MARIA JOSE ARJONA
LARGE SCALE PROJECTS
TOGETHER BUT SILENT
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF BARCELONA MACBA
Barcelona-Spain
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF MEDELLIN
MAMM
Medellin-Colombia
2022-2023
Work comisioned for the exhibition "If this was the beginning of an infinite. Maria Teresa Hincapie.
No rules. There are intuitions, traces, coagulating spaces.
Resting places where everything seems to gravitate towards a black hole.
Spaces where the appropriate speed is reached
making us move from habitual states
and away from predictability.
In silence but together is a map of pilgrimage and choreographic articulation. It is about drawing routes and at the same time disseminating, in a broader way, the knowledge that Hincapié wanted to share as a teacher. The choreographic becomes the intention to gestate something collective, a sum of bodies and actions that go beyond the museum, but include it as a space for crossing and social experimentation.
AS IT IS INSIDE SO IT IS OUTSIDE
NC ARTE
Bogota-Colombia
2021-2022
I want to imagine that this place of the unexpected is what emerges after this encounter.
As It Is Inside So It Is Outside is in effect about how everything, human and non-human, flourishes, proliferates and creates links beyond the conditions of everyday life. And yet, the project is also about finding the “edge of the world” in the everyday — as another MJA box recipient described his experience with oracles. The discovery that the limit of the world rests on the edge of mundane things, its unsuspected borders, that the outside of the world already exists potentially in the mundane. This is why art matters: as a practice that tries to unfold and detach the limits of the everyday.
TO BE KNOWN AS INFINITE
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF BOGOTA
MAMBO
Bogota-Colombia
2018
Let's imagine for a while and within the contingencies of this time,
the way these “new animals” will cross our hands to appear as a flock of messengers, as a pack of healers, as constellations moving through new orbits.
Representing twenty years of work, this mid-career survey occupies the museum in its totality. Rather than follow a chronological presentation of works, the exhibition’s five chapters take on the image of the pendulum as a way to understand the cyclical nature of Arjona’s practice. Cast into motion, this gravitational pull returns the artist’s focus to a recurrent set of questions as she moves between diverse environments, mediums, and contexts: arriving each time at a different answer, or an alternative means of expression. The chapter titles – While in the City; While in the Woods; While In-Between; While on Earth / While in the Air; While in the Air / While on Earth – emphasize both the mythic nature of Arjona’s cosmology as well as the conditions of becoming and reiteration in her work.
SIGHTING
FLORA ARS NATURA
Bogota-Colombia
2015
Magic: Activity linked to light
Migration: Movement necessary to create meaning.
Migrant: Entity capable of bringing new meanings to more established populations.
Messenger: The one delivering a message / also a migrant.
Sighting is a human awareness project in which the birds lead us to surprise ourselves with the other, in which we must inevitably start from other physical presuppositions to meet the body that we really inhabit daily. And it is precisely in the body where all the weight of the project falls, since it is the body that allows the trip and also the encounter; it is the body that unfolds to let us understand flight as a possible metaphor for accepting a world that is constantly changing to make way for life. The birds and the body are the same thing. They are entities that fluctuate and necessarily coexist in the world to always make life possible; and life, is the place, the platform to SIGHT.
THE KISS
LOCATION ONE
New York-USA
2012
Nothing stays the same when a living body or non- human body enters the space…it introduces life.
The Kiss is an exhibition mapping a system uniting two bodies. It is a gesture, magnified by the use of sound, emerging from the action of kissing and intensified by the working presence of the performer’s body.
Throughout the space each element is weaved by simple associations between body (present and absent), sound, and various materials which are all used to reveal the nature of this binding gesture: kissing. The exhibition does not display one privileged moment of the kiss – rather, it dislocates it through its many representations, underlining in this way an aural intensity which catalyses the possibility of an image of kissing within each spectator.
The exhibition could be also perceived as a microscope slide where some of the components of kissing are exalted and isolated in order to better understand them. It is not a rendering, it is not a choreographed sequence, it doesn’t function within linear time. But it proves the force contained in a simple gesture (kissing) giving it simultaneously a voice and an expanded corporeality.
VIRES
MADRE MUSUEM
Napoli-Italy
TEATRO ANATOMICO
Bologna-Italy
2010
Diversity, uniqueness, singularity, change...
Power.
Vires is a project stating the fundamental role of the spectator in performance, materializing the power residing on the individual through CHOICE in relationship to critical events and incidence of that same choice, on the way we experience and re-shape social, political and economical spheres around us. The possible similarities between the interaction with art and the ways we approach and live in the world, can only be reflections of the body we have “produced” as result of cultural evolution through time. The capacity our bodies have to change and be re-produce again, transpire our ability to relate to each other and our surroundings, or overflow our deficiency to understand the real significance of freedom. It is only under the premise of a free body that power could be understood as a sustainable force leading to erase differences between populations, and it is only, through individual choice, that freedom is affirmed every time an action takes place.
THE WATERMILL CENTER
WATERMILL CENTER
The Hamptons-USA
2009
“It is strange the way nature has become such a non-natural environment”
“One should develop the ability to “see” ideas”. Joseph Beuys (1)
A line of thought, a line of movement, a line would be an investigation and a course of action by which THOUGHT meets FORM resulting in a series of daily performances, where the body acts as a catalyst, promoter and executer of a process capable of unveiling the correlation between an idea, an action and drawing (or drawing, action, idea). Drawing, contemplated as a physical extension of both, thought process and visual result of the action will lead, by experimentation, to a series of formal and conceptual variations in the way the body could approach and experience, based on the concept and meaning of a line (2), objects and surfaces within in a determined space through time in order to expand their significance and formal depth (the meaning and power inherent to an object, the value of a space and the consequential line of though derived from the process mentioned above),
Drawing is not addressed as a media within the frame of this project; it is a concept and an action simultaneously. It is a process and a device by which everything that is “visibly” static and/or silent is put in to motion, acquiring a voice as the body enters any space. A line in a paper could denote the mood of its executer; a line of motion could reveal the subjectivity on choosing certain objects within a certain space in order to deliver a message or create a piece. Lines compose words, sounds and images and when the body moves, a line is what is left behind; it is precisely this l line the cohesive force behind any performance; it expands the meaning of any object as it is linked to other non-traditional functions. It is this continuous line drawn by the body and multiplied through motion, what seems to put together opposite concepts within the same space; it is this line, the bridge that allows knowledge become an experience.
THE WHITE SERIES
HOUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT
Berlin-Germany
2009
I want to play in order to become all the meanings, all words, all possible languages, a common vocabulary
The “body” is not a word and can’t be defined as one. It is, if we what to identify it, the expression of all the definitions contained in all words.
This phrase could actually explain the “White Series” as well as my recent work, in its most complex implications in relationship with the body and its inference regarding language. This unit, the “white series”, is a play of words which implies a different way of understanding language to better release the expression or expressive force of the body from single definitions. What I want to state with this, is the universal meaning of the body itself and the need to free words from specific delineations in order to be free physically. The body as the space from where we experience life, functions and happens in terms of actions and reactions; every process that takes place in the body, including rational practices, is a result not of a definition but of the assimilation of stimuli, which in return is the intersection of different phenomena. Language as we use it, cages that experience as it expresses verbally or written that same experience; words have become segments composing the line that further on will create the limit which circumscribes and address certain characteristics, attaching and attracting with these definitions, individuals who think and feel that those descriptions communicate what they are and what they believe within the same boundary (a save place). The body, in opposition to this system and ironically living in it, talks through organs, plays with images, sounds, smells, textures, blends everything, reacts, absorbs and transpires, giving as result fluids, which are not singular on their composition but bundles of bodily experiences. These fluids in a metaphoric way are all the possible meanings and forces of single particles as it is the body.
How we understand something defines our position in a group, or what I call boundary/limit and under this equation, we divide ourselves by gender, identity, sexuality, nationality etc…It is my intention with the white series to dissect words in order to experience all their possible definitions instead of attaching the body to a word or in reverse, a word to talk about the body. By releasing the word of its singularity and freeing it by addressing it through its multiplicity, the body transgresses it’s own circumscription or “local identity” to better address issues pertaining to all of us; issues that can alternate and intermingle with each other as it is the case of “Untitled”, the first performance of the series. I don’t want to define, or even write about the “issues that pertain to all of us”; it is a cliché by now. I want to describe a little each piece and give some “clues” working as “stimuli” for the reader or viewer to continue. I don’t want to be attached to my identity, to what I might find right or wrong (everything is), I don't want to be attached, even, to my first language…I don’t want to talk. I want the body to express, act and react, I want to play in order to become all the meanings, all words, all possible languages, a common vocabulary; which it would be to say: Become multiplicity, become an intensity.