The land where the sun was born

Nestled in a desert valley in central Mexico, Wirikuta is for the Wixárikas Indians the land of founding myths and manifold divinities. They come every year on pilgrimage to honour the birth of the sun and fire. From the Conquista to the industrial era, these lands have been open to new communities that have modified its nature but not its spiritual meaning. Now, all kinds of extractivists are trying to take over the land with the complicity of the Mexican government. Since 2017, I have been staying in these lands for several months each year, I have unwittingly become an actor. I started to accumulate information and to lose myself in the stories of others, to experience them. Many of the images also explore the notions of extraction, sampling, and cutting as a mirror-gesture of photography, of the technical devices we use to perceive the world. Certainly out of modesty or respect, this project is an oblique view, turning away from a frontal representation of the Other in order to plunge into what hybridizes in contact with him, in contact with his sacred lands and his real or fantasized layers.