Below the Sun, a Taxonomy of Light
Drawing/animation, photography, video and site specific interventions.
2019 - 2023
The disappearance of the peyote cactus -Lophophora Williamsii- from one of the greenhouses of the Natural History Museum in Paris was the starting point of a project invested in early modern interpretations of nature and its nomenclature, botanical and human enclosures, and the power of (sun) light.
Light appears weaved in the resulting video work as a connection between reason, life, and their degradation through excess.
The video piece focuses on the idea of the tropical greenhouse as a linguistic and spatial apparatus of control. This main conceptualization is placed in connection with various texts that dramaturg and poet Antonin Artaud wrote after his travel to the land of the Tarahumaras (Rarámuri), the Sierra Madre in Northern Mexico (where he was introduced to the peyote ritual in 1936), and his eventual clinic isolation at different psychiatric asylums in France.
Artaud, as a voice off in the video work, questions the reality of images while formed in the mind, the delusion that reason plays in our connection with existence, and the suffering that the divide between mind and body entails for the poet.
Hikuri / Jíkuri, Is the name of peyote in Wixárika and Rarámuri language (considered both the son of the sun and a trickster, a sacred giver of light and a player).
2019 - 2023
The disappearance of the peyote cactus -Lophophora Williamsii- from one of the greenhouses of the Natural History Museum in Paris was the starting point of a project invested in early modern interpretations of nature and its nomenclature, botanical and human enclosures, and the power of (sun) light.
Light appears weaved in the resulting video work as a connection between reason, life, and their degradation through excess.
The video piece focuses on the idea of the tropical greenhouse as a linguistic and spatial apparatus of control. This main conceptualization is placed in connection with various texts that dramaturg and poet Antonin Artaud wrote after his travel to the land of the Tarahumaras (Rarámuri), the Sierra Madre in Northern Mexico (where he was introduced to the peyote ritual in 1936), and his eventual clinic isolation at different psychiatric asylums in France.
Artaud, as a voice off in the video work, questions the reality of images while formed in the mind, the delusion that reason plays in our connection with existence, and the suffering that the divide between mind and body entails for the poet.
Hikuri / Jíkuri, Is the name of peyote in Wixárika and Rarámuri language (considered both the son of the sun and a trickster, a sacred giver of light and a player).
