Coquín pays double homage to the Mayan culture and to Carmen Tejero, Alvar Carrillo Gil's life partner, who for decades (ca. 1930-1960) devoted themselves to the collection of archaeological and artisanal pieces of that culture with the aim of contributing to the preservation of its material heritage, which during those years was programmatically sacked, causing invaluable losses.

In 2022, by the initiative of Gabriela Saenz Carrillo, and following the wishes of her grandfather and grandmother, the collection of 321 pieces was donated to the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

After studying the collection, Minerva Cuevas created a large sculpture by combining and modifying five pre-Hispanic pieces. The sculpture offers a scene of relationships. The woman holds a bird in one hand (“Coquín” was the family's name for Carmen Tejero and means bird in colloquial Mayan). At the same time, she holds and roots herself on the shell of a turtle; for that cosmovision, the earthly world floats in the middle of the original waters: the Earth is represented as a turtle emerging from them.

A rabbit and a toad appear too. Frogs and toads were for various Mesoamerican cultures symbols of water and rain; in the Mayan culture, specifically, frogs serve Chaahk, the god of the rain: they are the heralds. The rabbit, on one of the sides, seems to keep something between its legs, reminding us of its quality of thief and intriguer of intrigues.

In the hieratic sculpture vibrates the sonority in potential: the bird reminds us of the sweetness of the ocarinas; the frogs reveal their song and augur abundance; the woman, with her wide open mouth lets the wind pass through it and bequeaths us a silent message to be deciphered.

Minerva Cuevas has denounced, throughout decades of career, the multiple forms of material and epistemic extractivism suffered by native cultures and has postulated art as a form of denunciation and defense of diversity and rebelliousness. Coquín operates in this sense and proposes to take a close look at the Mayan culture, not only in its pre-Hispanic past but also in what still remains of it throughout the peninsula under modern forms of exploitation.

+ about Minerva Cuevas