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Exhibition view: Mi bosque es el tianguis, estos injertos son mi lengua, Campeche, Mexico City, 2026
Courtesy of the artist and Campeche, Mexico City
Photos by Ramiro Chaves
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Comprising video, drawing, and installation, this project explores the artist’s own linguistic dichotomy, rooted in the loss and subsequent search for his mother tongue: the P’urhépecha spoken by his grandparents, faltering in his parents’ generation and nearly forgotten among young people in Cherán, the generation to which Xharicata belongs. The tension between his P’urhépecha origins and the Spanish imposed through the asymmetrical relations inherited from the colonial period is associated by the artist with the concept of grafting—a common botanical practice involving the joining of plant tissue onto another already-rooted plant, which he observed in his paternal grandfather, who would graft peaches onto tejocote trees.
This metaphor serves as a model for illustrating the way something can continue to exist by taking form in something else: For Salvador, language and identity are systems of practices, gestures, and forms shaped by constant processes of hybridization and mutation. Grafting appears throughout the exhibition in the form of stems of nurite, a plant that grows in the ravines of Cherán and is used to relieve anxiety and digestive ailments.
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Its many plastic variations are spread throughout the space, at times carved from avocado wood using the artist's papier-mâché molds—a work carried out by artisan Neri Chávez, who comes from a family of mask carvers—and at others drawn on paper or plaster bandages that recall the bindings used to join botanical grafts. Xharicata associates these repetitions and variations with the idea of translation, understood as a series of displacements through which elements are gradually lost or distorted. From one work to another, the plant’s natural form gradually erodes and takes on different roles: this sequence of physical transformations suggests an approach to language as a digestive process, one that begins with the tongue as the organ through which we (physiologically) take in and (orally) enunciate the world.
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The symbolic presence of the forest also shapes the exhibition, much as it indirectly structures the life, history, and identity of the people of Cherán. Unlike many P’urhépecha people, Salvador did not grow up in the forest, but rather in the tianguis where his parents work, accompanying them from a young age as they traveled throughout the region. In the exhibition, the material culture associated with the forest takes the form of a fragmented tianguis stall. Grafted with nurite stems bound together with bandages, the disassembled metal tubes constitute an exercise that plays with the absurd—yet one that is nonetheless indispensable as a gesture of return to community life and to a practice once meant to become his.
Salvador’s practice inhabits what he describes as an in-between space, a linguistically uncertain place where the plasticity of language becomes evident. Language is body, matter, and form; it is saliva, fatigue, breath, babbling, textures, and movements—gestures that contain a corporeal memory that precedes and exceeds the spoken word.
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My trees are the plastic tarps: pink canopies in spring, blue during the rainy season. Like foliage, they let rays of sunlight or streams of water through their gaps. My branches are the intersecting tubes and ropes, creating paths through which time and bustle flow: the cries of vendors, the shrill sound of a broken speaker, the babble of haggling, the tapping of shoes on the pavement...That noise was my first language: the sound that taught my ear and shaped my speech, turning the chaos of the tianguis into a living forest where I learned to listen and speak.
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Every work is also a place where voices, readings, words, and materials encounter.
Mi bosque es el tianguis, estos injertos son mi lengua did not come on its own. It began as a short text meant to be read aloud and eventually it became this exhibition.
Along the way, I was accompanied by different forms of writing, and above all by P’urhépecha dictionaries and vocabularies, which have become inseparable companions. I have returned to these pages again and again, searching for words that might somehow bring me closer to a world I know, but whose language I do not fully embody. To name from that place necessarily means translating, making mistakes, inventing, grafting.
The works are also made from these readings, from the words I encountered, and from those who, before me, attempted to record similar experiences that continue to overflow the limits of any form of documentation.
No one creates alone.
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Exhibition view: Mi bosque es el tianguis, estos injertos son mi lengua, Campeche, Mexico City, 2026
Courtesy of the artist and Campeche, Mexico City
Photos by Ramiro Chaves
