TEMPERING THE SOUL

 “We live within imagined worlds; the task is to imagine better ones.”
— Rebecca Solnit

From the moment I met Georgia E. Durán, I sensed that we would walk into futures together. Today, with pleasure, we “make our social debut” on this first journey. Georgia appears quiet at first, yet once we know her craft and background, we understand that she is not retiring by nature but deeply alert in reflection; her training in psychology and education clearly gives her the tools to offer this awareness.

Georgia is an artist from Monterrey who for over ten years has worked in textile arts, folding, stitching, and drawing with her sewing machine. With an interest in the transition from vastness to intimacy, she has embraced the concept of Wabi‑Sabi, learning to accept imperfection and to see beauty in it, as her guiding principle. This philosophy has led her to create textiles, patchwork pieces, and thick quilts, exploring domestic spaces and their construction. As she reflects: “Desires and expectations, trying to predict the future, hoping that this envisioned future will fit in the place built for it. And as expected (or not), life doesn’t unfold as planned. Everything must adjust, change, adapt. Nothing is perfect, but everything is as it should be.”

Two years ago, Georgia presented Te llevo dentro, an interactive installation activated by audience participation: a table of food meant for peeling (leaving residues), a projected video on the wall featuring images of women from her lineage who share her name, and an atmosphere rich in joy and sharing. These elements mark her first relational art piece, developed as Device for a Shared Temporal Future.

Building on this precedent, during her one‑month residency at lagos, the artist created a relational quilt, merging the principles of home-based practice, desire, and future orientation, with the intention of crafting interactive and collaborative relational-art experiences.

Device for a Shared Temporal Future functions as a mobile space where participants share reflections on the question: What kind of world do you want to see? The first activation took place as a sleepover, playing on the enveloping character of the patchwork quilt, on Thursday, July 24, at ARAFURA in Colonia Popotla. Navigating the space were Vanessa García Lembo, Georgia E. Durán, and myself, with a brief introduction by Fernanda Téllez. The experience was truly fantastic!

For twelve hours (including sleep), we became processants of each others’ perspectives, values, and imagined activities for a shared future. Referencing rice‑and‑potato cultivation fields evoked through the cuilta’s form, and Bosch’s Ship of Fools, for its inverted sense of dominant values, we envisioned a floating Chinampa in which kindness becomes the prevailing affective tendency, equity is operative, and the dynamic flow of this utopia guides us toward laughter, food sharing, and healing the psyche by working through trauma toward flexibility and dissolution.

If the above sounds joyful and evocative, you are invited to envelop yourself in the Device for a Shared Temporal Future; grab paper and pencil and chinampa on!

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief Curator