IN MIHIYOTZIN IN MOTLAHTOLTZIN 

The site specific installation, designed for the baptistery of the Duomo of Volterra, includes a visual and a sound installations as well as impromptu audience participation.


From the center of the baptismal font, laser beams raised towards the vault, form two octogonal pyramids united at their base, with their vortex converging in two opposite poles.  

From the eight ogival windows, rise the sound of fragments from the Nican Mopohua*.
 The laser structure which unfolds down from the baptistery’s vault, and the sound installation attracts the audience towards the different sound sources, prompting them to walk around the font in search of the different voices, thus generating audience participation.

The baptistery of Volterra, like many others of its kind, was built over the ruins of an ancient roman temple devoted to a feminine divinity. The twelfth century bulding dominates the Tuscan region of “Villa de Guadalupe”.
 During the Empire of Maximilian of Habsburg, the influential Tangassi family from Volterra was invited to furnish the precious alabaster objects for the Emperor’s Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City. 
As a result of the miraculous event attributed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, in which the family survived the shipwreck occurred in one of their trips from Mexico to Italy, the whole Tangassy estate was renamed “Villa de Guadalupe”.

Throughout the historical metaphor and the materialization of metaphysic principles, this intervention brings back together two different worlds in an inverted way: Through ethereal tridimensional shapes and a thorough sound architecture, this double installation extracts essential forms of the sacred geometry – implicit in the medieval building, transforming it in a dynamic mechanism, evoking the “apparition” as the manifestation of the hidden shape.

* Sixteenth Century text in Nahuatl, atributed to Juan Valeriano and first written testimony of the apparition of the Tonantzin-Guadalupe divinity at the Tepeyac Hill

In mihiyotzin in motlahtoltzin installation, Baptistery of Volterra, Italy render

In mihiyotzin in motlahtoltzin sound installation