Ariamna Contino. Manigua

September 12th - November 2nd, 2024

EL APARTAMENTO

Calle de la Puebla, 4, local bajo derecha. Madrid. Spain

The artistic project that Ariamna Contino presents at El Apartamento is based on the manigua, a word of indigenous origin that describes the tropical forests, typical of Cuba, inhospitable spaces that throughout history have served as a refuge in the bosom of nature for slaves and those fleeing from war. It is for this reason that, in the words of the artist, "the manigua is rite, the manigua is syncretism, the manigua is rebellion, it is healing and freedom".

For this, the artist's research has been based on a text, El folclor médico de Cuba, written in the mid-20th century by the Cuban author José Seoane Gallo. The book is a compendium of medicinal remedies that the ancestors elaborated from the plants they gathered in the Cuban manigua and which, in our time, remain safe only in popular culture. Contino's artistic work is an exercise in personal freedom, which is why he is particularly interested in the set of preparations attributed with the ability to heal certain ailments related to the voice and sight, that is to say, to speech and perception.

Contino's exhibition, Manigua, reveals both his approach and the interests that animate his artistic production. Thus, in the space of El Apartamento, on the one hand, he articulates his characteristic work between engraving and sculpture, through a very personal technique that he has developed over the last fifteen years and which consists of the openwork of paper by hand, the site specific that involves placing a fragment of his Madrid studio in the exhibition room and a complex installation that operates as a laboratory in real time. And, on the other hand, he establishes a specular relationship between two conceptual and symbolic terms: root, earth, identity; and healing, liberation, transcendence. In this framework, precisely, it denounces the uprooting that comes with the fact of distorting all identity in the paradigm of global society.

Visitors will also be able to enjoy the interdisciplinary work of the artist, who, thanks to the universe she weaves between popular knowledge, historical documents, scientific knowledge and aesthetic reflections, manages to express her particular view of what the manigua treasures. In her words, "more than a natural space, it is a concept: it is the knowledge that accompanies me wherever I go and helps me in my daily praxis. So complex is its understanding that only in the intersection between imaginary, writing, science, art and tradition do I find its most accurate representation. Only by tracing a 'cognitive map' do I manage to rethink it". In this way, then, Contino tries to protect himself from the precariousness of the individual and collective identity that we suffer nowadays and to offer us, also, a response to the latter by recovering the true knowledge of the land and safeguarding all the material and symbolic that the latter offers us.

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