OAX-CAR-38-57 offers a critical, contemporary response to Cartographies of Craft in the State of Oaxaca (2013), a now-defunct digital platform. Faced with the absence of a tangible archive, the project proposes a new one: not as reconstruction, but as a situated and speculative gesture that brings two radically different territories into relation.
The title's code refers to Oaxaca, Carabanchel and the coordinates of an equidistant point between them in the North Atlantic. Water operates as a symbolic meeting place and as the axis of research into the eutectic: the exact point at which materials with different melting temperatures soften together. This image makes it possible to understand connection not as synthesis, but as a threshold of mutual transformation.
The research combines wild clay from Carabanchel, magnolia and ficus leaves calcined for glazes, waste from the other participating studios and analogue photographs taken in Oaxaca in 2015. The Tro-Cortesianus or Madrid Codex, especially the iconography of the rain god Chaac, activates the symbolic dimension. Ruins, relics, material tests and documents form an open archive about memory, migration and territory.