Private Story
Máté
Máté is a textile narrative project that explores, based on its own ethnographic data and anthropological texts, the magical-religious and ritual therapeutic system of the Nahua, Otomi, Tepehua and Totonac indigenous groups of the Huasteca region, in Mexico. To do this, I return to the drawings of ceremonial figures that are traditionally made on amatl paper cutouts from the book by anthropologists Alan and Pamela Sandstrom, “Traditional Papermaking and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico”. I recreate these figures on a diverse range of typical Mexican fabrics with floral prints and colorful metallic and satin textures, reinterpreting the ritual paraphernalia of the community altars that the Huastec indigenous groups build to perform healing ceremonies.
Each figure represents sacred entities, good or bad, like the lords of the mountain, of fire. The spirits of the plants: corn, chili, beans, coffee. And those nefarious powers that have the power to cause a person to fall ill, such as bad air, the siren, the lord of the rainbow.Each of these figures is a symbol that constitutes the cultural unit in the structure of the ritual.
With each of these figures, I built a series of textile tapestries in the form of an ethnographic mosaic where I archived the collective memory around the magical-religious therapeutic system and indigenous ritual from an aesthetic, political and resistance dimension. Each one of these pieces contains a constellation of figures that narrate how these ancestral populations have exercised their beliefs and health-disease processes in a different way than Western medical systems, to which they generally do not have access. And since colonialism and migration, many of these indigenous nations have maintained these traditions that date back to pre-Hispanic times for centuries.Each seam has a relationship with the reconstruction and the union, from which a link is configured; draw and build.
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