From Oaxaca to Mendocino to Abruzzo.... a new embroidery underway.
Through researching Durer and his Rhinoceros, we learned that he printed a woodcut map of Tenochtitlan (pre-hispanic Mexico City) that was published in a 1524 edition of Hernan Cortes’ letters to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, celebrating his conquest of the Aztec Empire.
Nuremberg, where Durer resided, was a center for printing, cartography, weaponry, and finance during this time of Empire building. Nuremberg investors financed a great deal of Spanish colonial exploration of the New World. Spanish firsthand accounts of the New World were published in Nuremberg and disseminated throughout Europe.
The map is a European interpretation, based on Cortes’ accounts, of an American indigenous cosmology. The image itself is oriented with south at the top, the left hand side of the map represents, at a very different scale than that of the city, the Gulf of Mexico and Southeastern United States, including Florida. On the right is the city of Tenochtitlan, under the Hapsburg flag, surrounded by Lake Texcoco, with the raised causeways that linked the island city to the mainland. At the center of the city is the temple precinct, and at its center are the twin temples that were dedicated to the deities Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli, gods of water and war, respectively.
Like the rhinoceros, Durer never saw Tenochtitlan. And, like the rhinoceros, the Aztec city and the lake that surrounded it, were displaced by colonialism. This map of Tenochtitlan is now the foundation for another monumental, collective embroidery and eventual work in paper.
In 2018, we were invited to the TEXTIM III conference hosted by the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, in Oaxaca, Mexico, to launch this new embroidery.
In 2019, We held our first US sewing circles on the map in conjunction with our exhibition at the Mendocino Art Center.
After the exhibition came down, we were taking a break to assess the whirlwind of the past few years, and our future plans for Rhinoceros Paper Pours and Map Sewing Circles, when all came to a stand still with Covid.
Like for many of you, we’re sure, 2020 was a year of quarantine and social distancing. During that time, we began to embrace ideas of slowing down, intentionality, and the importance of stillness.
This past summer, though, as things seemed to be opening up, we were invited by LAB-8 to bring the Map project to Abruzzo, Italy, as part of a new artist residency program: Riabitare con l’Arte.
We stayed in the Comune di Barisciano, in Abruzzo, and held sewing circles there, as well as in Fontecchio, Panfilo di Ocre, Acciano, and PIcenze.
Like the Rhinoceros, the map will become a document and a story, evidence of the many hands that contributed stitches, and now also a material record of the places to which we travel.
While we are still grappling with exactly where to go and what to do to move this project forward in its best form, what is very clear to us is the importance of using these historical images that speak to intersecting histories as jumping off points for conversations from many different contexts and perspectives.
Over the course of gathering, sewing, research and writing, we’ve honed in on some key ideas that we want to continue to investigate moving forward:
1. From a contemplative perspective: That perhaps change can come from stillness as well as from action. That stillness is substantially different from stagnancy, and that creating a still, meditative, communal listening space is a powerful age-old tool that we want to continue to engage. That creating this space around a communal material project, can aid in reconnecting us to our bodies and our material realities - our environments and the land beyond.
2. From a political/social action perspective: That in order to best engage social and environmental issues of today, we must dig deep into our personal and collective histories – going back to the beginnings of globalization - to tease out our common origins, interstices and divergences, and altogether how we arrived here at the present moment. That our primary goal might be to find commonalities, community, connection and healings in this time of insistent polarization.
