MARCO, Monterrey, México 2013

JungCatcher is an installation which encompasses the conceptual, poetic and visual approach developed by Borja around magical thinking, here symbolized by the Amerindian dream-catcher, and modern thinking, in the tangible form of a personality diagram invented by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.

The work is made up of two large wooden circles which, like two intermingled round looms, each contain a “net” woven by the artist. The first, called “asubakacin” (spider’s web) in the Ojibwe culture, refers to a small sacred object suspended above cradles to filter the new-born infant’s bad dreams and let the good ones through. Traditionally used as a protective spell, dream-catchers became popular and widespread during the pan-Indian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and were then mass-produced from the 1980s onwards as “objects of native craftsmanship”, stripped of their spiritual dimension.

The second weaving is made from a self-understanding diagram, also developed by Jung to illustrate his theory of analytical psychology, in which the psychological interpretation of dreams plays an important part.

As the artist patiently weaves his canvas on the spot, he has fun putting Jung and his western vision of the psyche through the magic filter, and the pre-Columbian dream-catcher through the filter of psychoanalysis. Structured by the interwoven tracery of these two references, the work syncretizes a form of modern medicine and another form of ancestral care, both oriented towards the fragility of the soul.