Tercer Espacio

THIRD SPACE: Artes y Oficios Heredados

GIFTS FROM THE GODS: EVIDENCE AND SPECULATION

Countless Amerindian cosmogonies tell a fundamental event: at the beginning of time, people received from their gods knowledge, food, objects, and instructions that would allow them to become true people. Since then, each generation has taken on the obligation to teach their successors how to properly relate to these gifts, as they open up the possibility of recreating the sacred bond that gives unity and meaning to their existence. 

To realize the promise contained within them, the gifts require special conditions that must be met, whether through the grand orchestration of rituals or through the minimal staging of the everyday life. There will be occasions when their message should be collectively deciphered, in multitudinous and colorful celebrations, to the rhythm of the dances and songs that tradition has transmitted, but there will also be moments when it presents itself as a soft murmur, intelligible only to a person concentrated on the intimate gesture of preparing the necessary plants to start their workday. Such diversity of scenarios is necessary because the gifts of the gods are activated by looking into the eyes of the urgencies of the present. They are not among us as a nostalgic relic, but as a prophetic element: in the face of the closure imposed by certain ways of life, they augur the possibility of undoing what is offered as normal and desirable and illuminate the creation of common horizons for a still-to-come world. 

The gifts of the gods have always circulated beyond the ethnic and cultural borders of the peoples who were their original recipients. Five centuries ago, they began to travel to more distant territories in trunks, chests, and suitcases as the networks of exchange and communication that inaugurated the landscape of the world that is now coming to a close were beginning to be woven. Received with surprise and generosity, but also with contempt and ambition, the power of their thinking has resisted both proscription and assimilation. When contemporary cultural creation suddenly floods with references to current and pre-Hispanic indigenous aesthetics in such dissimilar spaces as artists' workshops and industrial plants, art biennials, and craft fairs, it may be nothing more than new interactions of the gifts with humanity. This exhibition is a first exploration of this argument.