In a community in Chinantla, there is a tree called majé in Chinantec, or Jonote in Spanish. From its bark, a fiber is extracted that, before the arrival of plastic, was used to make bags for carrying squash and maize harvests.
This is the story of a fiber and its appearance in my life, of how, in the process of learning about it, tales of agriculture and field programs, coffee planting, and rain harvesting were woven together, and of my friendship with the family of who would become my teacher, “Don Eligio”.
In the threads of the fiber, I see memories of land expropriation due to the construction of megaprojects, of past tobacco plantations, and reflections on what it means to work and learn from a new territory. On how to be careful and honest with the contradictions that inhabit the dynamics of contemporary art and its symbolic extractivism, on navigating the traps of the ego, and on the possibility of affirming that individual exhibitions do not exist, for, as in life itself, care is sustained by a multitude of friends, trees, animals, and microorganisms that accompany us in various dimensions.