AMAZING LANDSCAPE DEAD ANIMAL
AMAZING VIEW DEAD ANIMAL
AMAZING LANDSCAPE THE DEAD ANIMALS
AMAZING LANDSCAPE DEAD ANIMALS
THE AMAZING LANDSCAPE THE DEAD ANIMAL
THE AMAZING FIELD THE DEAD ANIMAL
THE AMAZING MOUNTAIN THE DEAD ANIMAL
AMAZING MOUNTAIN DEAD ANIMAL
AMAZING FIELD DEAD ANIMAL
THE DEAD ANIMALS
During many years, a recurrent image came to my mind in different, seemingly unrelated circumstances. The scene was a very violent moment where a group of animals capture a prey. I suddenly stopped seeing that image and that allowed me to work with it. It must have come from a documentary film I saw as a child, but I like to think it is an ancestral inheritance, from the times when knowing how to read the footprints of an animal was essential for survival.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg, who has been very influential in my work throughout the years, once mentioned that the original act of narration can be found with the first hunters, who understood that the footprints they saw on the ground indicated the path their prey had walked.
At a brickworks in Ajalpan, Puebla State, Mexico, we recreated a scene where two wolves pursuit and capture a lamb on a floor of fresh clay tiles. An ethologist described the way in which this would happen in nature and two trainers coordinated the action with three real animals, avoiding any contact or harm between them. A year earlier I had done something similar, but with a hunting dog, following the traces of wild boars (Wrecking the floor tiles).
The shape and size of the clay floor surface is determined by the architecture of one of the rooms at Museo Tamayo where the work was shown.
The drawings hanging on the walls document part of the work process: the morning in the brickworks when the workers supposedly realize that some animals have ruined the floor they had just finished and, after capturing the guilty wolves, are getting ready to lynch them in the public square; the beginning of an orgy after a tiring day installing at the museum, and my partner and I in a hotel room where we stayed during the work at the brickworks.
616 fired clay floor tiles
39.5 x 39.5 x 4.5 cm each
(1625 x 586 cm)
7 drawings, pencil on paper.
(5)21.6 x 27.9 cm and (2) 43.2 x 27.9 cm
and steel pieces.
Produced by Museo Tamayo.
With the technical assistance of Bonifacio Lopez's team, Carlos Paredes team, Oscar Garduño and Manuel Gonzalez.
Ethologist: Jorge Servín
Wolf trainers: Víctor Manuel Valdés
and Aparicio family.
Wolves: Luiz Fernando and Balto.