Brujas/witches.
3D printed ceramics, leather, fur, banana leaf yarn, sheep wool yarn, wooden furniture, and fig tree. The work, Brujas/Witches, recalls the essence of different periods of time within my life and the ancestral lives before me. This body of work references the significant period of time I spent recuperating at my grandfather’s ranch in Xicalango, Hidalgo Mexico, after a car accident where I lost my memory. During my time at the ranch, I learned more about the magical jungle and the mythical creatures that my ancestors discovered after escaping Italy during World War II. In Nahuatl mythology, certain women are chosen by the universe to have metaphysical powers. Through a fire ritual, some of these chosen women who have become corrupted turn themselves into Brujas, balls of fire that jump and float atop of the jungle canopy. The Brujas travel from village to village seeking human blood, which they need to survive. Similar to the western concept of the vampire, which is an undying and an evil inheritance from the past, the brujas are shapeshifters that live among us undetected. The experience of losing my memory, and in turn gaining this meta-memory passed down to me from generations from my elders, informed the narrative elements in the tapestry part of Brujas/ Witches. Using a carpet tufting-gun, I recall the all-encompassing lushness of the jungle flora and fauna. I exaggerate the colors in terms of saturation of dark jungle scheme colors to reflect the strange psychology created by the light bending through the canopy. It was in such a setting that I saw a ball of light dancing in the palms, which prompted me to tell my grandfather, who then told me the myth of the brujas. In the tapestry, I create something that feels like less of a memory and more like the essence of this particular place. Through the process of creating this tapestry, I mediated the myth of the brujas and reconnected with the memories, electricity, humid stillness, foggy dark spaces, and aroma of the jungle. What I came to understand for myself is that the evil in such myths should not necessarily be located externally. All individuals have the capacity to incorporate the inherited evil of the vampire or resentful hunt for blood of the Brujas if they are not conscious of their own insecurities. In the tapestry, I worked with sheep wool and banana leaf yarn, both of which come directly from Xicalango. These materials evoke the cozy sensation of this place where I felt joyfully smothered by the plant life as I cared for animals in the humid atmosphere of the foggy jungle. Yarn tapestries lend a comforting and thick surface that holds my abstracted visions of my experiences in this particular place. Looking at photographs from the two-year period of time when I lived in Xicalango did not seem vivid enough to make me feel what I experienced while I was there. The data and pixels of current technology fall short of the lived experiences I have of this place in all of its chronological spaces and times. The process of recalling the experience through the process of creating the tapestry, while not exact, comes close to capturing the magic of being there.
