The Cycles of aMaízing Things

Abstract

Throughout this thesis, maíz becomes a trans-scalar agent of exchange across time, cultures, and territories. Maíz, as both a symbol and a subject, is intensely charged with tradition and disruption, operating within a jumbled feedback state that transcends myths and industry. The work situates my reading of the artwork, Río Revuelto by the Mexican artist José Chávez Morado (1949), as a guiding framework to approach a kaleidoscopic entanglement of different narratives. Considered under four different lenses: the cosmological, the national identity, the resistance, and the product, I argue for constant feedback between them for the re-transforming cycles of maíz. The crucial concern driving this exploration is how maíz and humans are ingrained into each other's systems — re-configuring methods, spaces, and forms of display. The display refers not only to maíz as a ‘product’ but as a continuous entity in transition, transforming and adapting to the social and cultural conditions where it circulates —whether through myth, ritual, portrayal, strategy of preservation, building typology, commodity, by-product, or history. The design approach is presented through performative artifacts that symbolize the systems through which maíz circulates. They are further represented in an essay film. Whether referencing myths, projections, displays, or products, the artifacts become mnemonic objects to think with—depicting the cycles of maíz as a world-building exercise. Maíz becomes the point that traces simultaneity in the history of humanity, representing a symbol eternally under construction. Acknowledging this monumental scale requires my work to be only a grain-sized glimpse of speculative potentials in design.