BERLIN.- In/Tangible: Maria José Arjona, Antonio Paucar, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa is an exhibition about resistance, imagination and alternative realities. These artists dissolve the surface of hyperreality and the common grounds of the daily that blind our imagination and the symbolic possibilities of life. The explorations that Arjona, Paucar and Ramírez-Figueroa propose share the desire of bringing the human and the natural closer, particularly the animal realm, as well as suggesting spiritual dimensions that are generally inaccessible. These artists each one in their individual ways tap into the invisible, both by placing their body in the center of their works, a resistant body which is multiple, unstable, and in transformation, while they explore what we cannot see, while affirming the present.
Maria José Arjona began to develop Avistamiento (Sighting) a project in many stages, in 2009 in New York when she started to follow birds in Central Park. For Arjona, Avistamiento is a project of human sensitization where birds lead us to surprise one another. Birds and the body are the same thing, they are entities that fluctuate and coexist in the world, making life possible. Avistamiento is a project about recognizing the other. A profound exploration of birds both in their habitat and in relation to humans, lead to powerful metaphors of migration, coexistence, and existence; to arrive to a fusion of bird and human in one body in the performance Second Messenger, 2016. In this performance the artist wears feathers and a leather helmet which replicates the ones used in falconry, thus promoting the perspectives from both human and bird alike. Here the artist smokes tobacco, a plant that is sacred for many indigenous people in Latin America. The tobacco produces an ephemeral drawing, a revealing phenomena which may be seen and understood as light, as an alternative form of knowledge. Arjonas new work, and particularly her performance Breather, constitutes a transition from Avistamiento. In Breather and her new drawings, the body having already incorporated the bird, no longer exhibits feathers, beak, and tail. Instead it proposes a body that dissolves in the smoke of tobacco, as a way of giving access through the invisible, to different forms of cognition and other realities.
Antonio Paucars new video performance The Purge with the Mothers of the Plants, 2016 was born from his experience with medicinal plants from the Amazon and the Andes. Specifically from his recent experience in Quechua-Lamas. As Paucar points out, in the Amazon indigenous people coexist harmoniously with plants and nature in general, and they heal themselves with dieting, bathing with medicinal plants, and purge. Purging is about cleaning the body from negative energy, and toxicity. Paucar explains: The purge is on the one hand the path to healing, to liberation, and on the other hand, a profound reconciliation with nature: with animals, with water, with the virgin jungle (sacha monte). Purging takes place in the form of vomiting and evacuation; bodily acts that are seen as abject and negative in the Western world. In The Purge with the Mothers of the Plants, the artist proposes a criticism to colonialism, and the polluting effects of consumerism. Through The Purge he proposes alternative ways of thinking, where human and nature can coexist. He does this by reversing what may be seen as of negative value in the Western world and bringing new light into it. Thus a toad is not a toad, -an animal with bad connotations, but a metaphor for the conciliation between humans and nature.
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Cantos de Pájaros Extintos Previamente Desconocidos Por La Ciencia, Pero Recuperados Por El Espiritismo, # 3, (Songs of extinct birds previously unknown by science but recovered by Spiritism, #3) is the third sound work in a project that documents intimate collective spiritist séances that instead of invoking dead people, they attempt to communicate with extinct birds. This audio piece and the drawings in the exhibition are the result of a séance on June 5th, 2016 at the artist apartment in Berlin. The artist writes: This séance was different from the previous séances in that only two creatures appeared (instead of the gathering of various birds in previous sessions). These two creatures seemed semi aquatic and full of air. The audio gathered in Cantos #3 specifically comes out of a creature that wished to be seen and heard between the union of the letters u and f. What is heard is the collective vocal process of the combination of these two letters.
The video performance Tres fantasmas, (Three Ghosts) 2007-14, deals with the loss of knowledge about ancentralship as a result of colonialization. The three ghosts are the Tres Potencias, from Venezuelan spiritist traditions, Maria Lionza, Guaicapuro, and Negro Felipe (Spanish, Indigenous, African), as three racial and role models. A paradox is presented in that the carving of the Three Ghosts is in the liking of the Pac-Man video game icon, so no real identity is associated to the idea of origin, in a globalized contemporary world. Ramírez-Figueroas explorations into the realm spiritism and it cultural referents proposes experiences into complex invisible realms.