Semilla de sol
By: Santiago Robles Bonfil
Edition: Edicio n facsimilar.
Publisher: UNAM, FAD
Place of publication: Ciudad de Me xico
Language: spa
Number of pages: 20
Subjects: Artists' books; Specimens; Collage; Themes, motives; Art and globalization
Description: Semilla de sol, by Santiago Robles, is the conjugation of confrontation. If the semantic construction of this statement is considered, it will be seen that, as in mythology, it tells a story with a dual purpose. On the one hand, it presents the juxtaposition of two ancestral figures related to the feminine and the masculine insofar as it shows the cultural, political and ontological condition of contemporary man. It is a documented fact that the images of the seed and the sun are identified with multiple meanings about the origin of life and the ideal of civilization. In the case of the Mesoamerican peoples, the sun and the seed are icons of a complex and profuse presence in history that, paradoxically, allow us to synthesize a cosmogony with transcendental repercussions in today's society. Such is the relevance of this event, Robles warns us, that we still, 21st century citizens, NAFTA survivors, witnesses of capitalism and protagonists of postmodernism, belong to the legacy of Tepeu, Qukumatz, Kauil and Ixmucane. 1 Robles' work begins with a remembrance of the origin of time, which implies a review of the history of man: "And the parents, creators and trainers said," and concludes with a parody of the famous phrase by Porky Pig, Looney Tunes character: "That's all folks!" 2 Put another way, Semilla de sol is a diorama in which it is possible to appreciate pre-Hispanic magical-mythological thought and the direct and overwhelming intervention of American culture in Latin American society and imagination since the late eighties. In other words, between the appearance of Tepeu in oral literature and that of Porky on color television there is an arc of more than three thousand years that includes the innumerable history of miscegenation that marks the present. The landscape of this story has the land as its main setting, an allegorical representation of women. The image is topped by a sky where the sun dwells, a recurring emblem of man; from the union of these figures germinates the possibility of overcoming time. Just as water is associated with the earth, the wind is associated with the sun; here is the permanence of life; copulation, agriculture and miscegenation; the fertilization of a people and the cultivation of a destiny: water man, earth man, wind man, fire man, corn man, sun seed. II Conceived as an artist's book, Semilla de sol adheres to Ulises Carrio n's aesthetic and political stance by assuming the book as "an autonomous and self-sufficient form", which is linked to the search for the self-exiled artist in Amsterdam: "Make a book it is to actualize your own ideal space-time sequence by creating a parallel sequence of signs, be they verbal or otherwise. ' In this sense, Robles' exercise makes possible the existence of a physical and narrative space in which we witness, through temporal leaps in the history of Mexico, the unfolding of a metaphor (sun seed) through the confrontation between images and texts from various and unexpected sources (codices, cartoons, free documents on the net) expressed in turn by the formal struggle between cochineal ink (pre-Hispanic pigment, manufactured) and acrylic paint (representative polymer of an industrial culture ). Closer to a palimpsest than to a historiography, Semilla de sol contributes a significant difference in the field of the artist's book, since the risk it assumes does not lie in its materiality, which is unusual in itself, nor in the authenticity of its entity, but rather to be conceived as an open space, a platform where other processes, investigations and tentative certainties can converge and originate. III In just three verses, almost a century ago, Ramo n Lo pez Velarde exposed the historical and paradigmatic condition of Mexico, and not only of modern Mexico described in La suave patria (April 24, 1921). Lo pez Velarde says: ℗łLike the young lady, my homeland, / on a metal floor, you live a day, / miraculously, like the lottery. It does not seem risky to me to read Santiago Robles' book under the oblique light of this disenchanted poem from his time. I consider it that way because Robles does not praise or apologize for corn, as neither does the poet from Zacatecas from the silver-rich national subsoil, but, on the contrary, resorting to parody and irony, he undertakes a scathing critique of this moment. While in La suave patria, the Mexican state and society of the twentieth century are seen as an insolent woman, servitude to herself, in Semilla de Sol, Mexico appears as an ambiguous, contradictory and amorphous community, without a legible face or voice. , and corn appears as a transvestite in Virgin Mary, War Granada, Cosmic Uterus, Transgenic Machinery, Seer Hand, Ixcamacuane and Death. Christian Barraga n. --(Texto publicado originalmente en la versio n impresa de la revista Tierra Adentro, agosto 2015, pa gina 67)
Notes: The publication has a run of only 500 copies, numbered.

Winner of the Bienal Universitaria de Arte y Disen o UNAM in the category of artist books.

"Para los interiores y guardas se utilizo  cartulina couche de 300 gr, para los forros amate artesanal y para el empaque cartulina meta lica oro mate de 16 puntos"--Colophon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In Spanish.