go to exhibition


Crocodile Skin of the Days, 2021
Wood panels engraved in CNC and oak appliqués
Courtesy of the artist

Castillo Deball has worked with cartographic representations from the colonial era in a series of pieces that take up the floor of the exhibition space. These wooden panels also serve as printing plates that, upon reproducing the image, reveal traces of the original drawing. In Crocodile Skin of the Days, she continues exploring this format through an engraved wooden floor that interprets plates 39 and 40 of the Codex Borgia, consisting of a spatial representation of time. The scene depicted in these plates is complex and so Castillo Deball only works with some of its elements: a tonalamatl on the skin of a reptile that envelops a sacrificial scene.

The Nahuatl word tonalamatl merges two concepts: tonalpohualli and amatl. The first refers to the system that allows us to count the tonalli, that is, the energy that flows through the cosmos, an irradiation that circulates through the calendar. The tonalpohualli unfolds through the registry of calendrical dates, divided into 260 days. The second term, amatl, refers to the amate paper that served as a material support for the count of days. According to researcher Ana Díaz Álvarez, in the Codex Borgia, the tonalamatl is found within what seems to be the skin of a reptile, with pointed scales like those of a crocodile. Calendrical signs surround the sacrifice of a human figure pierced by nine suns through different parts of his body. Each sun contains a perforated heart and torrents of blood flow out of each one. 


go to Falschgesichter