“But in the literal sense sbot’sba means “staring, intensely, at oneself”, as happens with our image reflected in a mirror, because that is ultimately the image itself: the Other Side of oneself. In other words, the image itself is not one’s own, it is the strangest aspect of the person. The Other Side of himself is an other. (As a New Guinea native explained to Roy Wagner [2010:VI]: “what you see when you look at yourself on the surface of water, or in a mirror, is not you and is not even human.”)” Pitarch, Pedro, La cara oculta del pliegue (2013), Artes de México
The most fearsome and subversive knowledge is that which comes from the bowels of oneself, which are one’s own and at the same time common.
María Sosa (Morelia, MX – 1985) conceives the exhibition space as a fabric in which various threads unfold to form a symbolic universe that questions Western epistemologies. The body of the artist is the territory unfolded in textiles, watercolors, ceramics and video performance where the material is the metaphor of the processes of feeling-thinking to conceive artistic practice as an axis of healing, introspection and questioning of ontological ideas. that the monocul- ture has taken for granted.
The arranged works summon presences in the declared absences, defying a linear route where the experience is wrapped between images emerged from pre-Columbian art, self-portraits and the body itself unfolded as an archive to create the imaginary of the contemporary experience composed of fragments of life, of history, colonial wounds, as well as a constant search for hope.
The artist takes experimentation with different supports as a means of epistemic liberation, understanding her own body as a historical evolution. El otro lado de uno mismo (The Other Side Of Oneself) is a constellation without up or down, an indissoluble spiral of space-time that breaks up forgotten connections and makes them an alternative to think about the complexity of the present from art.
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It is true that I have two or three heads, four eyes, weak blood, several of my lost chulel and a pallet constantly talking to me.
It is true that I am a mixture of the mixtures that have been mixed and the multiplicity constitutes me, making me un- stable and disposable.
I carry the voids of my personal history that were filled with the violence of the History of my Land. I carry the violence of my body: woman and the violence of the knowledge that they denied or prohibited.
It is true that I read so that my body will remember and my head will heal. I read tonal, I read mintzita, I read rimuka, I read chulel, I read to find myself and then I picked up my pieces and found myself in the reconstruction of silent ar- chaeological pieces to the implanted logic, speaking to my feeling-thinking. I found myself in admiration for those who follow the path of Arewá. I found myself in the footsteps of my grandparents in the mountains and Lake Michoacanos. I found myself in my hands that knew things talking with the earth and the heart of the corn cane.
I constantly educate myself on what they deny me, I educate myself on what was taken from me. And with that I make art, I make life, I make myself.
It is true that I grew up in a programmed blindness 500 years ago, in a network of normalized violence that made me sick and makes us sick, dictating its path: fear, subjugation, exploitation, resignation, despair.
But from the region of the dead and dreams, the other side of the body pulls towards the paths of healing, memory and reconstruction of the forgotten.
The other side of ourselves was silenced, we will have to listen to ourselves again to repair reality.
Text: María Sosa
