Entrevista Miguel Ángel Ceballos, difusión del Conaculta
Monday, 02 June 2014 16:01
Written by Miguel Ángel Ceballos
1. I remember that in the exhibition that you presented last year, “Trees and Bodies”, you described how various pieces, both artistic, musical and literary, had inspired you. What inspired you this time to create the works in “Duality and Transformation”?
What originally gave rise to the images composing the collection Duality and Transformation was my deep reflection on the process through which human beings, throughout their lives, suffer and confront duality, antagonistic opposites, paradoxes and their transformation in the process of individuation and maturing. One source of inspiration was the richness of pre-Hispanic mythology in the creation myth of Ometeotl, the god of duality, and the process of his development from a state of subconscious totality, in which all opposites are featureless, through a process of gradual differentiation and separation, just like male and female, to reach its conscious complementarity as a whole and its transformation. Moreover, it was inspired not only by the symbolic representation of the deities to whom the Anahuacalli Museum is dedicated, as representations of the four elements, which when placed in opposition compose the entire universe. They are Ehecatl, the god of wind, Chicomecoatl, the god of earth, Tlaloc, the god of rain and Huehueteotl, the god of fire, but there are also the bivalent aspects of these deities, that is, their light and dark aspects, and their parallelisms with the process of duality, differentiation, separation, discrimination to achieve a final transformation. Another source of inspiration was my encounter with the indigenous textile art of Mixtec women from the Oaxacan Sierra, who use a hand loom to weave canvases on which various archetypal images are embroidered. The art of weaving and interweaving symbolically represents the image of the weaver as an ideal creator of the universe. The act of weaving and interweaving involves a duality both in the structure of the cloth and in the process of weaving itself:
the weft and warp, and that which emerges creatively through the image, starting from the interweaving of both.
This is how, through indigenous textile art, not only did I visually interweave the pre-Hispanic with the contemporary world, but also, through the image of the backbone interwoven from black and white hands, I attempt to incarnate this process. The hands symbolically represent, as Aristotle said, “the tool of the tools” – insofar as they enable us to struggle and journey through the horizontal territory, while the backbone, the structural support of the essence itself, represents the vertical territory.
2.- What do you currently consider to be your duality, and what transformations have you experienced in recent years as an artist ?
My duality as an artist is always between the technical and the ritual. Only from the conflict between both does the third possibility emerge, the unique creation of each work. For me, creative work, which always involves a dialogue between the opposites of the ego and the self, attempts to respect the balance between both worlds.
What originally gave rise to the images composing the collection Duality and Transformation was my deep reflection on the process through which human beings, throughout their lives, suffer and confront duality, antagonistic opposites, paradoxes and their transformation in the process of individuation and maturing. One source of inspiration was the richness of pre-Hispanic mythology in the creation myth of Ometeotl, the god of duality, and the process of his development from a state of subconscious totality, in which all opposites are featureless, through a process of gradual differentiation and separation, just like male and female, to reach its conscious complementarity as a whole and its transformation. Moreover, it was inspired not only by the symbolic representation of the deities to whom the Anahuacalli Museum is dedicated, as representations of the four elements, which when placed in opposition compose the entire universe. They are Ehecatl, the god of wind, Chicomecoatl, the god of earth, Tlaloc, the god of rain and Huehueteotl, the god of fire, but there are also the bivalent aspects of these deities, that is, their light and dark aspects, and their parallelisms with the process of duality, differentiation, separation, discrimination to achieve a final transformation. Another source of inspiration was my encounter with the indigenous textile art of Mixtec women from the Oaxacan Sierra, who use a hand loom to weave canvases on which various archetypal images are embroidered. The art of weaving and interweaving symbolically represents the image of the weaver as an ideal creator of the universe. The act of weaving and interweaving involves a duality both in the structure of the cloth and in the process of weaving itself:
the weft and warp, and that which emerges creatively through the image, starting from the interweaving of both.
This is how, through indigenous textile art, not only did I visually interweave the pre-Hispanic with the contemporary world, but also, through the image of the backbone interwoven from black and white hands, I attempt to incarnate this process. The hands symbolically represent, as Aristotle said, “the tool of the tools” – insofar as they enable us to struggle and journey through the horizontal territory, while the backbone, the structural support of the essence itself, represents the vertical territory.
2.- What do you currently consider to be your duality, and what transformations have you experienced in recent years as an artist ?
My duality as an artist is always between the technical and the ritual. Only from the conflict between both does the third possibility emerge, the unique creation of each work. For me, creative work, which always involves a dialogue between the opposites of the ego and the self, attempts to respect the balance between both worlds.