TRANSITIONS,

corseted realities

contrast juxtapositions

transitions absurdity

wore instrument for future generations.

 

by  Melissa Flower Natalie Romero Marx 

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2018

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This curation honors the meeting of two artists carrying the research of the female in the land.  It was a crossroads, a meeting of two lines spontaneously creating at a moment of intersection.  Like cells.  

 

An exploration of freedom.  Both carrying our own questions about what it means to be a woman or how have we lived our womanhood.  An honest curiosity and trust in our instincts as women stepping into the land and allowing ourselves to experience without predispositions or baggage.  

 

Ritual is a performance.  A way of dignifying myself.  Put my feet in the mud to see what it feels like.  It is enjoyable feeling that everyone should feel.  Without someone judging and saying oh now you will be dirty.  Not subject to predispositions that we all carry.  A way to feel free.  Basic things of what it means to be a human being.  We are always repressing ourselves.  We form a relation with the world based on all of these norms.  We aren't sure that we need them, but how are we not always evolving around these norms. The world needs to change when it does not serve the people.

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We took photos of our ritualistic performance of the experience of being free.  Freedom was expressed through experiencing the earth.  The earth outside of technology.  

 

Contemporary ritual of documenting experience of life juxtaposed with the reimagining of ancestral feminist, nature oriented rituals.  The rituals that help us reflect on who we are and how we feel in the world, how we exist.  Existence needs to be tender.  It is chaotic but we must be gentle. 

 

The pursuit of happiness is the path.  Freedom/happiness

 

Does freedom mean happiness?  

 

Documentation

 

Intersectional knowledges about mud.  

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Sculpting material to leave a footprint as a way of making a memory.  An image of freedom.  We have been controlled.  The two of us meeting without an agenda and just exploring what is and giving credit and dignity to our own experience.  This is beauty.  The art of living.  How life can be art also in the way you experience the world.  

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Work for self control.  The being unable to move properly.  

 

State of transition.  

 

Mud Brown with Red

 

I am thinking about control and the ways that women are seen as uncontrollable creatures who leak.  Women cannot control their own bodies.  Pregnancy and the rights of women over the bodies that so often act on their own.  And the man, this figure of control, chooses when he plants his seeds and where.  The male figure of the US needing to control the land, what is planted, the control of the resources and the control of the children.  And Puerto Rico as a colonized nation and the site of beginning of birth control.  This sense that she is colonized- PR is the woman.  And she does not have the right to say what happens to her.  She is loose and chaotic.  

 

How do feel that you are free.  Free from the man, free from colonization.  How to be free, imagine the self in the world as free.  Women always told how to behave to please the man.  Our behavior is always around contenting them.  

 

This society is built around the man.  

 

Your humanity, your dignity, it is beyond if you are a man or a woman, it is enough for you to have the right to express yourself and be free.  

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