Taller de Leñateros

book-making, poetry, incantations and paper made out of banana trees

About 5 blocks from where I am living in San Cristobal De Las Casas is the workshop (taller in spanish) of a wonderful collective of Mayan artists who publish, write, illustrate and bind their own books, including making the paper they print on out of local and recycled materials.

Paper making area of the Taller de Leñateros - image © Taller de Leñateros & Beatrice Coron

I visited the workshop today, arriving in the drizzling rain into a warm house in which about 20 people work making paper, handstiching books, screen and wood block printing posters, postcards, and the pages of the various books they publish.

I watched sheets of paper being made from the outside fibers of banana trees and dyed a deep black, and 1000 copies of a single page from a book being carefully hand printed with silk screens.

I am hoping to commission two book-like-things for a video installation I am working on, so with any luck will get to spend some more time in the beautiful workshop over coming weeks.

Apart from the undeniable beauty and aesthetic satisfaction of the books and papers they produce (I am a sucker for handmade paper), this group is another flourishing example of a project that integrates collaborative art practices and cultural documentation here in Chiapas. They also appear to be a successful small business, providing employment for members of the collective through the sale of the products they make. Their books use text and images drawn from the cultures and creativity of the makers. One I thumbed through today is a set of pocket books of Mayan spells, including Hex to Kill the Unfaithful Man, Mayan Love Charms, and Magic for a Long Life.

As I am discovering is so common here in Chiapas, the Taller de Leñateros has a beautiful website (all in English, though the artists speak a variety of Indigenous languages and Spanish), where you can read about their project, its goals and processes and see the catalogue of their works. Check it out…

Tags: books, collectives, Indigenous, Mexico, paper; Taller de Leñateros

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under Chiapas, Cultural documentation, Taller de Leñateros, book-making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.