This journey started on the 9th of April 2013, the day of my mother’s suicide. She was born in a Romani community in the north of Mexico City, daughter of a Romani prostitute working in a cabaret.

Parallel to this event, I was starting the production of a series of photographs entitled Forehead, which consisted on portraits of individuals with a laser pointed over the foreheads. After receiving the news from my sister, I was forced to cancel the production, but two very important persons in my life –Mariana García and Gudinni Cortina– produced the work without me, which no words can define my gratitude.

I met Aki Onda almost 20 years ago in New York. In 2013, he asked me to make the camera for an action performed by Akio Suzuki which consisted in talking to his friend Rolf Julius, who died in 2011. Through whistlers and stones, Akio talked with him while visiting places in Berlin and Potsdam where they used to hang out together. I filmed the process. Unfortunately, all this material got lost after being robed in Valparaiso, Chile. This encounters with Aki and Akio marked me, and a big part of this journey started there.

I red about Itako, an almost extinguished practice. Itako are blind women mediums in the North of Japan. I traveled to Japan to meet the oldest Itako in Japan. This was the moment I learned about a space without dimensions, in which all things —what we define as things— are together at once. A space without temperature and proportions. A deep confrontation —or better said—,  the destruction of all my principles, habits and agreements.

I traveled to Chile searching for ancient Amauta knowledge. We traveled to Atacama to visit the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. After this, we visited a astro-archeologist in Toconao who explained us how the cosmos can be red through refraction.

I traveled to Bolivia. There, the encounter was with a Yatiri, an Aymara who read coca leaves as a medium for divination and scrying. He had a small body, incredibly strong, penetrating eyes and used hands with rings. His fingers had marks, cuts and tattoos. Rings with different forms. We drove to a mountain to make an offer. A “mesa”, for the mountain. An incredibly beautiful offer for the mountain itself. Full of colors, forms, and materials. Plastic, sugar, beer, tobacco, coca leaves, animal fat and flowers. In the middle of strong winds, we burned an animal, chew coca leaves and after the ceremony we drank beer and smoked strong tobacco, raw. After this, the Yatiri asked me to visit him again in his working place. I did it. The place was small, with almost no light. Dense and syncretic. He talked with me and explained me the value of presence and vibration. The importance of love. We made another “mesa” for Rom, my son. A different one. Animal fat, stones, seeds and undefined objects covered with cotton. He blew on the object several times, spitted. Also over me.

After several trials and failures, fighting against something that stopped the process continuously, I traveled to India to work with an Aghori. A tantra master whose practice is devoted the Death, more specifically to the human body: The Corpse. Aghoris used to live in the cremation places, a practice that doesn’t differentiate bipolarity. Now, after the “acceptance” of the West into India, following the judgment of foreigners and some conservatives in the country, this kind of acetic practitioners moved to the mountains of remote places.

After a long journey I was there, in the other side of the Ganges, in front of skulls, metal figures, fruits, flowers and incenses. A smell of death, burnt flesh and bones. There, crying of surprise. Overwhelmed.

He talked to me in a language I could not understand, but with the help of Avinash I understood I have to come back the day after, early in the morning to make an offer. He made a long ceremony, I can say maybe over 10 hours, staring in his altar towards the Ganges river.

The Ganges is Vernacular. One of the most polluted rivers in the world. For the offer, I went inside the water, between corpses and trash, to clean with him a big and heavy metal figure and to leave my clothes. I had a long piece of silk, black, with a square embroiled by hand by the Muslim tailor days before. I made it for this, an offer.

We made fire and cooked rice with milk and sugar. He screamed, spitted and prayed. He drank water from the Ganges. I made balls of sand between worms and trash, naked. He showed me how to make fire with a match, using the body to protect the flame. He showed me the power of faith, and how, after all, Death is just a convention created by a system of control based on the administration of fear.