«TRANS OVUS MENS»
Alba Soto
28/11/19 – 07/01/20
“TRANS OVUS MENS” or a zoomorphic ritual from the cervix.
The works that compose “Trans Ovus Mens”, the latest work by Alba Soto, have been conceived in four series that symbolize the different cycles through which she herself goes through: preovulation, ovulation, premenstruation and menstruation. Thus, these drawings we see are a performative ritual in which the artist invokes her foremothers to heal her transgenerational inheritance. This ritual is encapsulated in a zoomorphic dance that flows through different papers sourced from the travels and vital happenings of the artist: Bangladeshi bamboo shoots, silks from India, papers that evoke Chicago’s feasting, others reclaimed from a family album. Each of these phases is characterized, for Soto, by different rhythms, impulses and affections that make the body constantly metamorphose. All of it devolves once and again in a body that is many she-bodies. These multi-morphic bodies connect the head with the ovary, are change in place of thought, dance in opposition to statism and travel in a time that has already been and that, at the same time, has not yet been. That visual narrative by Soto is accompanied by, in compositional space, four installations in which the artist will perform a ritual performance weekly.
At first sight we could think that there is no vital connection between Interior Scroll, the performance made by Carolee Schneemann in the 70’s in which the artist extracted a scroll from her vagina while reciting a speech written on it, and Trans Ovus Mens. We could think that Soto’s project is not inheritor to the proposals of many other artists that, placed between feminisms, have worked with menstrual blood and abject fluids from women’s bodies. That those and this do not make up one genealogy. We could even go so far as to think that the works of the 70s and 80s, situated in the field of performances, and that of Soto, made almost in 2020 and captured in plastic art, do not share a performative materiality. We would be mistaken. All these articulate a subversive genealogy, dialogue with one another, drink from mutual fluids and their abjections and thus make up the same gesture, poetic, artistic and material. This feminist genealogy not only places the body as materiality of their practices, taking back once and again those words by artist Barbara Kruger of “your body is a battlefield”, but they also let the body speak and do so not through the Cartesian language of reason but through languages that scream from the gut and that are thought through that cervix which we rarely see because it has been taken from us by medical science.
Original text by Yera Moreno Sainz-Ezquerra: visual artist, researcher and Art History professor in the faculty of fine arts in the Complutense University of Madrid.