Zacuanpapalotls
An Installation
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| Photographed by Apollo Fillmore |
In honor of
my family.
Many things inspired this body of work, but above all, it is
about transcendence.
The Aztecs
believed that the souls of our loved ones transform into monarch butterflies.
Every year
they return from the afterlife to the fir-crowned mountains of Michoacán,
so we may honor them on Dia de los Muertos.
To transcend means to go beyond, and self-transcendence means to
go beyond a prior state of oneself.
My family is
a living example of this; we exist above and beyond the limits of material
experience and are free from the limitations imposed by matter.
We left behind
a life in Mexico, guided blindly through an unforgiving desert by only our
prayers and a dream of something more.
Like our Aztec ancestors before us, our migration was not simply
a change in location, but a metamorphosis as well.
We are Zacuanpapalotls.
~ Nadia Rea Morales
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| Photograph by Apollo Fillmore |
