Ausgestellt in VOXELS
“¿Dónde está mi huipil?“, übersetzt: „Wo ist mein Huipil?“
2022
Hand-woven Mayan dresses (esp. huipiles) have an important symbolic meaning for the numerous indigenous Mayan communities in Guatemala. Mayan women, who take care of the weaving, need several months to create a huipil.
The fabric for the huipiles is not only used for dresses: by being fabricated into bags, hats, coasters, lamps etc., the clothes get a second life as utility items which are then sold to tourists from all over the world. This painting invites us to wonder where those artistic cloths ended up? For the communities where they originate, they are fraught with symbolic importance and for those who purchased them their meaning might change entirely?
Do their second lives enable them to acquire a new symbolic meaning?