Artshack Artist-in-Residence Program Presents:
Marcela Torres: Quipaxaloliztli Itenan Huitzilopochtli - Visitando La Madre De Huitzilopochtli

Opening Reception: Sat 1/25, 6:00 to 8:00 pm - Keepsake Gallery at Artshack
1127 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Exhibition on view from 1/25 to 3/09

Quipaxaloliztli Itenan Huitzilopochtli - Visitando La Madre De Huitzilopochtli is a body of work that considers how we retell myths and understand the passage of time through Aztec cosmology and clay bodies. 

In a passage of the book Stories in Red and Black (on the topic of reading Aztec and Mixtec codices), author Elizabeth Hill Boone refers to a Mexican codice by the Dominican friar Diego Durán, Codex Duran (The History of the Indies of New Spain). Post conquest Durán is documententing the culture he is actively erasing. In this narrative, Durán writes from an oral retelling where the moving from one city to another was a form of time travel, as time moved differently in each location. 

The Aztec ruler Montezuma ilhuicamina wanted to return to the origin city of Aztlan to give Huitzilopochtli’s mother an offering. Montezuma and 60 sorcerers with nahualli/nahuales abilities journeyed to Coatepec (Snake Hill) and held a ritual to transform into their animal form. In this form they can travel back in time to Aztlan. Here they find that time has slowed down and people from the past are still living, albeit older. They exchange gifts, receiving a maguey shirt from Huitzilopochtli's mother. Upon return, 20 of the 60 sorcerers were lost, unable to return to the present time in their human form. In its simplest, this is a narrative of giving offerings to ancestors, signaling to remember our home spaces and nurture those who continue to live through memories. It points to how communion with animal kin is a technology that allows us to traverse cosmic planes - Earth nature is the technological advancement we are committed to. A final reflection is around the strangeness of learning about one's culture through researchers, essentially colonizers, who in direct or indirect ways originally suppressed this information from original knowledge keepers and retell it through a colonial-state sanctioned medium. 

This collection of ceramic sculptures are depictions of this anecdote, told through the geological body of clay - a similarly transmuted entity. The sculptures range from very direct logograms of locations, such as Coatepec, while others are ephemeral actions of transformation.

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