The stones, collective signifiers colloquially used to name pre-colonial fragments, seem to emerge from everywhere: a patio is dug in Tlatilco during a home renovation and suddenly two ceremonial masks appear; a longitudinal cut is made in the Yucatecan landscape to build a new road and it reveals a gigantic, hitherto unnoticed Mayan complex. If for many the plundering of Mesoamerican lands in the past was ruthless, for the people today, so too is the endless proliferation of stones, sprouting from the ground and traveling in all directions. The words that title this exhibition come from a conversation that the historian Mario Rufer recorded in Atzayanca, Tlaxcala, during a National Summit of Community Museums. They reflect the dissonance between the scientific and aesthetic desire for the material heritage of the ancestral communities and the evident disinterest experienced by their members in the present.

 

Aurora employs a wide variety of media, reflecting the vitality of the worlds she traverses in her research, to connect heritage forms with contemporary manifestations (what we now call art, design, and craft). She also acknowledges the inevitable processes of transformation that allow both these materials and their makers to situate themselves in the present. This work begins with the study of the Leonardo Patterson collection, a pre-colonial assembly largely created through processes of plunder, looting, forgery, export, and illegal trade. Aurora investigates different objects, which she unfolds, rationalizes, mixes, and reconfigures. In this process, she integrates contemporary artisanal production practices, such as synthetic fiber weaving, cabinetmaking, and upholstery, alongside artistic expressions like performance, collage, video, and installation.

 

Here, the stone is no longer an inert relic flooding landscapes and museums, but rather part of a material ecology that acknowledges its geographies, peoples, and cultural lineages. Aurora's work proposes an affective and cultural ethic of reconnection, which re-establishes material links and affinities between the heritage object and the heirs of the cultural practices that gave rise to those materialities. This is a form of reconnection that operates from the margins and the gaps opened by the ideological boundaries of the social sciences and the outdated reactions of heritage legislation. The latter not only acts belatedly but also fails to recognize the subjects who should be receiving restitution.

 

For this reason, All these tiny stones are suffocating me is also a collaborative effort. Aurora's significant body of work engages in dialogue with an archival intervention by Colectivo Bloque, a two-part choreographic performance by Natasha Barhedia, and a conversation with the situated research of Mario Rufer. Each of these processes offers additional paths for exploring Aurora's work and the questions that guide her research and material production.

 

 

—David Ayala-Alfonso.