Mexico's Day of the Dead inspires Czech artist

" ... Šimlová has experienced Dia de los Muertos firsthand on several trips to Mexico over the past few years, and she is fascinated by the Mexicans’ synthesis of pre-Columbian deities, rites and customs with the saints, demons, rites and customs of Spanish Catholicism. This unusual marriage shouldn’t be surprising to any European, as both cultures are strangely rooted in death and violence. It’s almost as if Spanish Catholic culture, with its history of ruthless inquisitions and self-destructive obsession with the occult and pagan practices, was bound to merge at some point with the Aztec culture, which has its own self-destructive history, including bloody human sacrifices.

 

Šimlová’s exhibition is additionally inspired by a rather long quote from the American novelist Tom Robbins, which begins: “Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe we are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from nature, to make extensive use of our pagan heritage.” Robbins maintains that links with our past must be re-established, although he points out that “to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles.” In other words, he isn’t espousing Thoreau, and he insists that Anglo-Saxons should not all rush out to become Hindus. “However, we have lost too many valuable things along the road of so-called progress, and you need to go back and retrieve them. If nothing else, to discover where you’ve been may enable you to guess at where you are going.”

 

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Europe has no modern counterpart to Mexico’s Day of the Dead. However, artists and artisans of the Middle Ages honored death in their own way, recreating unforgettable scenes of the danse macabre, or Dance of Death, on canvases and frescoes and in woodcuts.

 

“Air from the Thames” recalls this past by creating a collection of shadows, ghost figures or even dead souls in boxes, contained and struggling to get out. They are like lonely solo dancers in pristine lighted boxes, all moving in various rhythms to a modern danse macabre. ... "

 

~ From 'Updating the Danse Macabre' ~