A dismembered one is many.
avocado, reconstituted avocado, avocado dyed silk, sterling silver, Egyptian blue faience
2026
Suspended in flesh, the avocado pit acts as a protective vessel for the minuscule seed inside. A sacrificial carrier, the pit is genetically encoded to split down the center when the seed sprouts and overgrows its womb. What’s left, a dismembered carcass. outliving the potential of its past form, yet echoing in the offspring.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui Imperative similarly urges the potential of a dismembered body. The theory borrows its name from the Aztec goddess of the moon. In mythos, Coyolxauhqui was killed by being thrown from the top of the Templo Mayor by her brother, the sun god Huitzilopochtli. Fractured by the fall, she was broken along her joints. Spilling from the faultlines, snakes unfurl and entangle themselves.
One that has been fractured can be reassembled in infinite futures. To remember is to re-limb. To re-limb is to reform something that has been broken apart.
Rememberment is a moment of transformation. Something is forgotten, while other details are invented, emphasized, or reshaped. Memory is never a perfect return; it is a recollection of fragments. In the same way, a re-limbed body is both full of inheritance yet a new being.
This bolo carries an avocado pit through dis/re memberment. To be worn, the pit must be fractured to reveal its carved interior containing a bolo cord. A silver bolo slide replaces the seed’s function of acting as a clasp for the pit. Overgrowing with the fracture, its roots act as bolo cords. To re-limb the broken pit, what is extracted from it is returned. The cord is dyed with avocado pigment. Reconstituting the detritus from the avocado pit carving process, the dust congeals into synthetic gemstones placed on the endcaps.