Sisal Hemp Cycle (1998), IPA 2018

International Photography Award Entry

As a curious Mexican native, I traveled in 1998 with a couple of analog cameras with the sole objective of documenting the Sisal Hemp cycle that began with it’s extraction at the (now extinct) San Bernardo Hacienda at the Kopomá municipality with further manual dyeing and entwining at Chocholá de los Venados, also a municipality in the southern state of Yucatán.

What these images show, (which subtly informed what my artistic practice has become ever since) is the recovery, reappropriation or analysis of certain systems through either current or outdated technology in different scenarios.

Yet, in this particular case, my main concern was really about the strong presence of extinction and the slow decay of a whole system that once, became a striving economy for the state. It was a nostalgic sense of loss from a way of life that I called the “turkey’s pace”, one completely cut off from the train of modernity, an indigenous culture with an artisanal hand-weaving background left behind. What would become of the knowledge of our elders? What were the names of the barks of the trees that brought color to the world we lived upon?

These were times where kids worked (and still do) around heavy and dangerous machinery, where limbs were lost and no shoes were worn. Long days of sisal harvest, and the back bending recovery of the fibre under the lost force of a machinery that incorporated improvised parts instead of the original ones that the owners of the Haciendas were never able to supply. These were hot afternoons where kids had fun under a water hose and not in front of a cell phone. Maybe it was then, I foresaw something evanescent that had to be preserved so it could be later shown?

Paulina Sierra