Monpas
Following the reflection that has directed my artistic narrative so far, particularly matters and questions dealing with timeless aesthetic feelings, this new body of work brings to light a novel contour in my artistic output.
In Bhutan, the Land of the Thunder Dragon, where myths are true and history is a journey into legend and folklore, I found the narrative to share my vision and understanding of the mixed elements hidden in the history of my native country, Mexico, land of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.
Hidden away in the deep forest and high mountains, live the Monpas, the indigenous people and considered the first inhabitants. They were isolated from the Bhutanese for thousands of years, living sustainably as hunter-gatherers. Always small in number, today there are approximately four hundred and twenty Monpa living within three communities. Their distinct language, spiritual practices, dances, music, food and traditional clothing made from nettles, predates Buddhism being introduced to Bhutan. It has been less than twenty years since they were contacted with the intention of assimilation into the modern world.
To better understand the series, I invite the viewer to take into account my personal history: I am Mexican by birth, but spent more than twenty years living between North America and Europe. This gives the project a unique dimension: finding similarities of my culture in other cultures around the globe.
This body of work becomes my way to explore time throughout the similarities between Bhutan and Mexico that I found during my journey into the Land of the Thunder Dragon. The bond of proximity between these two countries portrays a different way of thinking about distance and sense of longing, while representing the experience of an absence of a common history, but, contradictorily, sharing an analogous physicality. Memories of my past overlap time in a kind of communication that is quickly fading; nevertheless, they are also expressions of a past where this exchange of cultural heritage and timeless elements are intertwined.
Confusing the viewer manipulating time “within” the photographs, blends in, in how experiences even the more prosaic ones, are inscribed in the fabric of my existence and how memory consolidates my personal narratives. These timeless aesthetic results over the images are intended to create an illusion of happiness, to cover and disguise the awkwardness of the human struggle when faced to another society’s culture.
Photographing the Monpas in Bhutan has been an exploration of an identity that intrigued me, rooted in the country, its inhabitants, culture, traditional values, and customs. This exploration materialized a reconciliation of seemingly distant and diverged cultural homes that allowed me to form a new multilayered reality.
