Memory Daydream

Hermaphrodite on Mars

In these conflicted times, it’s hard to imagine another existence. It’s fascinating to think about our inability to think past our own cognition, because if the thing lies beyond our cognition, how could we ever think it? As a paradox, it grants an impossible space, but also an opportunity. I wanted to imagine a thing I cannot imagine. And if our longings for Space (and for exploiting its resources) come true, how does this place feel?

I made the diptych “Hermaphrodite on Mars” out of a need to think about a future which is not a direct continuation of the present: a speculative place on Mars, from which I could distance myself from Earth and look again at the reality I know, especially at the conflicts within which I exist. This distance is not an attempt to escape reality. It is a space that allowed me to build possibilities that are not subject to the dichotomy of conflict. In itself the place is not utopian, and it is possible that the transformations it underwent left us behind.

I thought about Lot’s wife and her fatalistic curiosity, and indeed we are all like that. I wanted to take the fracture and channel it into thought beyond the limits of my understanding. The body becomes a future being, one that perhaps no longer needs the definitions that were necessary in the world from which it came. Unlike Lot’s wife, who looks back and becomes a pillar of salt, this figure continues to look forward, deciding to leave something behind, even if it is not clear what lies ahead.

While working, sounds of Krautrock accompanied me, music which is itself a journey and a search for a place that does not yet exist. History is not erased, but in this series of paintings, it stops being the main reference point. Through this figure I tried to imagine what happens when we stop choosing between two familiar sides, and begin to move toward a place for which we do not yet have a clear language to describe it.

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