XIYEKO

XIYEKO is a sound and sculptural installation investigating cycles of decay and regeneration through vessels crafted from mycelium and clay—living materials that breathe, grow, and connect. The name derives from Nahuatl Xicalli and Murui Jiyeko, meaning "vessel" or "what contains."

The work emerges from dialogue with Indigenous Amazonian women, of the Mura people, and chinamperos in Xochimilco, whose voices are contained within these sculptural vessels alongside field recordings and electromagnetic emissions from mycelial networks. Inspired by the sacred totuma passed hand to hand while stories are shared, these vessels become carriers of ancestral wisdom, collective memory.

Beneath the visible life of forests, mycelium performs invisible labor: fine tubular structures—hifas—branch, fuse, and intertwine forming what mycologist Merlin Sheldrake calls "anarchic filigree," "a growing investigation," "corporeal speculation." This underground network is not a thing but a process. Through chemical signals, mycelium communicates warnings between plants, redistributes nutrients, transforms death into life. When one plant faces attack, the network transmits alerts so neighbors produce defensive compounds. The forest persists through this vast subterranean dialogue we ignore but upon which everything depends.

Drawing from Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and Jack Halberstam's Unworlding, XIYEKO prioritizes communal narratives over individualist frameworks, exploring decomposition as fertile ground. The vessels enact what fungi teach: life exists only in encounters, and each encounter is indeterminate. Within consumerist logic that compulsively fills, we avoid confronting emptiness. Yet only empty vessels can receive, carry, preserve what needs holding—like rivers that are Earth's veins, flowing with histories, connecting territories through the sweet flavor of shared words.

Developed during AKI AORA residency 2025

XIYEKO

Museo Flor de Chinampas, Chinampaxochitl Xochimilco, México

2025