To imagine the body we are as a house places us as a living organism; however, we inhabit our bodies at the same time that other beings inhabit us. In this sense, we coexist in a world alongside other worlds. The body is not separated from other organisms; rather, it is a container where atmospheric, vegetal, and animal affects are deposited. It is the first universe we inhabit: a refuge between joy and loss, a space of pulsating memories.

This exhibition is proposed as an essay on the body which—in its essence as a house, organism, temple, container, and world—safeguards a primigenial time that bursts into the present. It weaves itself through a web of improbabilities; a deep, almost imperceptible time that leaves its mark on an intimate archaeology that sustains us. Here, the selected works address these intersections of the body-self, both in itself and in relation to others, surrendering to forms, rituals, and repetitions that combine to escape beyond their own confines.

In this sense, connections with other beings shape a fabric of shared gestures and affects. Reiterative rituals remind us that what we do with the body, time and again, reinforces this web through ways of being together and sustaining a world of multiplicities. It is the place where the human recognizes itself in contact with that which exceeds it. And in that recognition, we return to the common; for we are organisms that inhabit, that remember, and that share an origin with all living things.

Therefore, reclaiming the sense of the body as an organism requires paying attention to its cycle of life and death: a system of cells, bacteria, and matter in perpetual transit that hosts and rejects, nourishes and expels, offers itself and withdraws. In the acts we repeat, we sediment ways of inhabiting.

Fernanda Ramos Mena