The Serpent’s Trail

Maya Goded Colichio is a renowned Mexican photographer and documentary filmmaker focused on themes such as gender violence and the lives of marginalized communities. She explores the complexities and challenges that women face in Mexican society.

The Trail of the Serpent combines photography, poetry, testimony and essay to shape an intimate, political and spiritual journey.

Through images, spoken accounts, historical archives, and philosophical reflections, The Trail of the Serpent is a collective chant of resistance. Within its pages echo the voices of women who, despite dispossession, nurture life, heal, sing, and remember.

The book’s design is truly unique, consisting of three interfolding booklets. The first two are designed to be read simultaneously, guiding the reader to the third booklet at the center.

Maya Goded guides us through wounded territories—from the Atacama Desert to the jungles of Chiapas—where the body of the earth and the bodies of women serve as both stage and witness to historical violence, extractivism, and oblivion.

The project emerges from a personal quest as the author explores her maternal lineage, her family history marked by wars, migrations and abuse, drawing parallels with the experiences of Indigenous women, miners, healers, and land defenders.

The serpent—an ancestral symbol of transformation and feminine wisdom—serves as the guiding thread of this spiralling narrative, embracing cyclicality in contrast to the linear, patriarchal logic of destructive progress.

The book is a ritual act of memory, mourning and rebirth—an ecofeminist proposal that reimagines the relationship between humanity and nature from the root, from the feminine, from the serpent.