Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Friedrichshain

PERES PROJECTS

Bayrol Jiménez: News from the Netherworld

18. Februar – 18. März 2022

(Work by Bayrol Jiménez concerning the last dwelling of the two great emperors of ancient Mexico)

The chronicles of the feats, life, and cosmogony of the ancient Mexicans have demonstrated, before and after the Spanish conquest, a continuous relationship and coexistence between history and myth, reality and its transformation into oneiric ambiguity. In the most famous chronicles of pre-hispanic Mexico, the true stories inhabit an eternal limbo leaning towards the side of the myths of battles, pilgrimages and heroes. The gods not only reign over mortals but also present themselves suffering with them and transforming human lives within a nebulous setting of dream mythology, historic events and interpretations.

Contemporary historians study the ancient codex as well as chroniclers of the Indies. Through varying and numerous sources or stories emanating from ancient Mexico and the Spanish colony, the study of friar Diego Durán, friar Bernardino de Sahagún, Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc or the Jesuit Juan de Tovar (amongst others), aims to put together a coherent version of a past whose natural vacillation is also a charm for the imagination and is in need of urgent research. The Toltec culture has not only been the most important and influential in central Mexico, yet it is also the direct precedent to the myths, knowledge, architecture and foundation of the ancient Tenochtitlan, today known as Mexico City. Ancient Tollan, the city of the Toltecs, was the seed that subsequently made way for the powerful Aztec empire, whose remaining traces, culture and character is still part of the fabric of contemporary Mexico.