Koyoltzintli: Tableaux as Self-telepathy

“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” — William Carlos Williams

According to string theory, life(s) occur(s) simultaneously in different dimensions (eleven some say, infinite argue others). Who are we in each one of them? How are we dressed? With whom to do we share intimacy and love? Koyoltzintli's self-anthropology tableaux-vivants seem to be whispering to her different selves how to walk this path of self-recollection, exercising a particular photographic hypnosis.

Recollections of visiting curanderos and performing cleansing sessions peacefully weave a psychic retrieval in the cinematic narrative and aesthetics very familiar to us thanks to photographers like Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Tracey Moffatt or Carrie Mae Weems and filmmakers such as Maya Deren¹. However, the pulsating mood in Koyoltzintli's self-excavations is antithetical to the spectacularity of those iconic artists.

Telepathy and the ability to understand and connect with “the things we cannot see” danced freely in her grandmother's stories: “... she would often mention the devil as an enchanter, who often tried to seduce her, and sometimes in her stories there were supernatural animals that functioned in many ways”². This is why in her cozy Wunderkammer an audacious ambition materialize: to give each image the power to transform reality, to infuse it with pure magic as in Ana Mendieta's Silueta series (1973-1978)³. This strive for transformation, initially modest, aimed at covering certain gaps in the artist's personal archives. The lack of visual mementos of significant moments of her life crystalized in a series of anachronistic archival atmospheres, an uncanny collection impregnated by a longing often associated with nostalgia. In this case, it is more than that, it is as if the determination to recover a personal territory gives her the right to preach and codify her own cosmology accompanied by meaningfully chosen scenarios and props.

And it is in this resolve of putting your finger on it, on dissecting a particular sensation, in this search of a conspicuous “felt-absence”, of removing the visible and unveiling the meaningful, that the undercurrents of Koyoltzintlia's inner odysseys abandon their theatricality to become a reliable archive of ominous selfgazing narratives. There is so much truth in these atmospheric collective memories that one can easily forget their essentially reconstructed spirit. Always accompanied by a fictional or approximate date and a brief note describing the situation, feeling, vacuum and/or fear that the artist is conjuring, the candid authenticity and cinematic stamina of each piece persuade us beyond doubt, very much in the tradition of Tracey Moffatt's “Scarred for Life” series (1994, 1999). Yet role-playing collectively for the sake of detecting the heights and depths of what one believes that define our inner chore, instead of becoming a predictable narcissistic exercise turns out to be an organic platform for healing to take place. Unintentional, as the artist's argues, this aftermath also implies the necessary pain that such endeavors usually carry: “In Superkids [my mother] actually cried, I felt the responsibility of taking people back into their emotions, […] this image told me that I am making something happening, this is how collective memory works.”

Quoting the spiritual connection with the universe in Ana Mendieta and the densely symbolic vignettes of Sergei Parajanov's The color of Pomegranates (1968) as significantly influential in her quest for vividness, Koyoltzintli's Other Stories/Historias Bravas successfully subvert the mediafication of everyday life. Achieved in opposite direction to the endemic over-exposure of the era of the selfie, her meticulous compositions transit on a couple of frames from 50 mm to 35 mm assisted by a timer. A handful of them were taken in exteriors and only one is a landscape. For Koyoltzintli this particular one, entitled Mom showing me how life came to be, ca. 1992 accurately summarizes her biographical journey mainly because: “... I am still pondering on the question of the origin of life.” This conscious uncertainty liberates her accounts into a space where storytelling becomes irrelevant, what matters here/there is the connection between photography and its poetic imagination.

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¹ “Like Claude Cahun, she was a friend of André Breton. Deren, however, denied any connection with the movement’s aesthetic aims. The Surrealist obsession with duality—with the lines separating the real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, the waking life and the dream—was, in fact, diametrically opposed to Deren’s fascination with the continuity of life and death, the physical and the spiritual, and “I” and the “non-I.” Her films were intended as imaginary arenas where this point of contact could be visualized—where boundaries normally fixed could dissolve, or become wildly flexible; where protagonists could move freely between dreams and waking life without ever resolving the differences between the two; where nature and culture, urban and rural environments could be separated (and linked) by a single step; where past and future selves could meet along the road, fracturing into clones moving along parallel paths of time and space.” – Shelley Rice (1999) Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. New York: MIT University Press, p. 70.
² All quotes from the artist are part of our two interviews between June and July 2017.
³ “Now I believe in water, air and earth. They are all deities. They also speak. I am connected with the goddess of sweet water—this has been her year, and it is raining a lot. Those are the things that are powerful and important. I don't know why people have gotten away from these ideas.” – Ana Mendieta interviewed by Linda Montano. In: Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties. Berkley 2004, p. 180.
⁴ Lynn Gumper (1999) Introduction. Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. New York: MIT University Press, p. x.