Pre-Columbian codices report cosmogonies full of cruelty and eroticism, magic and transformations. Early interpretations, completely biased, of these pictograms came to us from the hosts of Hispanic conquerors, scandalized by polisexual divinity and phallic worship.
In Mayan and Huasteca cultures, goddesses related to sexuality as Ixchel and Tlazolteotl were hermaphrodites. The second one incited to lust and drunkenness but was the assistant of women giving birth, healing, earth and moon deity. It was often represented defecating to symbolize the inner cleansing process.
Not surprising that the Mexican Rurru Mipanochia has Tlazolteotl in the highest place of its own pantheon. Rurru is inspired by those Nahua codexes to rewrite the erotic history as she wish it to be read by archaeologists of the future. Of course, a subjective codex, narrated in first person, experienced from the burning of her own pussy.
In her artwork takes up the chromatic symbolism that Maya and Aztecs gave to turquoise (jade) and yellow (corn), displaying in vignettes the vicissitudes of sacred jaguars, abductions, priests dancing with skins of young flayed, sperm engendering bats, vulvas transformed in flowers … Rurru retrieves the transgressive load of those elusive identities, metamorphic, chimerical … to demand the opening of pleasure to nonnormative tastes, noncanonical bodies, unregulated sexualities.
Thus, characters with feather headdresses, jaguar heads or dogs Xolotl and platform shoes, wear fancy panties subjected to garters and sexual harnesses under their skirts. Sometimes they are provided with orthopedic extensions, with which the artist gives visibility to paraphilias as attraction to motor disabilities, which in turn refers to the Mesoamerican pictorial device to associate bodily deformity with sexual transgression. Representations of dog Xolotl as crippled or with twisted limbs responds to its deviation from certain rules in the sexual sphere, according to recent anthropological studies.
Rurru rescues this liberating function of ritual transgression through the figure of the monster and what escapes dichotomous precepts: transvestism, bestiality, homosexuality… Also reenacts the ambivalent sense that body fluids had for those cultures, the magical power awarded to menstruation and sexual secretions (seeds of life and death omens). The existence of a goddess of the filth that is once the goddess of love notices the acceptance of confused boundaries of identity, their viscous, pleasant and disturbing sprawl. That is, the full acceptance of what modernity reviled as perverse, abject.
Like her progenitors Xochiquetzal and Tlazolteotl, women characterized by Rurru with long hair and nipple piercings are also voluptuous and warriors. They enjoy of wise cunnilinguis practiced by feathered serpents, while the descendants of Quetzacoal spill their semen on sacred chalices. Onanism or orgiastic rite, telluric fertility and carnal satisfaction, everything fits when pleasure is seen as divine gift and lifeblood.
Solo exhibition in: Recyclart, Gallery 21, Brussels, 26th May- 19th June