Participating artists: Abraham Arroyo, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil - Impronta Casa Editora, José Benítez Sánchez, Isa Carrillo, Manolo Castro Montoya, Marcos Miguel Covarrubias, Florencia Guillén, Pedro Ibarra Cázares “Solín”, Xitaima (Lucía Lemus de la Cruz), Esteban Leñero, Iván López de los Santos, Tomasita Montoya González, Chudy (Ma. Asunción Moreno Cisneros), María Anita Pérez Guzmán, Víctor Hugo Pérez, Daniela Ramírez, RojoNegro, Maximiliano Ruelas, Emanuel Tovar, Bruno Viruete, among others…

When the Spanish conquerors colonized Anahuac –which was later referred to as the nation-state Mexico–, they encountered a multiethnic and multilingual territory. Through the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Yankwik Kaxtillan Birreiyotl), the Spanish Crown and the Church imposed a whole new order –social, political, religious, and cultural– of dominance and subjugation over the cultures living in these territories. Although attempts to succumb, extract, or eradicate them varied, the cultural power of the ancestral inhabitants ensured that their heritages were transmitted with resistance and resilience.

Transmisión Ancestral arises as a research project to understand the artistic and cultural survival of various techniques that, being widely produced before the conquest, remained in the arts of different indigenous peoples and were assimilated in their mestizaje as forms embraced by local culture. From there, the contemporary drift of these techniques, iconographies, and conceptions of said artistic productions is envisioned, as it is also observed in others by Mexican artists not belonging to these cultures, who being contemporary –through respect, research, and escaping extractivism– have honored this legacy as historical and cultural wealth. Therefore, the artistic trail is followed in the cosmological, economic, natural, musical, linguistic, textile, ancestral stories, and legends. The project anchors its roots in the productions of artists from the sixties who were not part of a Mexican modernity because they were not understood as artists but as craftsmen, an idea grounded in the prejudiced separation of modernity that we have inherited to this day.

From Jalisco to Nayarit, Oaxaca, or Michoacán, artists and participants, both mestizos and from various wixaritari, purépecha, coca, huasteca, or triqui cultures, contemporize legacies: the polished clay of Tonalá, the waist loom weavings that developed a large part of Mexican ancestral cultures, or the wixárika beads and shells that turned colonial. In various works and cultural productions, we will find opposing processes: in the culture of dressing, from malacates and spindles to Spanish garments of the 16th century; from the representation of Tonantzin to the iconography of the Virgin, alongside the emergence of other iconographies of deities such as Tlazoltéotl, Tláloc, Cihuacóatl; from the pride of the colonial resistance of the war cry Tastoan to the linguistic activism of the Mixe language; from the water instruments and sounds of ocarinas that unite various cultures of Abya Yala, to contemporary vessels with tepalcates embedded to speak of the continuity of knowledge; from the natural representation of flowers and plants alongside the xoloitzcuintli or legendary nahual; or the representation of contemporary El Dorado under the jaws of commercial capitalism, among others.

Transmisión Ancestral is to contemporarily view the richness of the legacy that the Mesoamerican indigenous cultures deposit from the pre-Hispanic era to our times, thus eradicating both the notion of linear time learned from Eurocentric history and the Western relationship between high and low culture, between the notions of craftsmanship and art, between essentialist identity and the whitening of mestizaje, not to create a tabula rasa, but to show with reclamation, pride, updating, and from active activism, what coloniality and modernity subjugated in the form of oblivion, undervaluation, or exoticism.

Agustin Pérez Rubio