Gerardo Suter

The title of this work, Tonalamatl, refers to an Aztec calendar used before Spanish colonization. These 260-day calendars were separated into 20 trecena (groups of 13 days) and illustrated with depictions of the gods. In this work, photographer Gerardo Suter pays homage to this Indigenous system of organization by placing 20 Aztec symbols around a central male figure. The man’s pose, however, comes not from Aztec iconography, but from Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, created about the same time as European colonization of the Americas. Suter’s carefully staged image explores collective memory, and how intellectual and cultural traditions of the preconquest past intermingle with colonialist legacies.

–SM