Calihtic: Inside the Womb of the House (Performance)

2022–2023

Performance + textile installation

This work operates across layers that do not align: territory, archive, and body. Tlatelolco is not a neutral site. Pre-Hispanic ruins, colonial architecture, and modern violence coexist in the same space. I move through these layers with the body, not to represent them, but to register how they remain active.

The textile I wear carries fragments of these systems—botanical images, food, archival material. It does not illustrate history. It holds its contradictions.

Certain actions repeat, but they do not resolve. Eating is interrupted. Vision is obstructed. The body cannot fully access what is in front of it. When the veil is removed, the gesture becomes possible again, but not neutral. Something has already been displaced.

What circulates in the work is not only material, but relation. Herbs are shared. Actions extend to others. The piece shifts from object to exchange. Calihtic does not attempt to restore what was erased. It exposes the conditions that produced that erasure. The work remains there, in the tension between what structures knowledge and what continues to exceed it.

Credits / Presentations

Museo Universitario de Tlatelolco, Mexico City, 2022–2023
Renombrar el mundo: expediciones botánicas en la Nueva España
Curated by Sofía Carrillo

Xaltillolli. rotation: 2023 . 2025. Curated by Lucia Bustamante

Photos By Antonio Juárez Caudillo