Taller Leñateros (The Woodlanders’ Workshop) is an artisan society of Mayan women and men who produce handmade paper, artist books, silkscreen and wood block prints, pansey graphs, natural dyes, and magic spells.

The individuals who make up Taller Leñateros are woodlanders who walk in the hills gathering dry branches and deadwood from fallen trees, collecting firewood without chopping down the forest. They come down from the mountains, carrying bundles of wood, of pitch pine and split encino for the hearths of the city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. They walk through the mist, leading their burros, selling firewood from house to house and knock on people’s doors, offering pine needles as well, to spread on the floor, moss, flowers of bromeliads and orchids for manger scenes.

Thirty years ago the cooperative of individuals rented an old adobe house in San Cristobal and they planted a little avocado tree in the patio. The sprout took root and grew and now it’s as tall as the tree where the Moon showed the first Mother-fathers how to weave. The house shrank under the shadow of the leaves and filled up with dreams and they called it a "workshop," first "of dreams" and then "woodlanders" - something between theatre and witchcraft.

The silkscreen alchemists of Taller Leñateros work from Sun to Sun, from Moon to Moon, transforming natural light into bougainvillea-color images. They cut, fold, sew, glue, bind and wrap and publish a literary magazine, a rustic codex known as La Jicara (The Gourd), which includes translations from Native languages, testimonies, foreigners’ journals, xylography, petroglyphs and odd things. They have also published a book of spells including one "To Live Many Years" from the book "Incantations by Mayan Women."

The Woodlanders come to the workshop with a load of madrone-wood to feed the fire. They bring withered flowers from the churches, and pine needles trampled in yesterday's festival. They carry rattan, lichen, banana-leaves, corn-husks, bridal-veil, mahagua, bean-pods, maguey-tongues, reeds, coconut-shells, gladiola-stems, palm-fronds, grass, papyrus, cattails, pampas grass and bamboo, along with recycled paper and old clothes; the raw material of dreams is nearly always something "useless."

Ideas and images come to the woodlanders in dreams. They recycle their visions to turn them into art. The also reproduce the dreams of others: images from pre-Hispanic clay seals, motifs from Mayan embroidery and ceramics. The Earth also inspires them: they photocopy the fossil of a tropical leaf, the texture of a seashell. They re-learn forgotten hand-printing techniques: xylography, basketography, petalography.

Taller Leñateros is a cultural society, an alliance of Mayan and mestizo women and men, founded in 1975 by the Mexican poet Ambar Past. Among its multiple objectives is the documentation, praise and dissemination of Amer-Indian and popular cultural values: song, literature and folk art; the rescue of old and endangered techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants; and generating worthwhile and decently-paid employment for women and men who have no career, no future.

Taller Leñateros has created a multi-ethnic space for artists and artists-to-be. They invent, teach and exercise the arts of hand-made paper, binding, solar silkscreen, woodcuts and natural dyes. They benefit the ecology by recycling agricultural and industrial wastes in order to create crafts and objects of art. Taller Leñateros survives thanks to the sale of the products they make.

In their group environment, all the members of the Workshop participate in decisions, contributing ideas, solutions and work-proposals in order to benefit the individual and the group. Although they are not all from one same culture and may speak different languages, they are putting together a common project. Once servants, washer-women, wandering vendors and unemployed, they now own their own business.

Little by little, without subsidies or capitalist partners, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, we have been able to buy and construct the minimal equipment with which they work. Their only and most valuable resource is themselves and their indigenous folk-wisdom.

Contact information:
Calle Flavio A. Paniagua 54
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas
967 678 5174
tallerlenateros@yahoo.com.mx
www.tallerlenateros.com

Or contact Marianne Carlson at (from the US) 01152 376 765 7485 or email marianne carlson@gmail.com.