Zona MACO

Cuidad de México, México - Feb. 8/12, 2023

Patrimonio Colonial Inmaterial de la Humanidad: La visión de los vencidos

Eugenio Merino y Pierre Valls

Produced by Uriarte Talavera ( https://www.uriartetalavera.com.mx/patrimonio.php )

Intangible Colonial Heritage of Humanity (The Vision of the Vanquished), presents a series of theoretical and artistic reflections on the history of the conquest in America, from its beginnings to neo-colonialism. Part of the World Heritage concept, as an exceptional universal value belonging to the common heritage, to make visible its opposite, a negative heritage that has shaped our present.

In this sense, images and/or representations generated from the first colonial codices of Mexico, produced in the Mesoamerican area, up to the current information supports are used. These representations have been selected with the help of historians and cultural researchers and shaped in the Talavera Poblana by artisans from Uriarte.

The stories, and their images, are inspired or directly taken from various social movements in Mexico against the neoliberal policies of handing over territories to mining companies for their exploitation, expropriation of protected jungle reserves (Mayan train), evictions and exterminations of the drug trafficking and mafias to peasant families or small producers, poisoning of water and land by chemicals associated with mining, etc.

In other words, today's "vision of the defeated" is made up of the stories of the losers, the dispossessed, the subjugated, the silenced by the effects of neoliberal-capitalist violence emanating from the processes of conquest. The vision of the vanquished today is that of the civil, community movements, activists against these looting and crimes.

The narrative proposal seeks to generate a re-reading and historical criticism, through the contemporary practice of art, in which concepts and images merge symbolically in the fabrication itself; Uriarte being the oldest Spanish colonial workshop in Mexico and the Talavera Intangible Heritage of Humanity since 2019.

Likewise, each piece is presented in an inverted manner, canceling its utilitarian function and denying its origin, while the image remains in its original position allowing the re-reading of history.

The project is a mediation device that proposes alternative narratives to the hegemonic history, through strategies typical of contemporary art.