Escucha profunda, group show, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, MX (photo: Erik López)

María Sosa´s (Michoacán, MX - 1985) works starts from her research of the pre-Columbian past, emphasizing the moment of contact between the original peoples of America and the Europeans. As well as in the way in which this historical moment configured the structural column of the current reality.

Each time, she tries to make questions about the search of the past and the events that constitute contemporary social dynamics, emphasizing the investigation of the processes arising in the colonization of America as the epistemicide of the prehispanic worlds, racism, sexism and the invisibility of non-Western ways of life and knowledge.

Starting from the concept of “ecology of knowledge”, she is characterized by the collaborative and the design of production processes outside the traditional studio of an artist. She borrows methodologies from anthropological and historical research to configure a methodology of her own artistic research which uses observation as the main tool, combining the archaeological study and historical sources with material work.

Contemporaneity is a container of simultaneous realities, so Sosa’s work can only be posed by constructing questions from the collaborative, speculative and transdisciplinary, translating her ideas and questions into actions, sculptures, publications, videos, lectures, talks and performances. She conceives of history as a sculptural material whose ability to model allows her to intervene directly in the present.

María Sosa, El cuerpo de la mujer es la pizarra donde escribe el poder, 2019. Oil paint, woodcut on cotton paper, wood embossed with 22k gold leaf. 250 x 200 cm (Benedicta Badia Nordenstahl Collection, Chicago, USA)

“She conceives of history as a sculptural material whose ability to model allows her to intervene directly in the present.”

Sosa´s artistic practice is based on the exploration of both artisan techniques typical of her state, as well as the production of Prehispanic and contemporary ritual objects. She maps the phenomenon of the conquest, focusing on the cultural and social consequences that emerged from it, which also have repercussions in the context of contemporary art.

In the end, her work develops from research about colonial wounds and how they shape contemporary racial, sexual and social dynamics in the American continent.