Calihtic, Inside The Womb Of The House.

Calihtic is a funerary garment that puts in context the origin of the scientific method’s insertion during colonization in America and its fatal consequences. In this way, images of the botanical expeditions, the Badian codex and the first moments of exploitation of the so-called natural resources dialogue with the current processes of extractivism.

The work focuses on the medial and procedural aspects with which a visual framework of fabrics and extended transparencies is elaborated. First, the display of a time takes the form of a grand funeral Huipil (traditional indigenous dress) made of sewn and embroidered paper.  I have dismantled an encyclopedia of the first botanical expeditions to build a version of colonial history: cultural looting and extractivism started in America. Through performance, the resistance of the original patterns we find in nature (plants, herbs and animals) is raised, which in this work acquires presence from the fabric that covers the body, ornamentation, care and community. This textile installation addresses the silent process of sewing and the memory of a daily doing that prints and redesigns in its figurations, the criticism towards rational (Cartesian) thought that in technical-scientific development (taxonomy, engraving, text), it exploited the earth’s resources and structured a way of connecting us with the natural world. Calihtic, Inside the Womb of the House also suggests the resistance of a thousand-year-old ontological force that can be associated with the cosmo-technics proposed by the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui and the revitalization of the collective memories of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, since the performance unfolds a world of indigenous knowledge from the Badiano codex, a 16th-century herbarium written in Nahuatl by Martín de la Cruz and translated into Latin by Juan Badiano; while dressed in a large cape of flowers and primordial reminiscences of the plant world, the artist plants seeds and shares herbal sachets with the public.  The textile world built in this work acquires the memory of the jungle and the exuberant figure of nature.