WELLCOME: no coger coco by irak morales
GENEALOGY
Establishing the lineage of irak morales with any precision is no simple task. It likely belongs to a tradition of beings who touch things before seeing them, who dance before they walk, or who speak with fragments of matter before those fragments become organism. The hypothesis that all of this implies an ancient, unknown lineage cannot be ruled out.
Nor can it be confirmed.
What is known is that irak morales was born in Tenochtitlan México, 21st century, in the area bordering the State of Mexico, where it is unclear whether the asphalt begins or ends - or even whether it is valid to call that thing asphalt at all. This border - between what already is and what is not yet - is the natural territory of what might be called the practice of irak morales.
Curiously, but in keeping with this mystery, no one knows when la santa trenza appeared either. It is said she was always there, waiting. That irak morales did not summon her but simply tuned into her frequency. Some hold that she arrived on a specific day, in a specific place - a room with a photocopier, a beach, a dry bathroom - and that from that moment on, the two share the same body.
The tacit agreement between explanations seems to be that both irak and la trenza actively destabilize the very notion of the one as well as the two.
La trenza as a form suggests as much: strands that are one and many at once. Yet for there to be a braid, there must be separation. The strands do not fuse - they pass, alternately, over and under. The unity of the braid depends on its parts never occupying exactly the same place at the same time.
The word "santa" that precedes "trenza" invokes the devotional and the miraculous. No one knows exactly who gave her this name. It was possibly la santa trenza herself who decided it.
PERSONAL HISTORY
irak morales discovered his capacities in a non-verbal way, purely through contact with materials. Iron. Saliva. Corn. Sand. Thread stretched taut between two points creates an invisible barrier and a void no eye can enter. He learned to tune into what materials had not yet revealed.
La santa trenza, for her part, already knew. She did not have to learn. Her relationship with materials is not one of learning but of recognition and manipulation - like someone returning to a place they have already been, even if irak morales does not remember it.
irak morales has allowed himself to be sculptor, walker, zine-maker, teacher. He took part in collective actions in Chimalhuacán and in San Cristóbal de Las Casas and in Guasave, Sinaloa, in France, Switzerland, Indonesia, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez - as far as we know. In those places irak morales left behind structures, residues, love letters, and exceptional drinks, often burning ones. La santa trenza left something else: a modification in the vibrational behavior of spaces, an ethereal map that sometimes even irak himself cannot identify - only move through.
WORKING MODES
The working modes can be divided, provisionally, into four categories. First: sculpture as the nervous system of space. Second: video and photography as records of what the eye alone cannot retain. Third: collective action as the redistribution of gesture. Fourth: publication as an object that takes shape in the hands of whoever receives it.
These categories belong, for the most part, to irak morales. They are the ones that can be named, documented, dated, included in a résumé or an art exhibition.
The modes of la santa trenza are harder to catalog. They operate at the margins of the above - in the space between the floor and the air of a sculpture, in the black between one image and the next, in the silence after a mark finishes manifesting. She produces no objects. She produces the sensation that something just happened or is about to happen, without it being possible to say what.
A bottle of mezcal that catches fire without any explanation, in the hands of a French curator. Like Buddhist masters who generate flames from the tip of their index finger.
irak morales often works with materials he finds. La santa trenza recognizes them. For her, the dead fish on the beach in Guasave was already a sculpture before irak morales saw it. It was la santa who guided him - without his knowing - directly toward no coger coco, in Medellín.
DIAGNOSIS
I personally had the opportunity to observe the work under conditions I cannot describe with full precision, because the moment I tried to fix what I was seeing, what I was seeing changed in nature. I suspect this is because I was not always observing the same entity.
I watched him - irak morales - walk across the asphalt of Mexico City and trace with vinyl paint the cracks that were already there. The cracks spoke. He followed them. The result was not a drawing but a reading. This is irak morales: the mark, the walking, the paint.
What I saw afterward was something else. The dried paint on the asphalt, days later, untouched by anyone, seemed to have grown slightly - as if it had kept tracing on its own through the night. I asked around. No one could explain it. This, I suspect, was la santa trenza.
I watched him build a structure of metal pipe and coil thread through it until the interior became uninhabitable for the gaze. The thread did not close the space: it emptied it. Inside there was an absence with a shape. irak morales built the structure. The absence with a shape - that was la santa trenza.
I watched him locate and create a sacred tzompantli using objects discarded as trash in Lille, France.
I watched him carry out a blind ritual with nothing more than a shattered motorcycle helmet and an inexhaustible bottle of alcohol on a long Tijuana night.
I watched him, dressed in an apron, open a portal with no entrance and no exit, no beginning and no end, behind a colorful tablecloth, against a brick wall in Magulandia.
I saw him on a beach where there was a sign tied to a palm tree that read no coger coco, and he was standing in front of the palm tree doing nothing. Afterward he told me he had not put the sign there. That when he arrived it was already there. That he had simply stayed for a while, looking at it, surprised.
I did not ask who had put it there. I already knew.
On another occasion he handed an unfinished zine to a group of people in Oaxaca. They had to photocopy it, staple it, and take it home. Those who did not understand left with an incomplete zine. Those who did, also. It was later, already at home, flipping through the pages, that several of them found something they did not remember seeing at the workshop - an image, an instruction, a blank space with a shape barely drawn. None of them could confirm whether it had always been there.
He also cooked a fish at the same time he slowly moved through Mexico City, cooking while acquiring the fish at a seafood supermarket, while producing a television program with no audience. All at once. A whole that is never just one.
He told me once that what mattered to him was to stay as attentive as possible, in an oblique relationship with the immediate social fabric. I asked him what he meant by "oblique." He looked at me as if the question were the problem.
I had the feeling, in that moment, that it was not irak morales who was looking at me.
I confirmed that my question was, precisely, the misunderstanding.
PERSPECTIVES
An attempt at explanation is necessary, even though we know in advance that failure is the most likely outcome. The phenomena that manifest through the practice of irak morales are not irrational - they are sacred and profane, at the same time. And they are double, and three.
There are things irak morales does and things la santa trenza does, and the difficulty is that it is not always possible to tell which are which. irak morales declares, builds, walks, publishes, convenes. La santa trenza intervenes at the margins of those actions - in the moment when irak morales sits down, closes his eyes, and what begins to happen in the space no longer requires him to be fully present.
Something always takes place between the two, who are three.
It seems that when irak morales makes artwork, his consciousness is in a garden, resting, while la santa trenza uses his body as a tool.
How and through what means does la santa trenza operate? irak morales himself does not seem to know with certainty, or at least understands that it is not his place to know. When asked, he says no hay que coger el coco. This answer, which seems like evasion, is in fact a precise technical description: the mechanism interrupts itself the moment one tries to analyze it. La santa trenza does not work under direct observation. She works from a place invisible to our worldly eyes, like everything worth anything.
The evidence of these capacities leaves no room for doubt about their truth. The mechanism involved remains a mystery.
APPENDIX: TESTIMONY OF AN ANONYMOUS COLLABORATOR
"What I recount below is a synthesis of my experiences working in this space, trying to be as faithful and objective as the case allows.
The first time I saw him work was at a workshop in Escandón. I arrived at three in the afternoon. The space had natural light, materials stacked in the corners: rolls of thread, steel tubes, cans, magnificent books, useless books, sand in buckets, a photocopier, the remnants of a dog named Cosmos. There were no decorations. There were manifestations.
The first time we were face to face I felt equally excited and disoriented. irak was sitting on a wooden bench, looking at something on the floor that I could not see from where I stood. When he looked up, he seemed younger than I expected, and quieter. Resolved within the smoke.
He showed me a piece of industrial thread and asked if I knew how to make a braid. I said yes. He told me to show him. There was no more thread. Just that one piece. I told him you couldn't do it with just one strand. He said: exactly.
I did not understand then. I understood later, over the course of weeks. What irak morales does does not work with a single material, or from a single angle. It needs the interweaving. It needs something to pass underneath something else.
But there is a moment in every encounter - I saw it many times - when irak morales stops. Not dramatically. He simply halts, looks toward some point that is no particular object, and for a few seconds his face holds an expression I cannot describe except by saying he is no longer entirely there. It is not a trance. It is not absence. It is more as if someone has taken over - as if the strand he was carrying passes in that moment underneath, and another strand, which is not him, passes over.
What happens in those seconds is generally the hardest thing to explain afterward.
Once I asked him directly who la santa trenza was. He looked at me for a moment. Then he said: I don't know, ask her.
Immediately after, he kissed a mirror, his lips in red lipstick.
I did not know who to address. He did not clarify it for me either. But I had the feeling, for the rest of that afternoon, that something in the room was listening."
CONCLUSIONS
irak morales possesses an uncommon control over attention. He knows where to look. He knows when to stop.
La santa trenza possesses something else: she knows what happens when no one is looking. She knows what space does on its own. She knows that the crack in the asphalt was already a drawing before the paint arrived.
Together - irak morales and la santa trenza, the strands that take turns passing over and under - they constitute a practice that cannot be understood from a single angle, because it was made precisely to escape that. The signal that unsettles into an astonishing perception of the world is not in the most visible place. It is in the interstice. It is in the moment when he sits down, closes his eyes, and la trenza keeps working on her own.
No hay que coger el coco.
What we locate as the artwork of irak morales is merely a record of this mystery.
- Cenzontle Amapola
