Amoxohtli

Buch und DVD In Náhuatl, Spanischer und Englischer Sprache. Amoxohtli Libro de Carretera A Road Book is a book, full of fotos and drawings, which came together from a project the artist Jimmie Durham developed in Mexico City with the collector Cesar Cervantes. In front of Cervantes’s house a large stone, part of the currently dormant volcano called Xitle, was placed on top of a Chrysler-Dodge ‘Spirit’. Durham describes the book as a ‘road book’ after, he says, Homer’s Odyssey, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Kerouac’s On the Road. It begins with the French founding of Detroit and moves quickly past the race-riots there in the 20th century to a brief history of the U. S. automobile industry. That brings the ‘story’ into Mexico and the uses various governmental agencies there have employed for the Chrysler-Dodge company cars. The first language of the book is Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and other peoples in central Mexico. Spanish is next, with English, as Durham originally wrote it, almost as a footnotin the back. There is a foto record of placing the stone on the car, and a DVD of a video film by Maria Thereza Alves and Christian Manzutto of the action. Durham has also included recipes for Mexican ‘pizzas’ and some odd poetry.