When the women of the Comcaac community walk out into the Sonoran desert to cut branches, they call out their own names whenever they drift out of sight of one another. It keeps everyone found in a landscape that swallows distance, and it is a fitting way into a culture where a person’s mark on a made thing carries enormous weight.
Un Canto por el Desierto (A Song for the Desert). Directed by Enrique M. Rizo
The NOWNESS short film Un Canto por el Desierto (A Song for the Desert) is built around that same attention to who made what. Director Enrique M. Rizo spends time with the Comcaac, also known as the Seris, a people numbering fewer than a thousand who live along the Gulf of California coast. They are among the last to hold on to a nomadic life divided between desert and sea. Rizo’s guide is a local woman, Ana María, who speaks in their language, Cmiique Iitom, and leads the camera from the practical side of weaving into stranger territory.
Still from Un Canto por el Desierto (A Song for the Desert). Directed by Enrique M. Rizo
The practical side is formidable. Every basket begins with limberbush branches (haat), which the film calls torote. They are burned to loosen the bark, and a weaver judges the fire by smell, colour and sound. Many peel the bark in one long ribbon by gripping the branch in their teeth. The fibres are rinsed in seawater, since fresh water would rot the finished piece. Weaving starts with a knot, spirals outward around a bundle of fibre with a deer bone awl, and ends when the bundle is gradually trimmed away until it simply disappears. A giant basket can take a year and a half...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Seri basket woven with the haat plant, Alejandro Yanes.
All further images as credited in captions.