Mexican artist reinterprets brutal Aztec ritual

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican artist Hector Velazquez leaned in close and picked dust from one of his sculptures in a dim alcove of his exposition space.\n"They attract flies," he said in a disheartened voice.\nUnfortunate, yes, but also fitting for an exhibit that is all about dead bodies and new life. The tall, lanky artist's exhibit, "Xipe Totec," is a personal interpretation of a gruesome Aztec ritual of human sacrifice by the pre-Hispanic god of the same name. Each year, skin from humans was stripped off and worn by priests until the dried hide disintegrated, revealing the priests' own skin -- a symbol of the year's harvest.\nAmid growing interest in Aztec culture, Velazquez's modern interpretation of the rite is incredibly timely. Visitors to his show at the Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico City may not realize they are just blocks away from the excavation of a newly found site in Mexico City's center that archaeologists believe holds the tomb of Aztec emperor Ahuizotl, who ruled from 1486 to 1502, and whose son, Moctezuma, was defeated by the Spaniards.\nIn the modern, airy cultural center, Velazquez's yarn-surfaced sculptures bring the ancient culture into modern times. But instead of the blood and violence of Xipe Totec, his sculptures evoke relationships and personal renewal.\nWhile it includes photography, clay and quilted surfaces, most of the exhibit consists of models of arms, legs, heads, mouths and elbows. They are covered in carefully layered yarn, giving it a porous texture akin to that of human skin.\nThe show starts with a canvas meant to represent a swath of human hide. To create a rough silhouette of both sides of the human body, Velazquez laid on his back on the canvas, then rolled over onto his stomach, tracing the entire form. Many of the pieces are three-dimensional portraits of family members, their faces layered over models of the artist's own eyes and ears to form a sort of combined identity.\n"We all need one another to survive," he said.\nIn an angular space with a sloped floor and a high ceiling, Velazquez has covered the walls with clay replicas of his own ears in a work called "Gritos," or "Screams." Cartoonish, balloonlike heads with his own ears and mouth suspended from the ceiling seem to shout at the ears on the walls.\n"I'm always working on emotions and sensations and their representation," he said.\nThe ancient rite caught Velazquez's eye in Berlin in 2001, where he lived until early 2006. At an exhibit on Xipe Totec in that city's Ethnographic Museum, he saw human figures covered with a sacrificial skin, tied in front and back. Because he had worked with the idea of skin in the past, he knew he could reinterpret the idea according to his own thoughts and environment. A book by art critic Paul Westheim furthered his interest, and he began work on the lengthy project, first exhibited in 2004 in the same museum.\nVelazquez insists that he never meant to do a systematic analysis of the ritual, and did not feel like he was exploring his own cultural roots by using a reference from Aztec culture.\n"I feel almost completely separate from pre-Hispanic culture," he said, explaining that he saw a way to communicate his own message through Xipe Totec. "I'm interested in taking certain symbols from this ritual."\nVelazquez wants his exhibit to impact visitors without having them relate it to the story of the ritual on which the show is based. His modern interpretation of a violent ritual will not lead everyone to think about the Aztecs, he said.\n"If it gets linked to the ritual, that's great," he said. "But it isn't indispensable."\nAs Velazquez strolls up the exhibit's walkway, he passes two hands clasped as if delicately holding something inside, then a circle of elbows with a flowerlike shape. In the same room hangs a quilted version of a topographical map of Banff, Canada, where Velazquez went twice on artists' retreats. The front resembles mountains and rivers, but the back, with thousands of knotted and hanging threads, looks like a cross-section of a human body with its veins and arteries exposed.\nKaren Cordero, a professor at Mexico's Iberoamerican University, first saw Velazquez's work in 1993 at a house in Mexico City's affluent Polanco neighborhood where young artists were exhibiting their work. She was struck by his originality. His piece at the time was a pile of bags filled with soil that seemed to emerge from a hole in the wall that was actually a small passageway to other parts of the house.\n"His way of working with unusual forms caught my attention," Cordero said.\nCordero praised the artist's technique in the newest exhibit.\n"The technique has a ritual aspect, almost Zen," she said.