Montaña Estrella – Flor del tiempo (Star Mountain – Flower of time).
Since 2013 I been exploring the tangible and spiritual impact of violence on families in Mexico, including my own. My work focuses on communities fractured by the state and the organized crime, in a physical and psychological sense. I am trying to create a testimony through which I can discuss all these layers of reality that shape my country.
I’m interested in exploring the symbolic construction of the territory where violence penetrates all and this violence crosses the physical and spiritual space of those who inhabit it. The territory as an analogy to a body or space that could be a house, a person, a family, a community or a country.
Montaña Estrella – Flor del tiempo is the second chapter of my long-term project Firefly and opens my research around drugs and the poppy-producing communities of Guerrero Mexico; the state where I am originally from.
The poppy is the primary source of income for indigenous communities that have been marginalized since colonial times; it becomes the door that opens the possibility of integration into the modern world, and paradoxically what is helping the subsistence and permanence of its culture is changing and modifying it significantly. Since the war on drugs also constitutes a war against indigenous identity and ancestral territories by the violent domination of the state and the organized crime.
The opium gum extracted from the poppy flower is transformed into heroin in Mexico and almost entirely exported to the United States and Canada. Mexico represents one of the main world producers of poppy and heroin. The cultivation of the poppy becomes a double-edged sword, a weapon that juxtaposes two cultures and visions of seeing the world, on the one hand, the preservation of an ancestral culture through the improvement of the local and personal economy and for the other side disrupts the entrance to the capitalist and transnational world. This illustrates the clash over reconciliation and resistance, inclusion and autonomy, and the modern versus the traditional.
Many images from Montaña Estrella – Flor del tiempo symbolically allude to the act of scratching the poppy flower through a process of scratching and perforation, generating an allegory to the act of scratching the flower, but also to the life processes and resistance processes that the indigenous communities of the Guerrero have since colonial times. I’m trying to explore a different perspective on the concept of resilience in these families and individuals that have been fighting against violence in their communities for decades. Working on how we as human beings can transform a bad energy into a positive energy. A light in the darkness.
The territory defines us as human beings, as a society, as a culture. A piece of land gives us certainty of our reality, of our identity and belonging, of our relationship with the world that is why for the indigenous communities of the mountain of Guerrero our days are not measured until our eyes go out and dance the white smoke of our fire, are measured by the number of roots that we cast in the earth and by the voices that burned with our struggle, with our anguish or with our dream, therefore the days do not meet, they arise from everywhere making our image a symbol, they announce stories that are shouted while they join others, it is then that we know that death is not a final point, but starting point.