Mariana Castillo Deball’s work connects objects with their troubled and violent histories, recreating them on new scales and with new materialities so as to bring them back to life. Through a research-based practice, she creates installations, performances, sculptures, and editorial projects. For Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld, she creates Paper Portal (2024), which intervenes in the entrance to the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, welcoming visitors into a passageway. Although paper is often associated with publishing or two-dimensional formats, the artist continues the ancestral traditions of using paper in public spaces to create spiritual and festive thresholds, such as with the gohei in Japan, the door gods of China, or the papel picado (pecked paper) in Mexico. Made of handmade paper dyed with red cochineal, the passageway is adorned with a natural pigment produced by the Aztec people of Mexico since 2 BCE, derived from an insect that lives in cacti, known in Nahuatl as nocheztli or ‘cactus blood’. Castillo Deball also contributes a newly com- missioned large mural, Crocodile Skin of the Days (2024), which extends across the floor of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, recreating one of the few pre-colonial calendars of Indigenous people in Mexico to survive the destruction of colonization and focusing on the image of reptile skin found in the ancient calendar, the tōnalpōhualli, meaning the ‘count of days’ in Nahuatl. As in many of Castillo Deball’s works, they are what she calls ‘uncomfortable objects’ that confront epistemicide and open up fables that give voice to the ruined objects which come back to unsettle hegemonic knowledges of the world.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Mariana Castillo Deball and HKW, 2024

Works in the exhibition: Paper Portal (2024), paper pulp, dyed with red cochineal pigment; Crocodile Skin of the Days (2024), floor mural, paint on floor. Courtesy of the artist