to the climate emergency (the cause of emigration, after
violence and hunger). It was made for the exhibition The Sound of
Sinking Voices, in Tegucigalpa. The exhibition centered on the
dramatic situation of Cedeño, a village in the south where the ocean
advances up to 1.22 meters inland every year, devouring homes, and
businesses. Blanca Azucena Guevara Bonilla leads a powerful call of
lament and longing. She is joined by the songs of a Filipino woman, a
Saharawi, a Californian actress, a woman from Nashville, and others
from Mexico, Sudan, Ghana, and Peru, from where her family was
forced to abandon due to overflowing rivers in the Sierra de Jauja.

The mosaic technique takes center stage in the exhibition, whose
origins can be found in ancient Greece, with numerous examples
found in archaeological sites of the Hellenistic time. In preparation,
papyrus templates were made into grids and drawings as with the
canvases that cover the walls here. In Chueca’s room, she has
painted them like tiles. Many of these Greek mosaics come from
Delos, where we can also find marine motifs, mythological beings, and
wave patterns, a very common motif at that time.