Lecture: “What we caught we threw away, what we didn’t catch we kept”

12.09.2013

Lecture by Mariana Castillo Deball

Alfred Maudslay was a British explorer who travelled extensively in the Maya region in Mexico and Guatemala between 1880-1920. Maudslay played a crucial role in the understanding of Maya hieroglyphic writing. He recorded the monument’s inscriptions with drawings, photographs and plaster casts. He also developed the technique known as paper squeezes, moulds made out of papier-mâché. Mariana Castillo Deball is interested in the trajectory of these objects, which depart from a direct contact with the original monuments and end up as negatives, positives, photographs and drawings. This immense amount of physical information travelled first as raw materials from England to the Maya region in the form of wrapping paper and plaster from London to Guatemala, returning to London as a precise and diverse record of the ancient Maya monuments.

Mariana Castillo Deball, born in 1975 in Mexico City, lives in Berlin. In her works she explores spaces of action and memory and constructs relationships between mathematics and philosophy, archeology and colonial history.

Lecture will be held in English