the Telaraña Circuit

A leaf turns to lace. Handwritten notes, video stills. Drawn symbols. Islands of text on white pages, drifting between Spanish and English. Photographed gestures, typewritten words. Poems. Negatives. Family photographs. This process book is a record of investigations.

Near the end of the Telaraña Circuit, artist Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola describes a ritual performed with old metal suitcases, potted plants, and family photographs shot in 1993. In another ceremony:

I asked some relatives to silently remember the images that had disappeared while I recorded the sounds surrounding their silence. A ritual towards an auditory archeology. 1993 […] was the last year before the National Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in Mexico, and with the rise of commercialism, life—and perhaps future memory—radically transformed sociality and intimacy, altering audible and inaudible manifestations of experience.

Gaxiola credits her aunt Margarita Gaxiola González, who carried out archaeological surveys in the 1970s, for spurring her to consider individual and collective memory, and to “reimagine her exploration as sound, as open energy, as continuation.” Reflecting on her practice, the artist describes the book’s “residual traces of performances, ephemeral actions, notes, experiments, and poems,” which are informed by “[s]ound, listening, and the instability of analog film.”

The printed poems condense and echo the handwritten notebook pages, as in “Chemical Language”:

a scorpion
had something to tell
me
        she said

        your
        method of excavation
        is similar to
the weather forecast:
  a geometry of attention
    tu visión,
frente al volcán
     analiza el proceso
chronos, chrono,
logical, position:
position your logos in
this
shadow running, this
        sun climbing
        time as circulation

Experience, the body, water, and language are the cardinal coordinates of this hybrid work, which excavates memory’s underlying structures.