Existing comment:
María Jerez
12 / 12
Sticking my head through the capitals of your columns
For months I have looked at the image of the building of the Office of Culture of the Embassy of Spain. After looking at it for a long time, I wondered how you can touch an image, how you can come into physical contact with it.
The impossibility of going to Washington to tour the building, step on it, smell it, perceive its temperature and its small garden at the entrance, led me to create a way of meeting to get in touch with it that consisted of dismembering that image into the different elements that compose it.
I couldn’t touch the building, but I could touch pieces of the image if they become a body: extracting the spherical shape of one of its bushes with the texture of its tiles; giving my nails the color of their grass; touch a stone the same color as the railing of your balustrade; caressing a baluster; reaching into a gutter; letting part of the curve of her arches physically interfere with my gaze; imagine a hole produced by the deterioration of its facade and stamp an image of it on a cloth; stick your head out of a plastic capital similar to the top capitals of the building’s columns; covering myself with a sky-colored cloth, the sky that flies over the image of the building; or holding a tree trunk full of lichens which could be the lichens that spread over the trees in your garden.
Contact with the elements of the image gave rise to a choreography of constant encounters with alterity, where new relationships can arise. A dance, danced live, by my body and the body of all the elements. This dance, in turn, has been captured in this image.
About María Jerez
María Jerez’s work uses choreography, cinema, and visual arts to explore the way in which art’s relation to the spectator is a space where modes of representation can be put into crisis.
Moving beyond her early interest in theatrical and cinematographic conventions —and the audience’s implicit understanding of those conventions— she now seeks to question the entire relationship by opening spaces of potentiality through encounters with what we find strange and alien. Her most recent work insists on the performativity of the encounter as a space of transformation. In this process of transformation the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing diffuse edges between the known and the unknown.
Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge itself becomes something vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
She combines the production of her artistic work with educational, curatorial and editorial projects. |