Being on site at our Ars Bioarctica residency made impossible by the current pandemic conditions Mayra Citlalli Rojo Gómez will shift her Biofriction residency online. Over the course of one month from January 7th to February 4th, Mayra will continue her work on domestication in the history of the evolution of anatomy-botany. Mayra will specifically aim to investigate and locate the performative space where historical research on plants and evolution have a binding character with language as "textus", tissue, link of imaginations about vegetative-human mutations. During the residency, Mayra will keep us updated via postings on our website. The residency will conclude with an online event on February 17th which will be announced separately.
To the blog entry:
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ARTIST STATEMENT
The monsters grow in the interstice offered by the dash in the word bio-art. Their presence are the interference in the colonial history of Latin America. Their clamor proclaim the rebellion of symbols and the experience of impossibility. To imagine them is the unexpected and contradictory act of the dissidents.
As a social activist I have learned that there is no artistic practice that is not exclusive, just as there is no social movement where we can all be included. The powerlessness of insurrection is to discover that community remains a concept and not an exercise in symbiotic mutuality.
There is no utopia more powerful than transformative everyday practices and that is why I believe in the power of language (tongue) as an act of the body, in the mystery of organic matter, in the image that breaks the barrier of belonging, in the insurrection of the imaginations of the monsters that are conjured up in the act of narration.
Mayra Citlalli Rojo Gómez, Mexico December 2020
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Mayra Citlalli Rojo Gómez (MX) is an artist, interdisciplinary researcher and curator in visual arts and body discourses (gender and race). She developed postdoctoral research about bacterial cellulose. Currently she works with critical association between symbiosis, evolution-teratology and diffuse identities, which interrogate the limits between the human and the non-human in the vegetal an bacterial universes.
The residency is part of Biofriction, a European collaboration project committed to supporting bioart and biohacking practices. Biofriction project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. biofriction.org
Image courtesy of the artist:
The tongue as a receptacle for Huernia cutting. Objective to create an interference with the language to recover and at the same time expand the Nzaki* energy. Mexico, December 2020
*word of the Otomi (indigenous people of Mexico inhabiting the central Mexican Plateau) translated as "blood tree"