The creative solutions of art are remarkable, when it comes to capturing the ephemeral and, at the same time, permanently activating an image. Such is the case of this extraordinary ceramic sculpture from the Tlatilco culture, whose territory included parts of present-day Mexico and Morelos during the middle phase of what is known as the Pre-Classic period in Mesoamerican history.
This is a woman who, with the fusion of two faces, seems to turn her head from one side to the other. What might she be turning to see? Is it a cultural gesture? If so, what did it mean in her time? Above all, I find it relevant that a static three-dimensional image exhibits movement and has the ability to look in two directions simultaneously.
It is a small standing nude whose corporeality corresponds to a mature woman, with prominent breasts, and even prominent nipples. She has long arms at the sides of her sturdy body with a flat abdomen and a conspicuous navel; her static nature contrasts with and at the same time exalts the suggested dynamism of the head. The two faces share one of the three large, figurative eyes and the thin, arched eyebrows that run continuously across the entire forehead. Each face has its own small nose and half-open mouth; the highlighted sensory organs evoke sight and speech. At the top, the composition culminates in a headdress with two horizontal bands, one smooth and the other that appears to be braided and which wraps around at the back.
In the sculptural art of the Tlatilco culture there are other works depicting images of women with two faces and also two heads. Respectively, works with registration numbers 354 and 349 2/2 can be seen in the same collection housed by the Amparo Museum.
Both artistic solutions allude to duality and, likewise, as I have noted above, to two moments, perhaps two different periods of time, with greater emphasis on those with two heads, each with different features. The renowned Román Piña Chan, who specialized in Tlatilco, assumed (without delving deeper into the subject) that they represented pathologies, such as the condition of coned twins. I am not inclined towards this interpretation. Although the subject is open to debate, I consider it appropriate to highlight the implicit artistic device, since in a more direct way those with two faces appear to be moving in a way that the head turns on a horizontal axis.
This type of image is sporadic in the Tlatilco artistic repertoire. Included in the variety of its sculptural stylistic modalities (defined by Jean Pierre Laporte based on a typology published by George C. Vaillant in the 1930s and earlier work by Clarence L. Hay), it was expressed in type D1 and occasionally in others such as B, K and F. In an by Edgar Nebot of four human burials scientifically excavated at the Tlatilco site, in the municipality of Naucalpan de Juárez, State of Mexico, bifacial or two-headed women were part of the grave goods of women, men, and infants. One of these is Burial 104 from the fourth season, conducted in the 1960s by Arturo Romano. It is the primary individual burial in extended dorsal decubitus of an adult woman offered with abundant grave goods consisting of several human figures, pieces of pottery and objects made of shell and bone. The bifacial female image was near her feet.
The function of this type of work must have gone beyond the burial sphere, as most of the ceramic art of Tlatilco has been found in other contexts. Whether mortuary or from the realm of the living, they are active images that could have been used in rituals and, by themselves, they perform the supernatural act of perpetuating movement in static works.
