María Jerez

María Jerez tells us that being a mother and an artist at the same time is like orbiting around two suns. “Before I became a mother, my body orbited around a single centre: my artistic practice. When Helios was born, it began to gravitate around this new sun at the same time. And that’s where I am now, experiencing a double orbit. When he was very little, he saw his shadow on the ground and said to me: ‘Look mummy, I can see myself in the sun!’. The sun in the sun!”. Taking this image as its starting point, together with the metaphor of circumbinary systems which produce double shadows, dawns, and sunsets, the research interrogates models of artistic production, education, and encounter that continue to separate these two spheres. This project sets out to prototype forms of collective experience that bring both orbits closer together, imagining alternative spaces, states, and forms of attention: parallel, double, fluctuating, divergent, within a kind of studio-slide, camp-residency, laboratory-gymkhana, lecture-tale, writing-sticker, or clay Excel spreadsheets where we can take in two sunsets at once. 

Bio

María Jerez (Madrid, 1978) combines her artistic practice with pedagogical, curatorial, and publishing projects. She situates herself ‘between’ choreography, film, and the visual arts. Going beyond the interest shown in her early works in theatrical and cinematic conventions, in her latest works she seeks to question this relationship by opening up spaces of potentiality through encounters with that which we find strange and alien, establishing blurred borders between the known and the unknown, object and subject, organic and artificial, animate and inanimate. Her work has been presented at numerous national and international institutions, such as MNCARS, Matadero, La Casa Encendida, CA2M (Madrid), Arteleku and Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Centro Párraga and CENDEAC (Murcia), MACBA, CCCB (Barcelona), Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (Paris), Frac Lorraine (Metz), Fundação de Serralves (Oporto), Southbank Centre (London), Bozar (Brussels), the 12th Havana Biennale (Havana) and Mapa Teatro (Bogotá).