Erik Bernado Tlaseca Gaona (Mexico, CDMX, 1989)
Interdisciplinary visual artist. His work addresses themes that arise from unattainable memories and images that touch on territorial transformations and changes in identity. He studied Plastic and Visual Arts at the ENPEG "La Esmeralda". In 2017 he was part of the Photographic Production Seminar of Centro de la Imagen. In 2014-2015 and 2018-2019 he was the recipient of the FONCA Young Creators scholarship and between 2019 and 2020 he was part of the BBVA - MACG grant program. He has done artistic residency programs at Motel Spatie, Holland, at WRO Art Center, Poland, and at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Indonesia, as well as participated in various group exhibitions, including the Jakarta Biennial in Indonesia. He is a founding member of the Cooperativa Cráter Invertido, Zungale, Taller de Producción Editorial.
A man walks the hill in complete solitude, waiting for the night, in silence he moves, mute, without leaving any trace. He sees the movement of the air; he is an accomplice of the passing of time.
Silhouettes are seen among the trees, the only language that exists is nature. How to represent the dense smell of humidity? How to transmit the presence of the mist?
If at the moment of death some essence of it escapes, where does it go? It is at this moment that a contradictory reality emerges, containing both hope and despair. The fear of the end of an era or moment that will not return, the death of traditions on which the new is imposed and the uncertainty of what will come. And hope for a new form and how we relate to it.
Conceived in six different skins, woven in natural palm in the Mixtec community of San Pedro Jocotipac, Oaxaca, located in the Sierra Mixteca; and in skin-colored and fluorescent prosthetic silicone in Mexico City.
Through a non-linear journey between these two territories, personal narratives and experiences shared with the inhabitants of San Pedro Jocotipac intermingle. Starting from the Nahuatl concept Ixiptla: "covering oneself with the ornaments of a god and seeing, hearing and speaking like him" as an invitation to explore what would be those possible materialities of a present time, but crossed with yearnings, desires and concerns for the current body.
The process of "Algún día llegará la noche “ (Someday the night will come) began as an investigation on Xipe Totec, a pre-Hispanic character shared by many Mesoamerican cultures during many periods, his name is currently often translated as "the owner of the skin." An extremely complicated character related to different festivities at the beginning of spring, but which consisted of someone wearing a real human skin from a victim of a sacrifice.
Something relevant during this research process was the term "Ixiptla", which is the symbolic operation carried out by Xipe Totec, it is a term that is usually translated as "image", "substitute" or "personifier": "This leads us to propose a new translation of ixiptla that rests on the meaning of the two parts of the compound word: "envelope" (xiptlahtli) refers to the fact of covering oneself with the clothing of a god to become his "personifier"; "Eyes" or "face" (ixtli) is the word that summarizes the series of organs on which depends the ability to see, hear and express oneself as the god.
Therefore, ixiptla can be translated as "sheath-organs of sight, hearing and voice" and brings together the terms that carry the two meanings enclosed in the word: covering oneself with the ornaments of a god and seeing, hearing and speaking As the."
Although we could argue that the operation carried out by Xipe Tótec falls on an operation of physical and symbolic domination, something that interested me was to carry out this same operation on something intangible, something that did not exist or does not yet exist.
My relationship with my own past and identity is not one of clear or defined descent, instead, it is a fragile, unclear, fugitive relationship. When the relationship with what has built me is unstable and opaque, what interests me most is guiding myself through that void.
The landscape of San Pedro Jocotipac in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, the trips through the countryside with Mariano Vasquez (resident of the community) and going out to cut palm trees; they were essential in understanding a narrative. I understood that palm weaving is an organic relationship with the nature of the landscape. Go out in the morning to do what has to be done in the fields: look for the animals or work the land. In the afternoon some palm is cut and the one that had already been left to dry is collected and taken home. There are no workshops to weave palm, it is woven in the time that is left over in the afternoon or evening, there is no table or diagrams used, there is no great tool other than a "bone", a metal wedge (the traditional way was a bone of carved deer) that is used to intrude the most difficult parts of the palm. A very transparent process of translating the landscape into a basket, ribbon, ornaments or tools for working in the field.
Q & A between Miguel Monroy and Erik Tlaseca
MM: There is a material relationship in your work, specifically between the material of the character's skin and territory. How does this work?
ET: In the beginning of the project, I explored the idea of the skin as a form of avatar, an image that we project to the world, and how this generates a reality in itself. As I went deeper, it was evident that this form of identity projection is linked to a territory and its time. For me it was very important to work with contradictory materials, the standardized efficiency of silicone, which reaches one’s home through delivery orders from the United States. Visually it is almost identical to human skin, it’s resistant and has a technique one can learn largely through youtube tutorials.
On the other hand, weaving with palm leaves, which is deeply specific to the region where the palm is cut, the season of the year and the time of day it is woven, while having to travel to the community where it is grown, using natural dyes that take months to extract and that never give the same color, and all the while it being inherited knowledge from generation to generation without a specific manual. These polar poles are completely different realities that, nevertheless, make a lot of sense in my reality. They speak of an inner desire that I live every day.
MM: The shift from rural to urban reminds me of the narratives that have taken place in Mexico since the early and mid-twentieth century. In which the inhabitants of rural areas migrated to the city in search of better economic opportunities. This generated, among other things, that a city be known as modern versus traditional or old-fashioned such as rural areas, the future versus the past. How does the meaning of these places work in your piece?
ET: Somehow all of my relatives have had moments of migration, from small communities to the city and from the outskirts of the city to central neighborhoods. These displacements are probably preceded by other displacements of relatives that I never knew, and, generationally, many comrades are marked by similar stories. When you cannot return to any places, (as is my case) there are always ghosts. On the other hand, one remains engrossed in the city, where the idea of the globalized modern and the idealized "traditional" that still resists is always in conflict. I don't think my work proposes any solution to this conflict, which has been very violent for many rural communities. For this reason, I have decided to let myself go for fiction and try to shape those ghosts that I mentioned earlier.
MM: How does the screen light fit into the narratives of your piece? How does the lighting of the cave work, which is such an important element for the pre-Hispanic cosmovision? The screen crosses everything, both rural and urban, the cave and the field.
ET: It is a difficult question to answer, because I am not interested in fully defining these two concepts: the cave and the screen brightness. On the one hand, the relationship of our bodies with screens and the digital is something that is problematic in the present and will become progressively more problematic, both in the city and in the countryside. The caves have a symbolic charge in different world views, it is both the origin and the destination of death, but they are usually introspective places. They live so much in fantasy and are also important geographical places and give presence to many fears. Visually both elements, the cave and the light, are deeply sensory experiences, which is something that I have constantly explored in my work. However, I am interested in maintaining an ambiguity with these concepts, perhaps to open up their potential as images, and not anchor them to a specific socio-historical context.