On Thursday, June 9 and Saturday, June 11, Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte will present these participatory situations by Sofía Durrieu, as part of NODO Circuito de Galerías.
Arco reflejo (Reflex Arc) presents a set of performative sculptures that propose, mediate, and articulate a series of very specific and regulated contacts between an operator and the person who chooses to participate.
Wedged between the ceremonial narrowness of the rules to be followed and the urgency of necessity, the contact becomes “denaturalized.” Overloaded with meaning, it turns at once feared and desired, fixed and rhizomatic, like a distant ideal or a baroque god, folded in upon itself, inaccessible. The sensation of separation thus becomes a complete certainty.
Direction and conception: Sofía Durrieu
Performers: Felipe Álvarez Parisi, Denise Groesman, Jair Jesús Toledo
Free admission, subject to room capacity.
IMPORTANT:
The duration of each participatory situation varies according to the device, which may result in waiting periods. Likewise, this waiting does not necessarily guarantee participation in the experience. Some devices may present limitations for people with reduced mobility.
Participation is not required to visit the exhibition.
The Messiah’s Finger
The results, efforts, and shared actions between active spectator, machine, and operator are fundamental in defining this manifestation proposed by Sofía Durrieu — and about which I reflect in this text, as a good practitioner: submissive and meek.
To place our body and mind in a state of relaxation, left in the hands of another person — or a machine — invites us to surrender to a place we do not know, or at least one we are not accustomed to visiting. If we practice it at all, it is more likely in an intimate, private space, certainly not an exhibition setting.
To publicly disarm our soul — which, armored, hides between ribs — is like setting a dinner tablecloth without a table. Everything is at hand: by foot, by ass, by calf, by mouth.
Once relaxed, emotional deconstruction expresses itself briefly, concisely, precisely — when we are subtly touched by metal tools and by the promotional voice of the one who guides us, as if in a beauty salon, a spa, or a confessional. The future of perception appears with existential melancholy and pleasure, as if that deformity we understand as faith were being slowly unscrewed and offered up to the cosmos. Faith becomes a gift, and this gift makes us unique under the public gaze that demands expression.
These machines give you too much — they bring you close to mental corners that pierce the membrane of the real, causing sweat to run in unfamiliar places, generating emotions where we have never felt before, highlighting our virtues in function of our humanitarian development. The machine as substitute for the other, and the other as manipulator of our emotions.
Submission means placing oneself under the order, judgment, or affection of another. As an example, we can think that every Christian must submit to God without questioning Him, following His orders and teachings, in order to live a life in faith. To touch the hand of a recumbent Christ — His finger — transports us to an alternative reality; it brings to the surface what we have built as the image of compassion, devotion, and fervor.
Through His representation, we can be with Him for a moment: His finger allows us to be touched and, through this, to be transported to ancestral narratives that seductively subject us to mystery.
The experience is primary, symptomatic, full of memory. That is why, for a moment, we surrender to that encoded past — so compelling as it speaks to us of cooperative humanity, matter, belief, and representation. The desire to obtain that which we believe we need — or that which we despair of losing — moves us without compassion for anything. It is in that place, between the material, the word, and the mental, that faith is built: a sustained vibration made up of continuities, truths, and present realities enriched by the interference of the one who, along with the redeeming finger, brings us the possibility of opening a channel, a threshold, a time of emotional prosperity.
The submission Sofía proposes with her machines awoke in me a delicate malice — perhaps comparable to the violence of being seduced by a swindler of faith.
Carlos Herrera / June 2022
