Mariana Castillo Deball’s Oracles
By Sandra Rozental


In Mexico, we are born, raised and shaped as individuals in an environment populated by carved stones and images of characters clad with  breastplates and feathered headdresses, presented to us as our mythical ancestors. In The Where I Am Is Vanishing, as in much of her artistic production, Mariana Castillo Deball takes up elements from the ancient civilizations that inhabited this territory to remind us that the pre-Hispanic has not always been considered to the backbone nor the heritage of the nation. The vestiges of this past have also been an object of fear, violence, destruction, forgetting, or simple neglect, or more recently, of fascination and curiosity, which led them to be looted as scientific specimens destined for museum collections or exhibited as examples of indigenous aesthetics and ontologies.

For this piece, Castillo Deball explores pre-Hispanic documents or “books”—known as codices—as one of these vestiges. Her interest lies in their nature as a means for telling stories whose narrative techniques and visual languages are different than those used in the books of Western cultures. For example, in codices, the sequence of images communicates a message that is “read” quite differently than a text that utilizes an alphabet and syntax. Much as in comic books, representations of places and characters in different timeframes can coexist on the same plane and the same event can even be shown simultaneously  from a variety of actors´s perspectives. These documents invite nonlinear readings through visual elements that guide the gaze in different directions, like the footprints that bear witness to migrations and paths taken.

Castillo Deball offers us a new, twenty-first-century codex that takes up many of these narrative techniques and visual languages. The piece is a drawing that unfolds on paper like a codex, accompanied by an audiovisual piece that also replicates the structure of these documents. Through video, the artist intertwines a sequence of figures with musical fragments and a collage of masculine and feminine voices reading texts. These are written in four European languages (Spanish, English, German and Italian) for those  by authors who attempted to interpret the content of codices at different times and in different contexts, as well as in Nahuatl (a language that was written with glyphs and logograms rather than an alphabet during the pre-Hispanic period) for more poetic texts that seek to represent Indigenous cosmologies. The music and voices, often overlapping, contribute to the heteroglossia that constitutes the codex as an object in time and to the artist’s meditations on language and the impossibility of accessing pure meanings.

Thus, Castillo Deball uses codices as material vestiges that have been transformed into fields of possible interpretations of the pre-Hispanic world. The artist chose to work with the Codex Borgia, one of the few prophetic books—or tonalpohualli—that have been preserved, which were used to predict human destiny. These books revealed but also obscured through their use of associations, metonyms, metaphors and analogies that needed to be interpreted by specialists responsible for unravelling the layers of meaning coded in their visual language. The priests and diviners who used these books—themselves immersed in the cultures that created them—spent years studying to be able to interpret them. These prophetic books functioned as mirrors, as instruments of revelation in which the person reading them, through their own experience and learned knowledge, saw themselves and also saw in them what was hidden for the majority. Precisely for this reason, these codices have been reluctant to reveal their secrets in the present.

The Codex Borgia, in particular, is considered the most impenetrable of the prophetic codices, even for specialists. It captures a sophisticated understanding of time, complex systems for organizing it, and esoteric elements for predicting  and manipulating it, which have been the object of many studies. Nevertheless, we still know very little about its history. We aren’t certain about when, where or by whom it was written. Nor do we know how it reached Europe, where it was discovered in the seventeenth century in a private library in what is now Italy, where it was acquired by Cardinal Stefano Borgia, who gave it its name.

Through the interaction between image and audio, the piece reproduces and, at the same time, disarticulates the codex as a legible document. Castillo Deball makes use of figures taken from the Codex Borgia, as well as the Glasgow, Tudela and Azcatitlán codices, which depicted the violence of the Conquest and the burning of documents considered to be sources of indigenous idolatry, yet she reproduces them in black-and-white instead of their characteristic color. The artist, who is deeply interested in processes of reproduction and the relationship between positives and negatives implied by printing, engraving and the gesture of drawing itself, traces ancient figures while distilling them, simplifying them without necessarily making them more accessible or transparent.

As a diviner in the pre-Hispanic era would have done, Castillo Deball selects her own combinations of figures and signs to make the Codex Borgia speak, to give voice to the oracle. Only it’s not the future—it’s never just the future—but the past that the codex speaks to, which also constitutes destiny in a sense. The piece narrates the Codex Borgia´s journey from Mexico to Europe, its adventures and the threats from different actors—inquisitors, collectors, scholars, and even some mischievous children who tried to burn it, unaware of the treasure they held in their hands.

Castillo Deball doesn’t intend to reveal new knowledge on codices in general nor on the Codex Borgia in particular. Rather, she tells us new stories about these documents and the knowledge they contain by utilizing their narrative techniques: the use of graphic and visual elements to communicate messages, the palimpsest of times and spaces, the structure of the book-screen folded like an accordion, the appearance of hybrid languages and fragmentary translations produced by a moment of intercultural contact.

While institutions, museums and scholars of the pre-Hispanic world have offered us explanations and accompanied each newly unearthed discovery with context, origins and detailed information, Castillo Deball invites us to approach the pre-Hispanic past and its remains—even the codices, which have been understood as books that can be read, translated and interpreted—through the lack of clues or definitive codes. She invites us to see them through their irremediably uncertain, incomplete and open nature. Borrowing the title of the piece from Outline for a Tropical Ode in Four Voices by the poet Carlos Pellicer—another enthusiast and collector of the pre-Hispanic—the artist undermines scientific attempts to “capture” and stabilize these documents, allowing us to experience them in all their poetic potential, through surprise, speculation and those excesses that escape any demand for unitary, clear and coherent meanings.

For Castillo Deball, the pre-Hispanic, its material remains and their diverse interpretations contain keys to understanding the present more than the past. Through her work, in replicas of iconic pieces such as Coatlicue, reworkings of colonial maps, recyclings of the texts, practices and methodologies of renowned archaeologists and reappropriations of pre-Hispanic narrative techniques and visual languages, the artist not only reanimates this past, but the ways in which its vestiges have allowed the imagination to take flight over time. She thus focuses on what she calls the “margins”of archaeology: its supports, instruments and processes, which have also been key to constructing the discipline´s objects. Through them, she reveals how the ruins and remains of that past have triggered interpretations that are sometimes accurate, sometimes fantastic and sometimes somewhere in between, in a tremendously productive place between science and fiction.

By reiterating the material gestures incarnated in the creation and reading of prophetic codices, the artist denaturalizes the interpretations that have been made of them and our desire to propose a unitary, stable reading of their contents. Castillo Deball uses drawing and video to create a new prophetic object with many possibilities for interpretation that, as with the pre-Hispanic prophetic books, depend on who, how and when they are done. In The Where I Am Is Vanishing, she creates a new instrument through which we can see our own destinies as they are forged in the past, thus reconstituting the codex as a mirror in which we can see and be seen, this time from the vantage point of the present.