CULTIVOS ORGÁNICOS
Cultivo de cerebro (2023); Medium: installation, textile cultivation. Italy, 2023. Materials: cotton fabric, organic tints, soil, mosses, others.
“Cultivo de cerebro” is the first stage of a long-term interdisciplinary research project that stems from the desire to create, explore, analyse, catalogue and cultivate sustainable micro-ecosystems in dialogue with the natural and social environment.
This project finds its deepest motivation in the urgency of awakening a renewed environmental and spiritual awareness in the light of the interdependence that binds human beings to nature.
The project offers the opportunity to meditate, study and transfer the ancient knowledge related to the earth and its elements, also in their application in ritual and medicine. The project would like to involve and sensitise the community through healing practices and participatory actions, and to preserve and transmit the collective and individual memory of a traditional heritage that is gradually disappearing.
ESPEJISMO
Medium: installation, textiles. Italy, 2023. Materials: cotton fabric, organic tints, mirrors, others.
The project stems from an introspective act and the need to investigate the spiritual, cultural, social and figurative dimension of the ritual artefact, a symbol that embodies the mystery of the human condition in its relationship with the sacred.
Metaphysical, motionless figures reflect the suffering and joys of the living, calling them to question the complexity and relativity of reality. These are textile sculptures with glass inserts, recycled materials, natural and animal elements. The artist’s Latin American origins and her closeness to Afro-Cuban culture emerge in the approach to the material: the use of traditional techniques at the service of experimental processes is the result of the cultural contaminations that the artist has always experienced due to her biographical history. Starting from an essentially animist perspective, the subject of the narrative is the public itself, whose reflection invites introspection and the rediscovery of one’s own spiritual self. The dialogue of the sculptures with their surroundings is therefore an essential condition of their existence, as it is only in the relationship with the outside world that the artefacts come to life, changing and adapting to the individual and collective narrative. The figures depicted are anthropomorphic and recall typical elements of the landscape, departing from any technical vagueness in the treatment of organic matter. The characters present stylised features tending towards the universal, a typical characteristic of the ritual mask, and manifest themselves as ambiguous entities located in an area bordering on the supernatural. The masks have shapes and invoices that refer to different realms: the spirit realm, the animal realm and the human realm. The choice of materials is careful and carries within it an almost methodical symbolism: these are composite representations that embrace various but precise elements, so that the whole offers a synthetic image of the complexity inherent in the mental and archetypal universe of the human being. When artistic action becomes preparatory to spiritual practice and philosophical speculation, the artwork becomes an invocation, an initiatory ritual, an intimate prayer, a visceral tale of the soul. Making art as an act of faith.
Babalu Aye, Olokun (2023). Medium: sculpture, installation. Materials: wood, roots, palm, branches, natural fibres. In collaboration with Daniel Escobar.
ORIRI
Medium: Installation. Oct / 2022. Italy. Materials: cotton fabric, organic tints, mirror.
Oriri (from Latin – to be born, to come) is an intimate reflection on ‘birth’, but also an invitation to ‘re-birth’.
The artwork manifests itself in organic form and evokes a vulva in the act of childbirth. The contribution of the mirror, which reflects everyone without distinction by putting each person on the same level, calls the viewer into question by making her or him the protagonist of the artwork. The intent is to stimulate reflection on the collective responsibility to protect the right to choose as a universal right.
LA JAULA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation. Oct / 2022. Turin, Italy. Materials: clay, mirrors, metallic inserts.
Is it possible to transform the substance of a finite subject by expanding its perception to infinity through artistic metaphor?
The installation “La Jaula” (in english – the cage) refers to the conflict that manifests itself in people when they feel their soul is constrained in a finite body, vulnerable and enslaved, since it is incapable of eradicating the collective perception of the self and legitimising itself in Being. The “body cage”, consisting of two parallel mirrors capable of expanding the subject’s perception to infinity, reinterprets the “mirror” element by making it the protagonist in the process of acceptance and liberation. The sculpture, made of hand-moulded unbaked clay, represents a hybridised body that wraps around itself unravelling into a female and a male back, two poles that in the Human inevitably dialogue and contaminate each other. A fundamental element of the artwork is prayer: a genuflection, the surrender of the body to the earth, intersects with a part of the subject twisting upwards. The tension created by these two opposing forces creates balance in the stasis of the subject represented. The only possibility in the constriction of the body remains the exercise of the Spirit.
RAÍCES
Medium: Land Art, Installation. Sept / 2022. Pinar del Rio, Cuba. Materials: “tela de tapado”, tobacco, thread.
‘Raíces’ is a collective artistic act of investigation into roots and was created to heal that perennial restlessness the artist is confronted with in growing up far from a land in which she does not live, but which lives in her. In its perennial search for a sense of belonging, ‘Raíces’ represents a moment of self-healing and fundamental awareness.
The artist’s paternal family has worked tobacco in the fields of Pinar del Rio, Cuba, for many generations. The installation, created inside an uncle’s tobacco house, is a collective artwork in that the whole of Isabel’s family is involved. Each member of the family actively contributed to the artwork. The desire was to create a shared space and time to reflect on roots, using as a metaphor the plant that has characterised the artist’s family history for 150 years: tobacco. The weaving of the word ‘Raíces’ took place using the veins of tobacco leaves (grown and cared for by uncles and cousins) on a “tela de tapado”, a wide-meshed cloth used by farmers to protect plants from the sun’s rays. The thread used to apply the veins to the cloths is traditionally used to sew the tobacco leaves together before drying.
Isabel Rodriguez Ramos ©2023