Sharper Than a Serpent´s Tooth

Lorena Ancona.

“The power of art objects stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantement of technology. The enchantement of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so we see the real world in an enchanted form”.

Alfred Gell, “The technology of enchantement”

Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth is a phrase originally extracted from Shakespeare’s King Lear but which came to Lorena Ancona through an article about the find at the Maya site of Xunantunich of two panels from Caracol (both in Belize), evidencing the relationships between different centers of Maya power in Pre-Colonial times. The authors of the article do not elaborate on the choice of title but the transfer of meanings helps Ancona to recognize in this anachronism a fertile ground for exploration. Instead of giving in to the temptation to “understand” everything — a compulsion that we have inherited from the epistemological paradigm of modernity where historical time accumulates in its linearity — she pours her research on the physical knowledge of materials that offer meaning of continuity between its work and a specific historical territory, that of the Yucatan Peninsula.

This knowledge is traversed by the exploration of technologies that, moving away from the paradigm of western progress, move in other directions and that bring artistic practice closer to what Anni Albers called “the stu the world is made of”. Anthropologist Alfred Gell described “magic as an ideal technology that guides practical technology and encodes technical procedures on a cognitive-symbolic plane.” The material and technological processes that allow the clay to be used to shape, burn, paint it are specific to the composition of the earth in each place and these specific knowledge is historically connected to the technologies that produced objects hundreds of years ago to conjure up another type of effects.

In this logic, tools often fulfill sacred tasks and end up functioning also as devices that allow entry into other domains of consciousness. The series of ceramic objects traversed by ropes that hang from the ceiling are jewels-tools that evoke functions such as that of the obsidian fragments embedded in the rope that Ix K’ab’al Xook (or Lady Xoc) uses to pierce her tongue in the ritual of bloodshed represented on lintel 24 of building 23 of Yaxchilán 1.

The work with specific materials led Ancona to experiment with different ways of combining and treating them, as in the case of stucco that serves as the basis for a series of paintings in which the final result is given by the way in which the painting is done, the base absorbing the color and the different layers of pigments compose different levels of opacity and transparency.

In Lorena Ancona’s work, Maya symbolic elements linked to the territory and what we now call ecology are retaken and updated as a way of conjuring up visions that counteract the devastation to which the planet is being subjected. The sculptures Ofrenda de sangre a la tierra (2020), Garza (2021) and Semilla y Flor (2021) are offerings that arise from the earth – the mud, obviously, but also the found branches of granadillo, a tropical tree. and they transform through what Gell called the “technology of enchantment”; those technical procedures that allow to produce results that transcend purely practical purposes.

Text: Catalina Lozano

 1 This lintel was removed from its place by Alfred P. Maudsley in the early 20th century and taken to the British Museum in London. Ix K’ab’al Xook has been identified as one of the most powerful Maya women of the classical period in recent discussions of power in pre-colonial peoples.