Poems have always been tools to unravel and give voice to emotional journeys, where words fail in their monolithic meaning. As Audre Lorde said: “Poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” Buscando Tótem is a video poem resulting from a collaboration between Mexican artist Vica Pacheco and photographer Nattan Guzman. Their narrative exercise sprouts from impromptu takes with lo-fi cameras recording daily moments in Mexico, triggered by existing images from a collection of videos of the two artists. Vica’s voice resonates as a psychic conductor,  guiding the viewer through natural sceneries. The synchronicities between words and images trigger a third story, inhabiting the evoked space of poetry. A fantasy which can, in its multiple facets, be enlightening as a bolt or a totem. 

“A narration exercise emerges like a cadavre-exquis, an almost dreamlike audiovisual journey, where nature is revealed as the protagonist in different scenes, where it prevails and suggests a search for a connection with the non-human but through existence and human contemplation. The poem narrated by Vica, recounts a search for totemic identification with some animal or element, concluding that this search is a mirage and that the human form is a metamorphosis and container.”

Photography by Vica Pacheco and Nattan Guzman
Edited by Nattan Guzman Music and
Text by Vica Pacheco Mexico – Bruxelles, 2023