The Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, a pictographic manuscript from ancient Mexico, is a folded strip of four segments of deer hide, each approximately one metre long, joined together with glue and figurative polychrome scenes were painted on the thin layer of yesso covering the material. As one of around a dozen prehispanic codices, it documents various aspects of Mesoamerican society, including historical events, religious beliefs, astronomical data, and other cultural practices.
The first page of the Codex displays a cosmogram, indicating time-space organisation and cardinal points, associating each direction with colours, elements, and glyphs. This includes the twenty day count of the tonalpohualli which are also associated with the four cardinal directions as well as the Lords of the Night and Tezcatlipoca, the Lord of the Smoking Mirror. Tezcatlipoca is associated with the unpredictability and anxiety of existence and the memory of the ancestors (Baquedano, 2014; Olivier, 2015; Sherwood González, 2022). He is associated with numerous aspects of life, including chaos, night, discord, conflict and change. Tezcatlipoca is known for his trickster qualities, his ability to disrupt order, and his propensity to challenge the status quo. He is a deity who revels in the unexpected, often turning the tables on both gods and humans alike.
My PhD research looks to reimagine the Codex, not only as a museum object but an object with its own agency and relevance to Mexican culture today. By acknowledging the agency and existence of nonhuman entities with the capacity to alter reality and have effect on worlds, we can move towards a more inclusive, pluriversal understanding of the world and its potential futures. Tezcatlipoca’s presence, much like the spectres of coloniality, permeates the past, present, and future, influencing and shaping the Codex’s spatio-temporal trajectory. Speaking to the contemporary tensions between Mestizo and Indigenous cultures in Mexico, I will explore strategies to extrapolate these unique visions into speculative futures. By framing the Codex as an embodiment of the Aztec trickster deity, Tezcatlipoca, my work seeks to activate the painted manuscript as a portal to speculative and transformative futures.
José Sherwood 