A one-night performance fuses painting, music and movement to explore ancestral memory and ecological futures.
Paola Estrella: The Cenote Ring
Performance
Friday, 9 May 2025, 7:30 PM.
Stone Nest, 136 Shaftesbury Ave
London, W1D 5EZ
RSVP – Limited Capacity
Exhibition
20th June, 2025 – 12th December, 2025
5 Howick Pl
London SW1P 1WG
Beneath the vaulted ceiling of Stone Nest, where the ghosts of Welsh congregants and late-night revellers still seem to linger, something extraordinary unfolds. Cenote Ring, the latest work by Mexican artist Paola Estrella, is part performance, part installation, part act of invocation. Drawing on the deep mythology of her homeland, Estrella conjures a world where memory, geology, and speculative futures come together through painting, sound and movement.
Image courtesy of the artist
The project takes its name and inspiration from the cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula — natural sinkholes formed by the impact of a long-ago asteroid and revered by the Maya as sacred portals. Here, these underwater wells become a metaphor for time folding in on itself, a space where destruction and renewal coexist.
At the heart of Cenote Ring is a one-night performance staged within Estrella’s monumental paintings. These works don’t simply hang on the walls — they shape the world around them. Two massive diptychs, a triptych, and a sweeping five-panel canvas encircle the audience in lush colours and layered textures, evoking the tangled vegetation and reflective waters of the cenotes. Dripping brushwork echoes the stalactites and roots that pierce the surface, while rhythmic markings suggest energy pulsing just beneath.
Photography by Eleonor Delecluse
Image courtesy of the artist
The evening unfolds in three parts. It begins with an ethereal soundscape by Colombian musician María Mónica Gutiérrez, who performs under the name Montañera. Her voice and electronics ripple through the space like water. As the sound deepens, choreographer Pierre Babbage and digital artist Costas Kazantzis enter — a duet of body and light, exploring themes of identity, nature and transformation. Their movements are part ritual, part response to the shifting visual landscape around them.
The costumes, designed by Gabrielle Venguer, seem lifted from Estrella’s canvases — flowing, textured and elemental. Meanwhile, Bon Music Vision fills the air with ambient sounds that include actual recordings from deep space, subtly reinforcing the idea that this story begins not just underground, but far beyond Earth.
Image courtesy of the artist
Presented by HS Projects, Cenote Ring is more than a performance — it’s an act of remembrance and reimagining. The layers of sound, movement and visual art speak to cycles older than any of us, and possibilities yet to come. That it all takes place in a building with its own history of worship and revelry only deepens the sense of something ancient waking up beneath the city.
Supported by Arts Council England and the Artists Make Space programme at Orleans House Gallery, the project brings together a diverse group of collaborators across disciplines. But it’s Estrella’s vision — intimate, expansive and unshakably rooted — that anchors the experience. In her hands, the cenote becomes more than a place. It’s a passage.
Paola Estrella: The Cenote Ring the exhibition opens on the 20th of June, 2025 until the 12th of December, 2025 at 5 Howick Place
©2025 Paola Estrella
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