HIKURI NEXA: The Sacred Peyote Celebration of the Wixaritari Nation

/jícuri nerra/

Hikuri Nexa, is the sacred celebration of the peyote, it happens between May and June of each
year, before preparing the soil for planting corn. This festivity is offered for the god of fire:
Tatewari (Grandpa Fire), god of life and wellness, god of the prophecies, the first shaman and
guide of the pilgrims that turn on the rising sun.
This offering brings the hope of receiving the blessing for a good harvesting year, to continue
their journey of the sun.

This ritual celebration is structured in minor rituals like the peyote dance, the animal sacrifice to
feed the gods, woman making holly meals to keep the vital energy, the preparation of the peyote
drink to be use during the ritual dance “circle of fire” which the community invoke the god
Tatewari. The first ceremony they do is the confession of sins. The Wixaritari people travel to the
sacred caves to deliver offerings for other deities. The marakame, leader shaman and healer,
sings four days, day and night in front of the fire. Contemplation of the fire and rituals of the light
are part of this festivity full of shamanic expressions.

This documentary project portraits all the key moments of their cosmo- vision that have been
celebrated since five thousand year ago.

This encounter started as an anthropologic curiosity of the author, and it became an spiritual
journey and discovery of a profound Mexican shamanic culture

The Wixaritaris invited Dante to participate in the ceremonies, but did not allow him to
photograph anything the first years. It was until he was adopted and “baptized” that they gave
him permission to start documenting and learning from the shamans the meanings of the
traditions.

Dante spent over a decade with the Wixaritaris, celebrating as one of them all the ritual
celebrations, researching and photographing. Fourteen years after, this collection is exhibited
for the first time. There are sixty five pieces that portrait in an intimate way, all the key moments
of one of the most important shamanic traditions in the world.

the Wixaritari culture is one of the few that has preserved and survive after the invasion and
colonization of the continent. Nowadays, they are fighting to protect their lands from the invasion
and corruption of neoliberal governments.

Note about the technique:

The photographs are handmade with platinum salts over artisan Japanese paper by contact
printing, with UV light as exposure agent. The mix of these elements creates a piece which
archival quality reaches up to a thousand years without losing its qualities such as color, tone
texture.
after scanning the original negatives, the photographer created digital negatives to scale to the
desired size of the print. All the photographs are not manipulated or edited, only the size for
printing was changed.

Platinum prints can have tone variations during developing process, it could come out with a
neutral black color or with a sepia tone, depending on the temperature that the printmaker
decides to work with. For this collection, all the photographs were developed at 95°F to keep the
same tonality in all the prints.

About the author:

Wirikuta Tuutu Uruyari (Flor Flecha del Desierto) / Dante Korinto, is a mexican cinematographer,
semiotician and multimedia artist based in Portland, who considers that biographies wear out
the soul. He studied filmmaking at the International School of Film and Television in Cuba, and a
master in semiotics and mass communications at the Pontifical Gregorian Jesuit University
(Vatican City/Rome). He specializes in alternative photographic processes, analog filmmaking
and direction.

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