The place where I am You

“The place where I am You, equals Ourselves” is an esteemed verse of Piedra de sol (Sun Stone) poem by Octavio Paz. This exhibition explores weaving elements from four connecting bodies of work produced during the pandemic inquiring on relational ways of being and knowing in/on the world. The crisis of climate change, the outbreaks of infection, and the menace of war offer a portal to other ways of being-in-relation. We are coming back to the awareness of ancient times: being alive is to be interwoven with the praxis (what is known as lived) of others: people, the land, the world.

Dialogical Playground
Interactive installation. 8x8in (20x20cm) stoneware plate, glass marbles
2021

Etkar-André-Str. 29, 04157 Leipzig

June 5-27th, 2022
With thanks to Takt Berlin-Leipzig for organizing, also to German Neu Start Kultur, and for some of the pieces thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and British Columbia Arts Council.

The book allows for making-your-own visual/textual poems. Nahui Ollin (“Four-Movement” in Nahuatl) is a fundamental concept of the ancestral and relational epistemologies of Mexico and Mesoamerica. It denotes the balanced joining of opposites necessary for creation/transformation to occur; as well, it represents the current era of the Fifth Sun becoming alive via the presence of the history of the four previous eras. Simultaneously, it refers to the goddess of life, Quetzal–Coatl, the bird (sky) uniting with the serpent (earth), or Kukulan in Mayan tradition.

Natural Field of Influence
Interactive installation. 1m (40in) diameter, steel, cloth, wood, plastic, and glass marbles
2022

"Synchronous encounters add up energy"
Pigment print on cold-press cotton rag 30x40cm (12x16in)
Click on image to go this whole series: La Física del Deseo
2021

The landscapes for Sound Migrations are part of the series of photomontages Atl-Tlachinolli: Her(e) on the Land, composed in situ under the influence of the Canadian Rocky Mountains during 2020 right after the first pandemic lockdown. Atl-Tlachinolli means “Burning-Water” in ancient Nahuatl language of Mexico, a concept and symbol of the vital contradiction. The show explores avenues for putting these photomontages alongside the visual/textual poems of La Física del Deseo / The Physics of Desire: Philosophiæ Naturalis, which reimagine the principles of physics as relational epistemologies: love, being-with-others, erotic energy, connectedness. Two installations and a book offer participatory playgrounds, places to be-in-relation.

“The Physics of Desire” series suggests an irreconcilable oxymoron for modern science: Desire, a drive attributed to the so-called Animal Kingdom, but which is certainly a force of all life, is supposedly alien to the production of scientific knowledge. Yet science is created by living beings. This assumption of detachment, central to Western science since the Enlightenment, reflects the belief in science’s privilege as a superior or ‘objective’ perspective on the world. “Philosophiae-Naturalis” may recall Newton’s treatises in his Principia Mathematica, which, along with other works, forms the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism that empowered and continues to sustain Western colonization. Around the world, a central component of this process has been the systemic destruction of Indigenous relational epistemologies based in the life-praxis of the Earth’s ancestral caretakers.

"Gaze is sometimes a body, sometimes vibrations"
Pigment print on cold-press cotton rag 30x40cm (12x16in)
Click to go to La Física del Deseo / The Physics of Desire
2021

Her(e) on the Land #4
Pigment print on cold press cotton rag 17x22in (43x56cm)
Click to go to Atl-Tlachinolli: Her(e) on the Land
2020

Her(e) on the Land #81
Pigment print on cold press cotton rag 17x22in (43x56cm)
Click to go to Atl-Tlachinolli: Her(e) on the Land
2020

Her(e) on the Land #80
Pigment print on cold press cotton rag 17x22in (43x56cm)
Click to go to Atl-Tlachinolli: Her(e) on the Land
2020