Toto Xaweri: Sonido de Música

The title's Spanish words, Sonido de Música, mean Sound of Music, and a xaweri is a violin-type instrument of the Wixárika, played with a bow. In a 2004 thesis on Wixárika music for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the ethnomusicologist Xilonen Luna Ruiz records a testimony tied to the myth of Elder Brother Kauyumarie in which the Wixárika identify the xaweri with the goldfinch and the kanari, the guitar, with the blue bird of the mountain, and link them “el primero con el sol y el segundo con el venado” (the first with the sun and the second with the deer).

A sun with a face is at the center, with a deer on either side. In a 1980 yarn painting by Yauxali, explained by Juan Negrín, founding director of the Wixárika Research Center, the sun is Tayau, Our Father Sun, and the deer Tamatsi Kauyumari, “Our Elder Brother Fawn of the Sun,” is the healer's deer companion. In a 1974 yarn painting by Juan Ríos Martínez, Negrín writes, two deer, Kauyumarie and Maxakuaxí, “Our Elder-Brothers,” reside in Wirikuta, in the east, “to transmit the words of our ancestors to us and to intercede with them on our behalf.”

An eagle spreads its wings above the sun, between two serpents. In Juan Ríos Martínez's 1975 yarn painting Wirikuta II, also explained by Negrín, the eagle is Tatei Werika Wimari, "Our Mother of the Skies." José Benítez Sánchez calls her Our Mother Young Eagle Girl; in his 1973 yarn painting The Communication of Our Ancestor-Spirits, as Negrín records it, "The heart of Our Mother Young Eagle Girl was a serpent," which is "why eagles eat snakes today."

October Gallery in London showed it in Portal II: Inside the Cordillera (November 2019 to February 2020), together with Teteaikutzi and Untitled.