TOTEMS. POLVO DE LUNA

Totems

A silver shard pierces a mirror. The gap reveals another world and another time. Stick your head through and gaze. Smell. The colour red smells like another space. One where sap and

cinnabar shaped the gods. We are there. A divine tree has appeared throughout the world. It takes root across the earth. Shoots sprout from different geographies. It speaks ancient languages. It feeds on the dead and creates flowers, making birds sing new possibilities. An pauses and watches as a lake reflects in it. The lake swims in the moon. It learns from the fish, their rhythm, and their dance. The lake lands on the moon and dances to magical music.A magician brings his hands to his head. He feels heat in his temple. An idea takes hold of him obsessively. To populate the world with new flowers and new fauna; he considers how to sculpt and mould them. His raw material? The stars will reveal it. A long heared rabbit with bulging eyes runs down a path made of rainbow remnants. The colours invade his grumpy journey. After the rain, the sun creates its havoc. Effervescent colours along the path silence his rant. The forest blooms.A tree with many ears bends toward the grey sky. It brings and whispers secrets from the underworld, drawing a smile from the universe. The sky turns blue. A silver shard passes at the speed of a comet. What doom awaits the world? A moon washes its face in the lake that courts it. It sheds its silver without blushing.Something is about to happen. A comet passes in front of it.

Omen.

A comet brushes the face of the earth. Serpent’s tail. Multi-coloured scales of a cosmic creature. The sky is about to turn to nougat. This is how a painter describes the world. With science and necromancy. With humour and tinctures. With zephyrs and fauns, between Mexico and England.

A silver shard pierces a mirror. The gap reveals another world and another time. Stick your head through and gaze. Smell. The colour red smells like another space. One where sap and cinnabar shaped the gods. Here we are.

Raúl Pina Pérez is an artist devoted to alchemy. From his deepest nostalgia, he longs to grasp the colour of his homeland and merge it with his current universe, also full of magic; blending goblins and fairies from two different continents, he asks the oracles—ominous skulls full of answers—the fate of his lineage. His spirit feeds on Shakespeare and the Mexican tradition of the return of the dead. With maguey thorns, he extracts the sap from oak and ahuehuete trees to give us, with his own philosopher’s stone, a blow to our skulls and transform pain into colours, mirrors, trees, women, moons, lakes, magicians, and moon rabbits; because in Mexico, everyone knows that rabbits live on the moon.

Text by Mardonio Carballo, 2024.

Mardonio Carballo- Poet, journalist, editor, actor, broadcaster, producer, translator, and Nahua

activist. Mardonio Carballo recently published La Canción de las Flores, a book that brings

together forty-nine poems printed on paper made from corn leaves and vine, publishes simultaneously in Nahuatl-Spanish, Nahuatl-English, and Nahuatl-French.

Raúl Pina Pérez (b 1961) in Pachuca Hidalgo, México.

He studied at La Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, México

Raul Pina Perez’ works are in the Collection of Latin American Art of the University of Essex and

University of Hertfordshire as well as in many private collections in Mexico and the UK

Installation photography by Varvara Uhlik