Say your name three times

Maria Sosa

The work of the artist Maria Sosa (Michoacán, 1985) is nourished by the processes arising from the colonization of Abya Yala –now Latin America–, based on archives, codices, or oral histories, as well as other social studies of history, such as anthropology. The artist focuses on the contemporary nature of the knowledge and cultures of Mesoamerica that have survived colonial epistemicides, racism, sexism, and underlying oppressions. Her work stems from the exploration and commitment to both artisanal techniques and the recovery of knowledge in pre-Hispanic and contemporary ritual objects. In recent years, Sosa has become interested in how Mesoamerican cultures understood the body as a container of knowledge, as a transmitter of relationships with the world, and how the colonial upheaval affected the understanding of death, under a phenomenology of renewal and ritual reintegration.

Say your name three times is an exercise in restitution. The project presents itself as a garden from which to trace a timeline –not chronological, nor linear– between ancestral cultures and their current relevance. A space where the human and non-human are interrelated, in search of a mourning that helps us understand death positively, where it becomes evident how, in the current Western hegemony, death has lost its meaning and life has neither value nor depth. This garden aims to eradicate the negative influence of the colonial spirit that enters in the form of a flying textile, like a virus, presenting a space of resistance through coexistence. For there are still ways to return to the land through rituality: in mortuary ceramics. The latent and the cyclical take the form of negotiation, so that what already existed continues and regenerates.

Framed by double-headed serpent arches, where mortuary vessels grow healing plants, where various planes of the interconnected ancestral world coexist, like liminal spaces through Si'pírakas or cosmic stairs, this garden is watched over and accompanied by mother deities located on the walls that, as guardians, accompany the ancestral legacy between life and death –Cihuateteo, Chalchihuitlicue, etc.–. The rituality takes the form of a spiral, adding syncretic temporal layers brought from the past to constitute the present.

In short, this project is a way to heal the colonial wound starting from personal and intimate ailments. The phrase that titles the exhibition is the action that Sosa’s grandmother taught her and her sisters when they went to the field, to ensure that the invisible part of them she called soul would return. An act or small ritual that years later she discovers in other contemporary indigenous cultures of Mexico, which preserve it as an act or mode of invocation for self-healing. Just as in Heal your words, Heal your energy, and Heal your death, it is a statement of intentions regarding lost knowledge and the interpersonal relationships of violence that coloniality imposed on the individual body and society, invoking willfully care for the healthy recovery of these relationships.

Agustin Pérez Rubio