10 November to 26 February 2023
Ayuujkjä’äy ëy Konk. A fable based on a Mixe myth
An immersive diorama addressing the legend of King Kondoy, the foundational myth of the ‘never conquered’ peoples.
The Mixe people speak one of the last living languages of the Mixe-Zoquean family. Linguistically, they are the closest relatives and natural heirs of the so-called Olmecs, the Mesoamerican mother culture. In the words they speak, the maize they grow, the stories they tell and the rites they perform, is to be found, encrypted, a world to which – initiated or not – no one can ever return. This, however, does not mean that this world has been destroyed, erased or annihilated. While we can never return, the hero always returns: this is what makes him a hero. Water always returns to its channel; by the principle of symmetry, the cosmic order cannot be interrupted forever: there is no greater certainty than the end of our time and the advent of the times that once were.
Through documentary, bibliographic and iconographic research, fieldwork and interviews, the team approaches the myth of Kondoy on various fronts and under numerous categories. At the same time, the analysis and reflection on all this collected material brings the team closer to the basic structure of the myth and its social, territorial, political, spatial and landscape implications.
The project seeks to address a new perspective on the history and current status of global art from a critical review of one of the richest, most problematic, recurrent and unique manifestations. The project is built around the notion of indigenisms and neoindianisms towards a theoretical reformulation of transindigenisms as catalysts of modern and contemporary art in the Americas. A contemporary proposal with a future horizon that brings with it a new understanding of the influx of intersections and displacements of the development of an original and unique aesthetic way of producing the cultural meanings of the region.
A project by Mariana Botey in collaboration with Dr. Lakra, Taka Fernández and Brian Cross, curated by Pablo Arredondo Vera.
A Hacer Noche – Promised Land production, in collaboration with the MACBA and with the participation of the University of California, San Diego, and the Casa de la Cultura Oaxaqueña.
Can we humans really return or, rather, is return always a new journey to a different time and place? It seems that the true return is vetoed to humans; only heroes return and thus restore the world. Could it be that we humans can only hope to return, or can we perhaps ask for it, invoke it, induce it? Where do heroes return from? Or could it be that they simply return to themselves, that their return is reflexive? That rather than returning from another time and place, they return to their other denomination, their other form, to themselves?
The restitution of cyclical time, of infinite alternation, the infinite primeval movement is an element common to all cultural regeneration movements on the American continent. In this context, colonisation and the European presence not only imply the subversion of the cosmic order, but also its interruption. We live not in the upside-down world but in the non-world, where the rhythmic attainment of life and death, up and down, seed and flower, day and night, man and woman cannot go on flowing. The cycles have stopped and humans no longer preserve and complete the world, but are outside of it, under Western and modern teleological transcendence, waiting. In this stagnation, the hero becomes mountain; his sister, mist; and his palace a ruin. The immanence of the cosmic order becomes landscape; pure and total potential, waiting for the return.
