Cochineal dye became one of the most valuable commodities of the early modern world. First extracted by Nahua peoples from female Dactylopius coccus—tiny parasitic insects living on prickly pear cactus leaves—the dye is a carmine richer and deeper than any red known by Europeans when they encountered it in the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, the Spanish empire tightly controlled its trade, and soon the color seeped into power itself: the crimson robes of the Catholic Church, the silks of aristocrats, the military coats of Spanish and British soldiers. A pigment drawn from a fragile insect—an inseparable companion to the Opuntia spp. cactus—was recast to signify dominion.

But history is not fixed, and neither is the color of cochineal itself. Shifting in hue from deep purples to pale reds and pinks, cochineal responds to light, pH, and time. Artist Mariana Castillo Deball engages this instability—material and symbolic—in a recent series of works that trace the entanglement of color and memory, while destabilizing the Western hierarchy of the original and copy. She does so through the approach of ixiptla, a Nahua term used to describe a “substitute” or “embodiment,” an understanding shaped by context, transformation, and repetition.

The title of her exhibition, “Vùjá de—Paper Thresholds,” took inspiration from anthropologist Roy Wagner’s Coyote Anthropology, in which he inverted the familiar notion of déjà vu. Rather than experiencing something new as if it has already happened, vùjá de describes encountering something familiar but seeing it anew, as if for the first time. This idea permeated through Castillo Deball’s exhibition at Galerie Barbara Wien, in which historical materials—facsimiles, codices, and fragmented histories—were reactivated through reinterpretation and collaboration.

Suspended sheets of handmade paper—dyed in cochineal—hovered quietly in the foyer of the gallery, their tones shifting as you moved beneath them before passing on to the next rooms. Produced in collaboration with master papermaker Gangolf Ulbricht, Paper Portal (2024) draws inspiration from the spiritual significance of paper in Dorothy Field’s book, Paper and Threshold: The Paradox of Spiritual Connection in Asian Cultures (2007). The sheets absorb light rather than reflect it, producing a spectrum ranging from violet to magenta, where no two sheets are alike in hue or story. Embedded in each is an image drawn from Diego de Valadés’ Rhetorica Christiana (1579), a Franciscan missionary’s text riddled with contradictions. Insects and serpents emerge from the mouths and bodies of Indigenous figures—a haunting reminder of how colonialism seeks to overwrite native language.

The remaining pulp from the cochineal-dyed paper was pressed into a series of ceramic molds, Vùjá de (2024), to create papier-mâché reliefs, Déjà vu (2024). Displayed together, the molds and their impressions feel both archaeological and emergent, like remains and reconstructions at once. This iterative process recalls the logic of ixiptla—not as facsimiles, but as representations in their own right. In Castillo Deball’s hands, each form asserts its own agency, blurring the line between what is original and derivative. Painted beneath them, the mural Crocodile Skin of the Days (2024) depicts the tonalpohualli, the Mesoamerican ritual calendar made up of twenty signs and thirteen numbers, rendered in shades of cochineal. A reptilian figure appears to devour or reconstruct time, embodying an interplay of destruction and renewal.

Codices, manuscripts, and facsimiles served as a foundation throughout the exhibition—not just as historical references, but as material for transformation. In She Bends to Catch a Feather of Herself as She Falls (2022), Castillo Deball evokes Coatlicue, the Aztec mother goddess, through linocuts printed on handmade paper. Here, Coatlicue is reincarnated, translated into geometric and Rorschach-like forms, merging myth and material. The handmade paper is constructed by Ulbricht from the refuse of denim cloth, shredded, repulped, and remade into sheets of paper.

Many of the primary sources Castillo Deball engages are themselves damaged, redacted, or difficult to access—often housed in remote archives. In works such as Burning of Idols (2024) and the Contra Infantium Adustione (2024) series, she subverts the precedence of the original, reimagining wild-plant illustrations from the monumental Florentine Codex and partial erasures from Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Description of the City and Province of Tlaxcala (1581–1584) as nearly life-size wall renderings. In Castillo Deball’s hands, the copy is no longer a shadow of the original.

Among the more luminous gestures in the exhibition is a quiet shift in tone: a deep-blue kite floats above, while another leans against the wall, gently tethered to a wooden handle. Crocodile Skin of the Days Kite (2021) unfolds like a message, its edges inscribed with the tonalpohualli in white. Unlike the more charged or material works nearby, the kite felt like an offering. Later, I learned the kite was made in memoriam for art historian Ana Díaz Álvarez—her friend and teacher who passed away in 2021—someone who had profoundly shaped her understanding of Indigenous timekeeping and the tonalpohualli. Castillo Deball once remarked, “We could imagine that the duration of a day is equivalent to the distance between someone’s heart and fingertips.” In a letter published in Ixiptla V, Castillo Deball reflected on their first encounter in a workshop where they reconstructed miniature replicas of the Codex Borgia. The letter became a kind of continuation of their exchange. “I hope this imaginary conversation manages to communicate what I was never able to tell you,” she wrote, closing with the image of flying the kites in a collective action that same year. Díaz Álvarez had imparted something essential: Indigenous codices are more than books. They are repositories of knowledge that do not merely record history, but function as complex, multidimensional objects—guides, tools, cosmologies in their own right.

Returning to Wagner’s idea of vùjá de, Castillo Deball invites us to see the familiar—paper, pigment, replica, ritual—as if for the first time. Fragmented histories, whether recovered from manuscripts or remembered conversations, are made material again. As in much of her work, the deep Indigenous past of Mexico is not a static archive but a generative force. In the exhibition, thresholds are not only sites of passage but of return. “Vùjá de—Paper Thresholds” proposes that knowledge is fluid—shaped by what is lost as much as what remains. It shifts and reemerges in new forms. Like the kite, it waits for the wind.

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NOTES

1. While cochineal is the name of the insect, the Nahua term for the pigment derived from it is called nocheztli. This is from the combination of the word nochtli (prickly pear) and eztli (blood), literally translating to “the blood of the cactus.”

2. Mariana Castillo Deball launched the first issue of her biannual journal Ixiptla during the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2014. For more on this journal and other publications by the artist, https://castillodeball.org/publications/.

3. Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

4. Dorothy Field, Paper and Threshold: The Paradox of Spiritual Connection in Asian Cultures (Ann Arbor, MI: The Legacy Press, 2007).

5. Mariana Castillo Deball, Ixiptla V (Berlin: Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, 2022), 119.

6. Castillo Deball, 113.

7. Castillo Deball. 114.

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