N.A.S.A.L.
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NHormiga

UN FARO A TIENTAS

"In the process of making this sample, the liminal zones have constituted meeting grounds for those who make up the non-collective NHormiga: Daya Ortiz, Ruth Cruz, Liliana García and Lisbeth Carvajal. Far from invoking the anthropological meaning of this term, linked to the rites of passage that mark the change from one moment of life to another, the artists reinterpret liminality as a circumstance or space of rituality without crossing, where the “between'' and, consequently, any demand for definitive transformation is avoided. Without closing an agonizing phase of existence and without yet tearing the veil of the new, the current proposals of the group invite to experience the transition as a legitimate state of (semi) permanence.

The works that make up the exhibition put in suspense the certainty of the world provided by the geopolitical configurations that establish territorialities and human borders. In this way, the perspectives of place that we see in the pieces move towards worlds inhabited and perceived by other species, fictional or metaphorical landscapes, dreamlike cartographies and ecosystems, the poetics of microworlds, places altered by the evocation of the I remember, sentimental geographies, the border between life and death, the proximity of outer space. In these evasive, conjectural topographies that border on objective reality, NHormiga finds a place of its own, a space that embraces the possibility of what does not yet exist, a heterotopia in the making.

Likewise, the artistic pieces rework the meaning of multiple experiences without resorting to the documentary record or presenting themselves as more or less clear traces of memory, but rather as vague clues or fictional games that encourage speculation. In each work the force of the autobiographical escapes from the anecdotal: it is contained, as a reserve of meaning, in metaphors, allegories and other poetic images that can be taken along different paths of interpretation.

NHormiga investigates the poetic uses and drifts of scientific data, the intersections between theoretical physics and theology, multispecies perspectives, the animal question, the imaginative power of dreams. It resorts to analog and digital technologies with an exploratory spirit, and displays its findings in logs or notes that are not seen in the exhibition but flood the studios and workshops of its members. The rigor of these investigations, even the obsession around them, accounts for a spirit of search that is vital in the practice of art.

In tune with this desire for persevering reflection, the title of the exhibition suggests abandoning the salvific metaphor of the lighthouse and inverting the relationship between navigators and light, that is, between some who have been lost or who must be oriented and another who has some certainty or enlightening truth. Thus, we imagine a lighthouse that, due to excess or lack of clarity, decides to leave its ordinary location, its safe space, to intuitively throw itself towards a place that cannot be seen, but can be felt. A beacon that makes its liminal circumstance a way to dispute its place in the world.

Ana Rosa Valdez
Curator of the exhibition
Earth, June 3, 2021