In 2015 the exhibition opened Who will measure the space? Who will tell me the moment?, of Mariana Castillo Deball, in collaboration with the Coatlicue Workshop, from the Martínez Alarzón family, and Innovating Tradition. The exhibition was curated by Oliver Martinez Kandt, and inaugurated at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca on January 24 with a concert by ceiba.
This sample is made up of various clay objects made in the Coatlicue ceramic workshop, in Santa María Atzompa, archaeological pieces from the Rufino Tamayo museum and some objects found in a mechanical workshop. It is the first project of the program monograms, produced in turn by the MACO, where a recognized plastic artist is invited to rethink his work under the terms of appropriation, copying and plagiarism, with the aim of reflecting on history, art and its multiple interpretations.
Mariana Castillo wondered about the shape that time takes when we turn it into history, past, identity. Can art put these discourses into dialogue and create another space? The objects were arranged in columns that reached the high ceilings of the MACO. Object upon object without apparent order, more than the continuation of its cycle, one's history thus becomes the history of the universe, everyday and sometimes trifling objects acquire the same importance as the pieces that make up an ancestral tradition or those made by the hand of our ancestors.
In a text written after this exhibition by Nidia Rosales, she points out that “Pottery making has always been a family affair. Behind the small shops where the pieces are sold are the houses of the artisans; mother and children usually dedicate themselves to this, while the men carry out some other work in the city. Together they learn the secrets of underground cooking, and spend hours in contact with the beautiful, raised raw material as an offering to the hidden part of the world. The life behind the objects, perhaps that is art.”
