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THE SOUL IS NOT A BONE   by Nerea Ubieto

THE POWER OF BEING

They say that the spine can be connected with the recording of our life experiences: a sort of staircase in which each vertebra would be a step towards the true or the knowledge taken from consciousness. At the physical level, the spine is the axle of the body, the structure that keeps us upright and works to support the body weight. According to yogic thought, it is as young as your spine is flexible and, in this sense, it acquires some very strong freedom connotations. Her careful and constant work allows a fluid movement, but also helps remaining still in one position, and glance inside, to meditate.

For Romina Rivero, the vertebra is a symbol of vulnerability and, at the same time, pure liberating power. Bones that are part of the installation have their personal experience of life linked to the healing, physical and spiritual. Represent the fight from the intimate, understanding the body as an extension of the Interior able to overcome external domains, that subjugate you and constrain. The installation device comdeses a field of tensions, among which stands out the existing between the idea of the social body Foucauldian - understood as the materiality of power on the same bodies of the subjects – and the estimation of the classical oriental philosophy, procurer of deep awareness, in the interests of the individual and collective emancipation.

On one hand, we are a same driver gear uniformed parts: the look of the Panopticon - that eye that sees everything -, weighs on our bodies blinded and disposed in one direction only. On the other, we are constitutive, differentiated and unique bones, which contain an inherent freedom. It is a dance of forces destined to reveal what, by nature, belongs to us. The oppressive metallic coating, a clear reference to capitalism and the post-Fordist industrial society, is also a specular surface on which to be reflected and do an introspection exercise. In this way, the possibility opens up to generate a place of resistance at the very core of repression. The threads that pull and tighten embody, in the same way, their power to untie. This conception is very close to the Chinese tradition, where the natural course of things, the Dao, is forged through the alternation of two opposing active principles, the yin (shady) and the yang (solana).

Said Master Lao Zi in the Tao te king:

(...) Being and nothing generate one another,

the difficult and the easy are completed with each other,

the length and the short form one another.

the high and the low are poured into each other,

the sound and tone harmonize with each other,

the before and the after follow each other.

There is a tension between what we are essentially and what we become, between the consubstantial movement that should prevail and the self-imposed one. We get carried away by the strategies that governments and power groups have built ad hoc for our domination. Without thinking where, we just go. But sometimes, in that journey, a space is created, a gap to fill, a silence. The so-called state of inaction1. They are the tense threads and the possibility of cutting them, of getting out of the way marked. We discover the intimate dimension in which we recognize ourselves, that redoubt of freedom, reflection and empowerment.

The installation work presented by Romina Rivero is subtle and emphatic, with the indispensable elements, but with multiple layers of reading. From the dignification of the woman´s mourning expressed in the black lace, to the vindication of the difference intervening each bone piece with detail. In front of all of them, a clear message: to work the distance that separates us from ourselves, reverting the hegemony in favor of autonomy, the disciplinary processes in libertarians. In short, to make the potential emerge from the union and the richness of the interdependent vertebrae.

 

 

1.Inaction is another of the common concepts of traditional Chinese thought, it is not about absolute inertia, but about understanding the state of things and balancing it without exerting any pressure on beings. Inaction is typical of the course, whose effectiveness is universal and permanent. Translation by Anne Hélène Suarez Girard in Tao te King by Lao zi. Ediciones Siruela, 1998 Madrid.

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