Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim: Hello, my name is Gala Porras-Kim. 

I found this stone called La Mojarra Stela 1, that was found in the south of Mexico in 1986 I think. It has this Mesoamerican text that nobody actually knows what it means, and so I thought that since the writing form is so close to a drawing practice, it would be interesting to try and see how to find meaning based on the aesthetic qualities of the text. 

The first one is based on the idea of using obsidian mirrors in Mesoamerica. So obsidian mirrors in Mesoamerica were used for divination before, so people would see the reflection and try to understand what they were about, or find something about themselves that they didn't know, or reflect something. So I thought that maybe this method could work and we could try it out. 

The second one is an image of the stone to scale where all this text was carved into. So the object in front of it is a device that I made to separate the aesthetic elements of the text. For example, you can separate them by all the circles, or all the lines, or all these other ways of looking for aesthetic connections in the drawing instead of trying to look at the whole thing.

The image of the third one is the outline of all this text, and it has a projection of the different characters moving. So it would be like this randomized, by chance, coincidence way, in case somebody or a viewer can find the connection between the characters.