Private Story
V. Paniecatacoyan
In Mexico, we see death in a very peculiar way, it has a lot of meanings and multiple visions, and since ancestral times it has played an important role in our culture. Death is celebrated, cried and respected, but it's also confronted and caricatured. The truth is that dying has many nuances in Mexico.
As central axis of this approach, violence has prevailed in our country for years, in the last five years femicides have doubled, and in the last 15, with the war against drugs, Mexico became a cemetery country.
Holy Death devotion comes from a religious syncretism between prehispanic and European elements. Her first representations would be Mictlan masculine and feminine gods: Mictlantecutli and Mictacecihuatl, but people from Europe were the first to represent Death with the shape of a skeleton.
On the first day of each month, hundreds of believers arrive at the Holy Death altar in the violent neighborhood of Tepito. People go with multiple sizes and colors images to offer candles, flowers and candies and to pay promises for the received favors.
This transmedia project (WIP) shows how Mexicans have related to death from pre-Hispanic cultures to our days. Which are the various ways of relating to death? What does dying in Mexico represent?
Paniecatacoyan “The place where people fly” is the 5th chapter of the transmedia project: “To die in Mexico”, that through a Mictlan (place of the dead) travel approaches different ways of seeing and coexisting with death in one of the most violent countries in the planet.
Ongoing project.
Película 35mm
Revelada con Flor de Cempasúchil
Película intervenida/Video.
PR
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