The flower of the Floripondio, Devil’s Trumpet or Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia arborea), has hallucinogenic properties like all plants of the Datura family. Its shapes and colors, its branches, along with the effects it produces on the mind and consciousness, are part of the cultural imaginaries we weave with the natural world. Since ancient times and across all civilizations, human beings have experienced an intuition of “totality,” sought through rituals considered sacred due to their extraordinary essence. Thus, each culture seeks answers to its ancestral concerns. Mystery, enigma and secret, shadow, hiddenness and silence are words that come to mind when we think of the Floripondio.

Flor Mecánica recreates a space rich in sensory stimuli that activate our cultural imagination around the Floripondio. The visual, sonic, and spatial experience it offers alters our impression of the moment by exploring the perception of time filtered through hypnotic music, a living space, and a connection to natural light, which plays a central role in the proposal. Based on the spiral shape of the flower, Amorales created Flor Mecánica with 24 doors representing the cycle of the day. On each door there is a mask of Janus, the Roman god of doors, beginnings, and endings. Six Floripondio trees planted in pots that represent faces with closed eyes surround the space. The closed gaze evokes the mystical and psychedelic spirit of Datura throughout the artistic experience. Flor Mecánica suggests a reflection on our millenary cult of hallucinogenic plants and how we relate to the perception of continuity and discontinuity of time in our current social and cultural practices.

The creative collaboration with master potter José García Antonio, a blind artist, and musician Jacob Wick and his group, enhances the symbolic meanings of this complex transdisciplinary experience.

For the four days of the event, the piece for brass instruments composed especially by Jacob Wick is performed inside Flor Mecánica at sunset. Wick proposed an Antiphonal musical form, a style of performance in which two groups of musicians alternately intone musical phrases. The music will interact with the architectural construction and the way sound bounces within the spaces of the pavilion.

Photos by Cristian Martín

Film by David Cruz Puebla