About
Cuerpo Esoterico
This series, is an amalgamation of ideas and senses: an understanding and a rhythm, a conversation and a frequency, which, in its own tracking, gives meaning to things.
It is a form of change and assimilation that seeks encounters and relationality to continue historical coercions that imply transcendence.
Observing the historicity of places as moments in life, and the sort of vividness that predominantly is not manipulated by the mind but gathers a storytelling, Cuerpo Esoterico offers an intimate narrative that perhaps is inanimate for some of us and, for others, deeply connected with our collective pathways.
This series is a pedagogical iteration of generosity as a praxis: capturing, flirting, finding, placing, glimpsing, as in laboring something anew from something real and static. Some of my teachers will say that how you see the world is how you interact with it. Others will say that how you see the world is how you move in the world. Consider your unique perception of the world. How does it influence your engagement with it? In what cycle or pathway do you find yourself as the witness of this art collection? What is your story, and how do you believe you relate to the world?
Memory as a liminal space/body as Memory
“The child in each of us
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was
Or home as it should have been.
Paradise is one's own place,
One's own people, One's own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.
Yet every child
Is cast from paradise-
Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community,
Into vast, ongoing Change”.
Warrior BY MARCOS DURAN
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
From Parable of the talents, Octavia Buttler, 1998
Since childhood, I have been interested in those liminal spaces where some truth is hidden. Since childhood, I have loved to manifest spaces that I felt around me without being real. That is to say, on the back stairs of our patio, from one second to the next, they were a carriage at full speed in the middle of the intrepid forests of England or France. Under the same stairs, it was a terrible but endearing cave where the imaginary winters arrived without warning. My dolls were also protected in my arms throughout the hours while I hid from the foreign hunters chasing me across mountains and villages.
Something that I loved to recreate, together with my cousin Cristian, was the reckless passages through the abysses of the underworld; Cristian and I accumulated all the benches from my grandparents' house to build paths with the benches along the patio, then we crossed imaginary columns of stones on the benches, which were destroyed as we walked over each of them, between loud calls of each of our names from bench to bench, whoever fell off the cliff fell into the rivers of lava. Sometimes, we hung from each other's bellies to help each other, never without success, to add drama into our intense, silly games.
But something that I remember with great longing is the landscapes that we created with the construction materials in the back of my uncle's business.
When a good amount of gravel and sand accumulated, we poured small amounts of water in strategic places in the tundra; thus, over the hours and days, the tiny streams eroded the sand and formed poetic ecosystems, small improvised models that outlined the landscapes of Iceland and Spain, tiny grass, rocks, volcanoes, and lakes. Everything was strategically manipulated until a client arrived and asked for hundreds of kilos of product, which, to our sadness, meant the return to reality, the destruction of our paradise. After the collapse of our heroic engineering, we had to wait until the new batch arrived to rebuild our universe.
This universe was often true, perhaps not real, but true. Together with the generosity and brotherhood of my cousin Cristian, those worlds were progressively reinforced; those tiny rivers, those waterfalls, and abysses, those heroic escapes full of drama, were translated into sensations and art. For years, we were aware of that movement, of those journeys that the elements created in our physical body, in our world's ideas. Somehow, that architecture we recreated as children emerged as a thought in both of us. Cristian is an author and editor, and in me, with dance and choreography. What I'm getting at is that whatever we perceived was not simply emanating from our imagination. It was not a fortuitous or pure childhood discovery. I believe that it was already an ancestral realization of our freedom, that right there in those games, which to me now appear truly as unannounced strategies, the look of life was coming, the sensuality of building and emerging from those places that were not there but that existed in our hard drives, in our hearts.
So, in that sense, when one discovers movement beyond the physical and sensory, it is super interesting and fun because it is not only an awakening of oneself, individually, but also an awakening of the other, in the sense that this membrane of imagination is no longer only virtual but tangible, it becomes an idea, word, verb, breath, it becomes a constant space where one communicates, transfers and feels. A type of boreal wake, of cosmic tension, an indelible curtain of union compartment that, although continually modified, does not change. Something that, in some mysterious way, maintains the essence of that fundamental consciousness of the girl, the it, or the boy.
It's very curious that if you realize I'm not talking about anything other than memory if you pay attention to what I am saying here. What I'm doing is remembering. A vehicle that is an inherent part of being alive. Many times, the hardest thing to do is remember. Having the foolishness of remembering-recovering the sense of oneself, and from there the things, the objectives of coherence, but remembering. Turn off the outside sources and then say, well, let's see- where am I? Or even better, where is my self, or that part of me that was hidden somewhere until I hear its screaming? Maybe part of you stays in some of those majestic childhood escapes. And there is the strange thing, the macabre of time. Perhaps in each of those memories, part of you remains. So with even more reason, I at least say: I have to remember to make my effort after all the shit that I have been in charge of putting myself in, maintaining, accumulating, carrying out, or even reiterating and getting used to it! I have to remember to stop, breathe, talk to myself, and not react to myself, right? In my mind, I say to myself: you have already left the world but me, the one self that permitted you into the underworld to emerge?, and I say, stop, boy, stop, observe, and listen.
There is something else. This narrative you have constructed is not essential. It is not the actual source; it is not Caesar's tension with the people. It is not justice or calm. Stop and listen.
So, in this way, those landscapes and strategies that were naive at the time are no longer so. They always turn, look, and return as the true sources of wisdom and not the wisdom of just one.
It's all a stream of ancestral tools and systems that, like the water in our infant landscapes, actually run through our veins, right? The blood flooding with information positively corrodes the cavities of our biology to emanate possibility, and just like the ports in cities, it provides exits, entrances, and crossroads like those of natural banks. Every second, the blood becomes a vivid and bizarre dance from the body's physiology into the world, which we should also pay attention to because this is what we call perception.
An absolute essence of the central nervous system from which living beings suffer. I mention “living beings” without separation since we are recognizing and learning that those biological divisions of yesterday, embalmed by just a few, are no longer the hierarchy of thought. Little by little, we see that this perception, that realization, the imagination, and the matter are manifesting in their own way in terms of ecosystem and socio-cosmogony regarding neo-anthropology.
There are different species in the universe, which manifest themselves in very different ways in terms of the liminal place that is the body. The body, then, is a memory.
Cuerpo Esoterico,
By Erick Montes
May 11, 2024
Cementon, NY