The Ritual issue. Art as Healing Praxis 2018

Parabol Art Magazine Nr. 9
Curated by Verena Melgarejo Weinandt & Imayna Caceres
(Vienna / Berlin / Lima)
Size: 40 ✕ 58 cm

Participating Artists: Vivian Zurita, Sergio Zevallos, Sophie Utikal, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Maque Pereyra, Antonio Paucar, Eliana Otta, Sandra Monterroso, Ana Mendieta, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Marissa Lôbo, Alfredo Ledesma, Alessandra Dos Santos, Pêdra Costa And Taís Lobo, Imayna Caceres, Gloria Anzaldúa






 


In curating this printed issue, we approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two guiding figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In turn, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy that runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”

We presented the works, exploring their connections between each other and the invocations they summon. The works invoke a stitching of wounds, of moving selves, and of spiritual activism. They refer to cosmovisions of interrelation, of trans and afro spiritualities, of Andean transformations, and indigenous reparations. They braid connections: caring for the dead in underworld journeys, exorcising whiteness with poisonous cures, and channeling communal spirits. They seek to activate ancestral knowledge and universal energies—a politics of the ritual towards healing revolutions. The invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological, and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between third-world, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics, and mystical sources.
 
Participating Artists: Vivian Zurita, Sergio Zevallos, Sophie Utikal, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Maque Pereyra, Antonio Paucar, Eliana Otta, Sandra Monterroso, Ana Mendieta, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Marissa Lôbo, Alfredo Ledesma, Alessandra Dos Santos, Pêdra Costa And Taís Lobo, Imayna Caceres, Gloria Anzaldúa.

Thanks to Verena Melgarejo Weinandt who invited me to co-curate, to Margarethe Makovec of < rotor > association for contemporary art who linked us to section a, and to the people of section a for the enthusiastic support. Thanks to the suggestions of Miguel López and Arturo Higa, and to Manuel Carreon Lopez of kunst-dokumentation.com.