Constructive Manual Like Specimens Like Myself

2010, Oaxaca

Constructive Manual for Specimens Like Myself, unfolds at the intersection of printmaking, performance, and embodied knowledge. It emerges from the need to understand a body shaped by chronic illness—one that resists control and does not fully align with clinical frameworks. A personal encounter with Zapotec healing practices redirects the work. Through a cleansing ritual, and the use of medicinal plants, the process shifts toward forms of knowledge carried through the body and the vegetal. A botanical press becomes both tool and site of contact, where pressure, time, and organic matter leave their traces. A series of performative self-portraits with a wooden chair follows the body through states of tension and release. The work takes the form of a manual that does not instruct or resolve, but remains close to a body in process—an affective map in continuous relation with the living, the vegetal, and the invisible.

Endless Flight, 2010, Purple morning glory, Angel trumpet, ( hallucinogenic plants) and the wing of a sparrow, pressed on paper intervine with graphics.

Susto, 2010, Herb of grace, Rosemary and Native Oaxacan Basil, ( plants used in a cleansing by a Zapotecan medicine woman ¨Curandera¨) intervine by graphics.

Exploration with two chairs, Oaxaca 2009.