Ancestral Transmission

Plataforma presents Ancestral Transmission, a collective exhibition curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio.

As part of the curated project entitled A Situated Consciousness of Inhabiting the Earth for Plataforma, by the Spanish curator Agusn Pérez Rubio, the third of the scheduled exhibitions is presented with the invitation of more than twenty artists and artisan workshops involved. The first level of Plataforma will exhibit this collective exhibition.

Ancestral Transmission arises as an investigation to understand the harsh and cultural survival of different techniques that, being widely produced before the conquest, remained in the arts of various native peoples and became, in their mixture, forms assimilated by the local culture as a mode of colonial resistance. From there, the contemporary drift of these techniques, iconography and conceptions of these harsh productions can be seen, at the same time as it can be seen in other Mexican artists not belonging to these cultures, who, being contemporaries – through respect, research and escaping from extracvism – have known how to honor this legacy as historical and cultural wealth. Therefore, the rough trail is followed in the cosmological, the economic, the natural, the musical, the language, the textile, the ancestral stories and legends. The project anchors its roots in the productions of artists from the sixties who were not part of a Mexican modernity because they were not understood as artists but as artisans, an idea cemented in the prejudiced separation from modernity that we have inherited to this day.

From Jalisco to Nayarit, Oaxaca or Michoacán, artists and participants, both Meszos and from various Wixaritari, Purépecha, Coca, Huasteca or Triqui cultures, contemporize legacies: the burnished clay of Tonalá, the weavings of the backstrap loom that developed a large part of the ancestral Mexican cultures, or the Wixárika threads or beads of bones and shells that became colonial. In various works and cultural productions we will find contrasting processes: in the culture of clothing, from spindles and spindle whorls to Spanish garments of the 16th century; from the representation of Tonantzin to the iconography of the Virgin, together with the appearance of other iconographies of deities such as Tlazoltéotl, Tláloc, Cihuacóatl; from the pride of colonial resistance of the war cry Tastoan to the linguistic activism of the Mixe language; from water instruments and ocarina sounds that unite various cultures of Abya Yala, to contemporary vessels with embedded tepalcates to speak of the continuity of knowledge; from the natural representation of flowers and plants together with the xoloitzcuintle or legendary nahual; or the representation of contemporary El Dorado under the jaws of commercial capitalism, among others.

Ancestral Transmission is to look contemporaneously at the richness of the legacy that the original Mesoamerican cultures deposit from pre-Hispanic times to the present day, and thus eradicate both the notion of linear time learned by Eurocentric history and the Western relationship between high and low culture, between the notions of craftsmanship and art, between identity essentialism and the whitening of the mixture, not to make a tabula rasa, but to show with vindication, pride, updating and from an active activism, what coloniality and modernity subjugated in the form of oblivion, undervaluation or exosmo.

Curator Agustín Pérez Rubio

Abraham Arroyo, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil - Impronta Casa Editora, José Benítez Sánchez, Isa Carrillo, Manolo Castro Montoya, Marcos Miguel Covarrubias, Florencia Guillén, Pedro Ibarra Cázares “Solín”, Xitaima (Lucía Lemus de la Cruz), Esteban Leñero, Iván López de los Santos, Tomasita Montoya González, Chudy (Ma. Asunción Moreno Cisneros), María Anita Pérez Guzmán, Víctor Hugo Pérez, Daniela Ramírez, RojoNegro, Maximiliano Ruelas, Emanuel Tovar, Bruno Viruete, entre otrxs...

— Plataforma