Coloquios
In 1525, after the fall of the Aztec empire, Emperor Carlos V and the Pope sent 12 Franciscan priests to ensure that the so-called “Christian Doctrine” was imparted to the defeated. The 12 friars held a colloquium with the main Tenochca priests and nobles, who were told that their gods were dead, and the new world order was explained to them. The Tenochcas naturally responded with their own worldview. Bernardino de Sahagún found the transcription of this colloquium in Nahuatl in the Latin language around 1564. He found it so extraordinary that he dedicated himself to editing it, being one of the two publications he wanted to do while alive. But the manuscript disappeared and was lost in time, only to be rediscovered in 1926 in the Vatican’s secret archive, with the entire Mexica cosmos ripped away. The uprooting policies of the Inquisition did not allow the existance of any vision of the world different from their own.
During the last year I have concentrated on studying this extraordinary document* and its multiple meanings in our daily lives. Although uprooted, the cosmos of ancient Mexico exists in our modernity as a product of the bloody collision of worlds and ideas that today make up the living, subtle and extremely extensive fabric of our present.
This universe made up of countless foods, plants, animals and knowledge continues to expand, both in its violence and its virtue, in a multidirection- al process that today we shape with our fingertips and with the light -or shadow- of our own thought.
A fundamental part of this project has been for me the most basic utensils: those that humanity has used long before and long after the colonial processes. Extremely simple and beautiful objects that in their direct and useful way transport us to the essence of humanity, an ancient place free of ideologies, such as brooms and palm mats.
The dialogue of a large number of elements such as gunpowder, coal, papyrus, coffee, wood, reflect on what we consider to be ours, authentic, native, original or indigenous in a multiplicity of interpretations.