María José
Arjona

The performative practice of María José Arjona grounds the body as a site of transformation, resistance, and political potential. Her work moves fluidly through sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and direct action in an extended consideration of sensorial embodiment that gestures to ideas of animality and thingness.  

Born in Colombia during the country’s decades of civil conflict, Arjona first became known for long durational performances informed by her contemporary dance training. Acts of profound stillness and quieted breath triggered sensations of tension and anxiety on the part of their observers: making visible the tenuous limits between sociality and violence; perfected suspension held at the limit before breaking. Other works coalesce this examination of physical and collective vulnerability with Arjona’s ongoing investment in animality. She observes and embodies the rhythmic movements of wolves, seals, and falcons as a way of examining ways of being or relating that are beyond the human.    

This engagement with human-object relationships and the essentiality of things (as manifest via processes and events) is explored, in Arjona’s work, through her relationship with Colombia’s diverse natural worlds. Her early childhood was spent in the forest: a specific experience to which she continually returns in search of alternative knowledge structures and understandings. In collaboration with the biologist Brigitte Baptiste and a group of women from the Nukak community in the municipality of San Jose del Guaviare, many of whom have been displaced by the region’s extensive deforestation, Arjona helped bring a box filled with the forest’s remains to a televised Colombian presidential debate in May 2019. The provocation began by asking what will we do with the ashes of the Amazon? With the same group of collaborators, Arjona tattooed the coordinates of a newly planted tree on her body, thereby indexing memories of deforestation and desired rebirth on her skin. 

Such questions of indexicality—a constant throughout Arjona’s practice—has increasingly taken shape as a preoccupation with the archive, seen not as a collecting practice but as an expansive mechanism with capacity to engender future potentialities. In recent years, Arjona has devoted herself to mentorship and pedagogy. Whether working with students in a year-long creative laboratory or with emerging performers in museum exhibitions, she has sought to transmit what is innate to the work by foregrounding openness to other bodies, identities, perspectives, and those political urgencies engendered therein. What knowledge does performance produce and how might it enter, or remain, in the world?  

In Berlin, Arjona is seeking what might be termed an animalistic approach to archiving. To paraphrase the artist, the challenge here lies in being able to receive the spirit that animates those ashes, so that you then might be able to reanimate yourself.  

Text: Jennifer Burris