In totality as long as you look closely, there is no one (1). These pandemic times seem to have homogenized collective fears but in reality we each have our own vertigo. Tania Ximena (Hidalgo, MX _ 1985) has found in the practices of the Tiemperos (workers of time and nature) or Graniceros, “those who overcome hail”, a vital matter of her own, a certain way of life that stops her particular vertigo.
The Tiemperos are in charge of negotiating the expenditure and distribution of energy -water- of an ecosystem to ensure the survival of the harvest cycle. Such a feat is always collective. That of the workers of time is an ancient, syncretic, communitarian and situated cognitive system. At the same time, it expands to other temporal and spatial dimensions when it appeals to the goblins and spirits of the ancients who preceded them and who inhabit Tlalocan, from where they continue to serve the winds and the community. They establish a body-to-body relationship with the landscape. Although they inherit their knowledge, each time period develops, in praxis, their own grammar made up of colors, tones, textures, effects on their bones and bodies, intensities, speeds, smells and behavior of beings and elements such as: clouds, rainbows, the sun, winds, flowers, lightning, lightning, whirlpools and animals. With this language they can predict the weather and, when necessary, act to change it through rituals. The gift is received by being struck by lightning, by illness or through their dreams.
We don’t know if the Volcana has called Tania Ximena, but there is no doubt that she has whispered to her in her sleep. Proust said that a bad dreamer is one who does not go to see if the color that she has dreamed of is really there (2). Ximena has spent years going up to Iztacihuatl to check if her colors are there. She doesn’t do it alone. Her guide is Gerardo, a young but highly experienced Tiempero, and the group of women and men he is training in his trade. It is difficult to know if Ximena is there as an apprentice, an anthropologist, an artist, all together or the opposite, but she has been there for a while.
Solar ecliptic is the first piece born from that being there. It is made with seeds collected in the area -red, white and blue corn, beans, lentils, wheat, canary seed and seed- and is inspired by a technique used in the Mayordomías festivities. The mural and the paintings share with us the coordinates of that being there. It precisely shows the apparent movement of the sun during a year, observed from the town of Amecameca at the foot of the Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes.
You will not find here the diagram that reveals the formula for a better way of life. Like most things in nature, the practice of timers is not scalable. Scalability – the ability to reproduce a system without acknowledging the diversity of each encounter – is one of the most violent strategies of “human progress” and we must focus on unlearning it. Let’s better accept Ximena’s invitation to share the view from the house where she imagines living and if we’re lucky, she’ll touch us one of those days when volcanoes peek through the gallery door.
Text: Alejandra Labastida
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(1) Deleuze, Gilles, En medio de Spinoza, Ed. Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 9
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDLpPIWP60o Abecedario de GILLES DELEUZE: V como Viajes
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360 view of the exhibition (Tonal.MX)
