Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola
Archaeological drawings from Huamelulpan Sitio Arqueológico reinterpreted as sonic scores with leaves, thread, and other mixed media
[Lucia speaking]
So a lot of my work has to do with kind of the affection and the love to the land and to nature, and at the same time, kind of like, I'm very interested in the matrilineal and, and the woman that not only from my family but also from different references I all the time have little oaths to that.
And I have a poetry book that came out some years ago that is the basis of the book is the research of an aunt that she was an archaeologist in Oaxaca. I was like, "Where is that voice coming from?" And it's so this book is, is a combination of two different scores.
One score that I have is I've been collecting for many years these different leaves with Venetian patterns, they're called, like the inside of the of the form of the leaf. And it's a poem and it's a score that says something like partitura para hoja, score for leaf, and it just says, "Map the sound of life embedded in the memory of this body." So kind of understanding how the patterns of, of nature, and in this case of the leaves and of trees and roots and everything, is they are scores in themselves. They are protocols of how to go where, and also they're a combination of the wind and all of the elements, you know? So it's like a metatextual or paratextual study of reality.
And I use it many times in performances. So a lot of, like, the objects that I sometimes show are part of long processes, both of poetry and of performances. So this book starts with this, like, kind of basis of, of a score, and then you open it, and then you start ha seeing the illustrations of the original archive of my aunt who worked in Huamelulpan. It's an archaeological site in Oaxaca that of from the Mixteca culture, Mixteca land.
And the first time I encountered this archive, a-as soon as I saw it, I was like, "Whoa, this is a score." Like, this is really a musical score. There's, there's a gesture, there's a form, there's a narrative. So I, I started using it first in performances. So this is, like, kind of like a mix. It's a score book for my performances, kind of something like that, because it has sometimes this score, and then you change, and then you have this one. And like, for example, I started printing the scores here in this kind of things because I use a overhead projector in my performances that I put this thing and I project them.
So I've done many different series and iterations. Sometimes I ask musicians to interpret these scores when I project them, and sometimes I interpret them. So I started using all my rocks and stuff in a way connected to this idea of, of the land and, and construction of reality, construction of epistemic, you know thinking, and also how to reformulate. Because when you're an archaeologist, it's been so far away, like, the culture is so far away the that reality, so how, how do you reinterpret and how do you bring it close to you?
So I started using the rocks to do this, like, what Daniela was saying of the fermata, which is a note that holds something. So I started first doing it with electric guitar and rocks and doing, like, boom, boom, and interpreting this. But slowly I understood that what I wanted to do was really to hold these notes with gravity itself, you know, with there's the piano or the keyboard, and then the stones that come from specific places are holding the gravity is holding the sound. So anyway, the book is kind of a, a history of, of that exploration of mine.
Then you have these things. And there's a whole project that has to do specifically with my aunt and this place. Like, I went back to the site at some point. I did performances in the ruins. I've written field recordings. But in general, for me, it's a practice that expands into other concepts of my performative work.
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