When I came back from the UK and I found this piece of land I felt back at home
It's been 25 years since my brothers had cultivated the land and I ran for miles all over the
place looking from the mountains attempting to locate the tree the peru because that
has such a memory for it
When I finally found it one evening I came here and it was
a blessing because everything was green and it was really like a welcome home
This still is farming land and yet the growth of Mexico City is without regard
when I was a kid you could go any way any direction
there were mountains there were trees there were birds there was a free space to play
today every other street you walk the house has grown so large high up you have literally lost the horizon
It means that we have lost our direction what we do and what we do it for
I call myself Huehuecóyotl my family calls me like that it means all fire coyote the oldest coyote
Coyotl is able to join worlds and to me it was clear I was joining
the wild aspect of the old world with the cultural aspects of my own homeland
in my work are references to memories to childhood to the idea of discovery because what they feel
what the country and our relationship with the land does is precisely that the very idea of
seeing a plant born a seed germinate is to be in the very presence of the mystery of what life is
In the past we used to see the moon the sun in order to do harvest planting and so on
nowadays electronics is our relationship to the world
Electronics are central to what I do
not just as a medium through expressing things but more importantly as a medium
to be explored to me that now is nature nature has been replaced by the transistor
I studied engineering I am now an artist and I see the differences between humanities and industry
Cihuapapalutzin is a work composed of 104 tin can shaped butterflies made into the exact
size and shape of the monarch butterfly and that particularly has to do with issues of
death conservation because the species is in danger of disappearing from the face of the world
I particularly call this work the ambassador of the free trade agreement between America
Canada and Mexico because it travels all the way this particular butterfly is particularly
significant to me because when my sister died I had constructed one such butterfly but larger
so I had to put it in her coffin thinking that perhaps my sister's energy is within me
Tecalco is like a little oasis it's the joy of my nephews it's the joy of having my mother around
for me Tecalco is a picture of who we are
It's not just our house it's a house for our neighbours it's a house for the kids that
come every Saturday for the reading club that my mum began 23 years ago
after that we incorporated Calpulli Tecalco which primarily deals with issues of
language the Nahuatl language preserving it promoting it
people who learn to express themselves learn to have a view a perspective on what they read and
I think people have become stronger
We are attempting to recover some of the characteristics of native communities
My mother is so vital in that particular way because through her we have the connection to the land
Before there were cars and the eternal presence of the laptop
on you could hear sounds that they were not recognisable you would get frightened
I got the experience of that nature that are not necessarily from this world
Now that there is such noise as amplifiers televisions radios all the electronic gadgets
I do believe that the frequencies that they emit they have got rid of the ghosts of this land
You hear all the time the passing of cars coming and going and you hear the police and so on
there's no room for ghosts
Travelling to Mexico City is not easy because of the growth
of the people living in Mexico City but also by the sheer inability to truly live
well with the car because the car creates such traffic jams that is impossible to move
The film Si no fuera por estos momentos was shot at different locations in Mexico City
Chimalhuacán Santa Fe which is one of
the poshest sides of Mexico City all to do with the having a kind of a picture a contrast between
the countryside and the city that at that moment began to eat up all Milpa Alta
Today specifically if it does not have a commitment to the environment
to what we are causing then art has really no social function it has to be spoken from the heart
and acquainted with the people you are speaking about
What we produce is machines that are just machines they have no an ability to speak to us
Having had this type of dialogue has not only allowed me to see that it is possible to humanise
technology but also that if we were to add humanities into the studies of engineering
we would produce engineers of quite a different type that would produce objects and systems
more respective of nature when you speak Nahuatl what we call objects in Spanish or English are no
longer objects are people that are inhabiting the world that we live in with equal rights
I'm not afraid to say the churches the buildings that remind us of the colonial days are collapsing
in Mexico City and the pyramids are coming back again I feel particularly glad that
this is happening because I do believe we have a lot to learn from the past
Either we halt this
situation and change our attitudes and save the world or else it won't last it simply won't last