How to tell the story of the Universe in a hundred years?

How to tell the story of the Universe in one day?

Snake, kapok, gear, whipping top, horned warrior, Mother Earth, potter, pot, bat, screw, dog, corn, frog with a cell phone, root, lizard, pumpkin, elder, turkey, ceiba, infinite column.This repertoire of objects, some archaeological, other mechanical, recreational or synthetic, were selected in the present, along with the Coatlicue pottery workshop based in Atzompa, Oaxaca. The selection was the foundation for imagining a series of stories, which now stand as columns in the exhibition space.

Who will measure the space, who will tell me the moment? It is situated on the thin line that divides our relationship with objects, with the stories we make about them. Perhaps, the language is not slippery, but the objects. The use, handling is its reason for being and simultaneously its exhaustion, their complete disappearance. In the project Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?, the initial question of the relationship Atzompa potters have with their archaeological heritage and how it is expressed, is contaminated or dissolved in the present. Far from taking a purist stance, this work began with a series of discussions on the copies, forgeries, style changes and influences in the history of Mexican archeology. Together (artist and potters) we visited the archaeological museum Rufino Tamayo and selected our favourite pieces. To this set of pieces, we added a lot of nuts and gears found in Ramiro´s workshop, also a whipping top, a ball, and other belongings, to form a repertoire, a vocabulary to tell our stories. The group split in two. The main exercise was to develop a story to proceed in the span of one hundred years, and one that happened in one day. We ended up with a story of the origin of the Universe in one hundred years, and another about the origin of the Universe in one day. The two stories are almost the same, which got us thinking. Then came the story of the journey of a potter, since he wakes up at dawn to prepare the clay until he finish the pieces, burn them, and then leaves to sell them in order to buy corn to eat. After hundred years the transit the life and death of the warrior who ended up being life-death warrior. We also realized that the kapok was a main character, and the gears became a metaphor for everything. And then every character became clay, and we ordered them in columns to reach the ceiling, so visitors can surround the stories of top-down and bottom-up.

This project challenges the idea of a static tradition that should not be changed in order to exist, broadening the debate of what archeology is in the present and how it can be constantly updated to resignify visual identity panoramas

Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time? is a project in collaboration with the Coatlicue ceramics workshop and 1050º collective Coatlicue.
Produced by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca. Curated by Oliver Martínez Kandt.

Cronotopo

Musée régional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon Sérignan, France

28 June - 30 August 2015

Curated by Dorothée Dupuis and Oliver Martínez-Kandt