No gods only flowers

Conjuring the spirit of a weed bursting through cracks in the pavement, Poncili Creación’s sculptural installation No gods only flowers takes up residence in MoMA PS1’s double-height Duplex gallery. Comprising an anthropomorphic flower that towers over a gardener collapsed amongst a shrunken cityscape, the installation is the second life of these massive forms. They once danced as puppets, suspended by boom cranes, over the museum’s Courtyard as part of a performance of the same name in July 2022.

Since 2012, the collective—brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, and their collaborators—have made spontaneous processions and performances around the world, informed by their prior work in dance and experimental theater, and articulated through colorful and manipulable sculptural forms handmade from salvaged polyurethane foam, fabric, and cardboard. In both their performances and installations, they upend standard operating procedures by re-energizing the detritus of industrialized urban life.

By infiltrating public and semi-public spaces and enacting dramatic scalar shifts, Poncili Creación question what forms of growth and development society privileges—and where. A history of unsanctioned occupation of spaces informs their work. Like the small sculptural “dwellers” they have also placed around the museum (and sites beyond it), this installation nods to, in their words, “the countless squatters of time immemorial that have made creative use out of the surplus of the capitalist rubble.”