(I) am: fibers in breath

The work of Esther Gámez during her residency at lagos* presents the performativity of the anima embodied in the body in two modalities: in public space and in the studio.

In the neighborhoods of Popotla and Anáhuac, in Mexico City, Esther places two collage pieces; on paper support (cellulose fibers) and fragments of posters and images of neighbors, over a public domain anatomical diagram of a woman. In these pieces Esther emphasizes the social material condition of the body, incorporating experiences and wanderings of others and of herself, by collecting found materials during her drifts through the city. With a deep interest in unveiling the woman’s body and situating it in collective visibility, Esther intercepts passersby; her desire is to create an intersection between positioning the work of women artists in the city’s gaze and framing subjective vulnerability as a kind of urban sheltering.

In the studio, through textiles, Esther makes visible the breath of life, the spirit, the air that allows us to think, move, act, and be. There are four installations and one piece that emphasize, in resonance with the intimacy of the artist’s studio, the effort or force (the immateriality) that animates human materiality. We are reminded that we are a textile, since we are constituted by epithelial, connective, muscular, and nervous tissue. The pieces were made with materials impregnated with bodies, memories, lives. Every Friday outside lagos, there is a street market of secondhand clothing bales, most of them coming from the U.S. This event was taken by Esther as both inspiration and a “material store.”

The work carried out during this one-month stay can be read as a duality of radiograph/portrait/body of the artist: on one hand, a corporeality manifested and placed in the urban social space, as a citizen with the right to sensorial-reflexive and artivist expression; and on the other, the substance expressed inwardly, in the studio, this being a circulation space of contemporary art, in residency modality, in which the subtlety of the textile is the intentionality of the spirit. In this manifestation at lagos, her will is externalized in a multiple, prolific, assertive flow, with a poetics of color in commonality, in the form of tones of collective interest and unfoldings towards well-being.

olgaMargarita dávila

Chief curator

*Esther is the first resident artist awarded the XXV Baja California Art Biennial, residency modality, granted by the Secretaría de Cultura of the Government of Baja California.

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