A commissioned 11’x7’ velvet and fibrous site-specific installation for a medical gala, private collection, 2023
At the same time that I was commissioned to create an installation inspired by cardiovascular systems for the 2023 Multidisciplinary Aortic Dissection Symposium at BodyVox Dance, I was also readying Liliana’s Invincible Summer, by Cristina Rivera Garza. The book begins with a description of Azcapotzalco, one of the sixteen municipalities of Mexico City.
A name which translated from the Nahuatl language means “place of anthills.” A name derived from the legend of the deity Quetzalcóatl, whose mission, after the formation of the Fifth Sun was to recreate humankind. Which meant that he had to enter Mictlán, the underworld or realm of the dead to collect the bones and skeletal remains as a way to rebuild. As I understand it, it is a creation story built on the backs of a small but disciplined army of ants.
Details of representing insides as seen on the outside made the same time that I was reading about ants linking the inside and the outside in May of 2023
[place of anthills]
“…the ants, which once crossed the border between life and death, slip through the skin now, linking the outside and the inside, history and event, myth and injury. A puncture. A crack…the ants climb the inner face of the body’s organs and, laboring against tissues and mucous membranes, advance steadily until they reach the most intimate crevices, the rifts. Collectors on the surface, predators under the ground. The ants have already colonized every corner of the planet and yet, clearly unsatisfied, they now travel through the lymphatic system, the large intestine, the very fine network of veins and arteries, the hidden side of the tongue.
There are 130 million years of history on the backs of these ants but everything happens in a blink. Time contracts. Time decomposes itself…Time elongates itself. Some eighty million years ago an ant was trapped within an amber and the fossil of Sphecomyrma freyi came into view.
Time thins out. Hymenopterans, mimetics, symphites, the words amble away and cross the border of Mictlán. Here they go, one after another, words and ants, carrying the bones of the dead on the protective shells of their exoskeletons.”
