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Objects have an active role in the interactions among humans and non-humans: things circulate; take part in social relations, have agency. They can be saturated of various meanings and values, while their materiality can shape human activity and perception. The object speaks is a series of digital contents in which a chosen object is presented in its cultural and artistic specificity, highlighting how the creation of an object is a complex event that intertwines subjectivities, practices, beliefs, materials.
The Wauja people inhabit the upper Xingu, on the banks of the Batovi River. Its millenary tradition of ceramic work is extremely appreciated by other indigenous groups and is currently the basis of the village’s economic support. The cosmological origin of Wauja pottery lies in the figure of the Kamalu Hai, the mythical canoe snake that brought clay to the community. He has a body that resembles an alligator and has singing pans on his back.
When the Sun (Kemo) and the Moon (Kejo) created day and night, they broke all pots and pans. The people learned to make pottery from the sight of the snake canoe down the river. On his journey through Batovi, Kamalu Hai left his waste as raw material for the manufacture of ceramics and showed, with his singing pans, the shapes of the vessels. The pieces that are produced until today are based on the models that Kamalu Hai brought on his back.
The production of these pieces thus represents ancestral and ritual knowledge, which connects the Wauja with the extra-human dimension of their cosmology.
The Object Speaks: Kamalu Hai was created by Patricia Meneses and Laura Manganote.
Kintsugi, that can be translated as mending or repairing with gold, is a centenary Japanese tradition and technique of reconstructing broken ceramics that emphasizes and decorates the repair and the scars on the body of the fragmented and reconstituted piece. The technique consists of seaming the parts of the broken piece with urushi lacquer, a vegetable resin, removing the excess lacquer by abrasion with charcoal, and sprinkling gold or silver powder over the seams, bringing distinction to the parts that have been reconstructed. Regardless of the type of material used to promote the repair or renovation of the broken piece, the evocation of the pathos of things is present, mono no aware, a kind of complicity with matter, with the human and the non-human, its beauty and its ephemerality, its beauty in ephemerality. In this sense, the practice of not only mending broken objects without hiding their imperfections, but admiring them even more for the imperfections they embody, is similar to enjoying the brief blossoming of cherry trees, in an ode to the dynamism of life and the passage of time.
The Object Speaks: KINTSUGI was created by Laura Manganote and Juliana Maués.
The plastic capacity of clay evokes transformation. In the hands of the skilled potter, it can take on various forms and, after firing, durably consolidate the modeled aspect. Chemical transformation, the firing of clay alters its physical consistency and causes changes in color, processes that can be controlled through manufacturing techniques.
Such observation, of technological and material character, allows an approximation to the concept of relational agency. An attribute present in certain materials and artifacts in Mayan ontologies, ancient and modern, where the need for human action is admitted for the transfer of protagonism to things. Animated by the life of the one who gives them life, matter made object can, in turn, shape the relations of the world around it.
Recovered from one of the burials of the elites of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, this triptych fish effigy vessel is a unique specimen that condenses not only the technical knowledge, but also the potentiality of its form and shape. Clay rendered fish (“Kay” in classical Maya and Yucatecan) now transforms and is transformed by the context in which it is activated. In Maya art, fish usually assume the role of water qualifiers: pottery converted into fish is fish-vessel.
Water is the primary medium of metamorphosis for the corn-related cultural heroes in Maya mythologies. In the Popol Vuh, Hunahpu and Xbalanque are killed by the lords of Xibalba, the Underworld. Their bones are ground up like corn and thrown into the water, where they regenerate first as man-fish, then transform into two indigents to subsequently defeat their enemies.
Aquatic themes are very present in the art of Kaminaljuyu, located where Guatemala City is today. Animals and deities of the waters, embodied in portable objects and monuments, attest to the effort of the ruling elites to establish a direct connection with the power of the waters in their different forms.
The fish effigy vessel is part of this effort to create links with these forces. It transforms the tomb where it was deposited into a watery environment. Death itself, from the perspective of the ancient Maya, can be perceived as a path to be traveled and a means of metamorphosis, present in the expressions och bih and och ha’, respectively “to enter the path” and “to enter the water”. Both used in inscriptions to announce the death of rulers, who sought to emulate the cultural heroes of the corn.
The Object Speaks: Vasilha Kay was created by Laura Manganote and Fernando Pesce.