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Dear Nano

Finally three images of my city: 1. Close to where I live, 2. on my way, 3. view from my atelier.

Mestizaje -  I Like this word. A good title. Where or what are the mapuche aspects in your scetches (I am not so familiar with mapuche jewellery)? Did they take over the catholic religion? As you can say that catholicism is the pioneer of globalisation…

what is your mix and Claudia’s mix? You are Chilean, homogen or heterogen?

The black madonna: Here is a link to a black madonna which lives quite close to Zurich, in Einsiedeln:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Schwarze_Madonna.jpg . I am not at all religiuos, not baptised which is on one hand sad because I don’t know many Christian stories, but I also really don’t have a link to the religiuos feeling. I thought a black madonna is unusual, but apparently there are many.

Money: Do you take coins because of the picture in it? Is it religious? Then money is holy.

Difficult to say something precise, but since you are in a postcolonial country the question of a national identity is certainly not so easy to define. But you’re trained of doing so. Switzerland is a country where people immigrate. This of course also changes the identity of a country, but we are not trained that much yet to accapt that we have to think about our identity with this new society. There is a sound bite: wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, und es kamen Menschen.” (We called workers and it was human beeings that came.).

I also started with my piece: I am carving maggots, lots of maggots from a shell to finally knot them to pearlchain, or maggotchain. Maggots as a symbol of metamorphosis, at a state which is not yet defined, awkward.

The shell comes from the ocean, probably somewhere in Asia, I bought it in Geneva, Switzerland, Now I am changing its shape in Zurich. It will finally show off in Mexico City and hopefully other destinations. Think local, act global, or the other way around.

Title: The necklace will be titled: “Made in Switzerland” (Made in German is maggot in English is larva in Spanish).

I am thinking about assigning each maggot to a different country. For each country I serach for the average monthly income. I calculate the time to fabricate one maggot and then I calculate for each country the worth of my work. To get the prize of the necklace I add all the sums. So in the end my piece has a global price. Well, I am not sure yet.