In the project Xipetotec or the Next Skin Katia Tirado refers to the Aztec deity Xipetotec, who was constantly reborn by flaying his victims and wearing their skin. She will cooperate with local tattoo artists and create on her body a “second skin” of signs and common points that epitomize the contemporary experiences of Mexico and Poland. This will be a civic ritual of recollection and consumption of collective memories translated and represented by a mediator in order to turn them into an anthropophagic image.
show intended for audience of 18 +
KATIA TIRADO (born 1965) is a Mexican performance and body piercing artist. In 1990 she left for Berlin where she became fascinated with situational ethics, the aesthetics of butoh dance and German cabaret. It was then that she started to experiment with the body, as a support for subjectivity and a space to process and distill memory — a cognitive machine for sensorial, political, affective, and poetical production. She destabilises gender constructions and the borders between public and private. The use of ritualised profanity and abjection have allowed her to build a language related with the politics of the body and its critical deconstruction.