Designer and craftsman unite their creativity and reinterpret Moctezuma’s plume

Based on the concern raised by the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (1919-2013), creator among other emblematic spaces of the National Museum of Anthropology, How a Mesoamerican artist would act with current materialsdesigner Valeria Corona Berlanga and master craftsman Gerardo Hermosillo joined their creativity to reinterpret a piece of deep meaning for the Mexican people: Moctezuma’s plume.

The work in question is named The plume of modern Mexico, and is currently part of Unreleased 2024, collective exhibition that continues until January 15 at Espacio CDMX, located in the second section of Bosque de Chapultepec, as an extension of the Design Week Mexico meeting.

Inspired by the quetzalapanecáyotl or headdress of feathers and gold found in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, in Austria, which according to popular tradition, could have belonged to the tlatoani Moctezuma Xocoyotzin. This new creation, in the words of its makers, is the result of a reflection on living culture and ancestral aesthetics, as well as the intersection of two artistic visions and techniques: contemporary ones and those of pre-Hispanic origin.

“We seek resemantize the original piece through the use of contemporary materials, such as acrylic and LED light nodes, and the traditional metalworking technique developed by Gerardo Hermosillo,” says Valeria Corona, who is a textile designer and promoter of the Tragaluz project, with which she proposes to link new materials to traditional crafts to achieve, together, the unimaginable: weave the light.

In an interview, the creator (Puebla, 1995) maintains that this new plume It is an invitation to rethink the value of cultural heritage, not only as heritage, but as a space for disruptive innovation, which encourages children and young people to preserve the traditional art techniques of their communities and develop their proposals in a dialogue between generations and tools.

He adds that one of the main challenges in creating this piece – which, in addition to being transparent, illuminates and projects light – was how to reinterpret a symbol, an icon that is half hidden in our geneticsbecause he considers that, although not all Mexicans know Moctezuma’s plume, it is an element with which we immediately identify when we see it.

Leisure heritage

“In Unprecedented, Visitors find that there are new ways to play with our icons, reinterpret them in a respectful but also playful way, and if they identify with them, so much the better! That is what we would most like to happen with our pieces, that people feel proud of our cultural heritage and realize that it does not have to remain static, because neither traditional techniques, nor materials, nor society, nor culture are static processes, without constant change.”

Although the claim It was never to usurp the place of the original plumethe designer clarifies that her version of it did try to stick as closely as possible in terms of appearance. To begin with, they chose to reproduce the natural feathers with laser-cut acrylic, while the gold parts were made of black sheet, a very thin material.

Valeria Corona accepts the challenge represented by the reinterpretation of that feather headdress of pre-Hispanic origin, for which, she says, they resorted to a large amount of documentary material: “It is a piece of maximum engineering, no one imagines its construction or the network of rods that supports each pen. It weighs about 600 grams while ours weighs 17 kilos, plus it is not symmetrical. It has a very difficult angle to reproduce, which gives it the shape of a fan rather than a rainbow.

We simply cannot understand it in its entirety; It is spectacular, and daring to reinterpret it was crazy. It allowed us to realize the processes of the Amoraca masters (specialists in the creation of pieces of feather art in pre-Hispanic Mexico), who developed a piece of total engineering that, in our time, with the help of computers and the vernier to measure millimetrically, it didn’t work out for us.

In his opinion, not even the reproduction that is exhibited in the Anthropology Museum is a faithful copy of the original, and he specifies that The plume of modern Mexico es a very close approximation, but not exact In terms of dimensions, while Moctezuma’s measures 1.30 meters high by 1.78 in diameter, the one he authored is 1.30 by 2.20. We would have loved it to be the same size; However, we either respected the visual coherence or we respected the measurements. We never manage to have everything.

There is nothing defined yet, but it is very likely that this light headdress will be exhibited in other venues after its participation in Unreleased 2024.