(27 Oct 2022)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mexico City - 27 October 2022
1. Artisan cutting skull shape from paper for Day of the Dead
2. Various of artisans working on paper cut-out decorations
3. Tools used to make paper cut-out decorations
4. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Yuridia Torres Alfaro, workshop owner:
"Making paper cut-out decorations is like painting in the air, because we make holes (in the paper) and what you see throw the air is the image."
5. Various of artisan working on paper cut-out decorations
6. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Yuridia Torres Alfaro, workshop owner:
"Stencils began to appear for making papel picado, because it is a lot of work if you have to supply a lot of people, but we wanted to keep doing it the traditional way, because it allows us to make small, personalized lots, and keep creating a new design every day. That's what the workshop does."
7. Various of worker folding paper cut-out decorations
8. Paper sheets
9. Workers folding paper cut-out decorations
10. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Yuridia Torres Alfaro, workshop owner:
"(Making papel picado) means bringing a little bit of Mexico around, which is represented through this craft. I think you can see something about Mexico through all of this crafts. It's an emotion, each Mexican can remember their childhood and life, going back to that family feeling."
11. Various of worker sewing paper cut-out decorations
12. Various of worker hanging paper cut-out decorations
13. Various of paper cut-out decorations
STORYLINE:
Mexican artisans are striving to preserve the traditional manufacture of paper cut-out decorations long used in altars for the Day of the Dead.
Defying increasingly popular mass-production techniques, second-generation paper cutter Yuridia Torres Alfaro, 49, still makes her own stencils at her family's workshop in Xochimilco, on the rural southern edge of Mexico City.
As she has since she was a child, Torres Alfaro punched stunningly sharp chisels into thick piles of tissue paper at her business, 'Papel Picado Xochimilco.'
While others use longer-lasting plastic sheets, laser cutters or pre-made stencils, Torres Alfaro does each step by hand, as Mexican specialists have been doing for 200 years.
"Stencils began to appear for making papel picado, because it is a lot of work if you have to supply a lot of people," said Torres Alfaro, who still hand-cuts her own stencils with original designs.
"We wanted to keep doing it the traditional way, because it allows us to make small, personalized lots, and keep creating a new design every day," she says.
Begun in the 1800s, experts say 'papel picado' using tissue paper is probably a continuation of a far older pre-Hispanic tradition of painting ceremonial figures on paper made of fig-bark sheets.
Mexican artisans adopted imported tissue paper because it was cheap and thin enough so that, with sharp tools, extreme care and a lot of skill, dozens of sheets can be cut at the same time.
But the most important part is the stencil: its design designates the parts to be cut out, leaving an intricate, airy web of paper that is sometimes strung from building or across streets.
More commonly, it is hung above Day of the Dead altars that Mexican families use to commemorate and commune with deceased relatives.
The holiday begins Oct. 31, remembering those who died in accidents; it continues Nov. 1 to mark those died in childhood, and then those who died as adults on Nov. 2.
Still other producers have tried to use mass-produced stencils, which means that tens of thousands of sheets might bear exactly the same design.
AP Video by Fernanda Pesce
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Негізгі бет Mexican artisans preserve Day of the Dead ornaments
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