AtmoSphaira

Sandra Rengifo

Colombia

Wandering bodies. Reflections on AtmoSphaira by Sandra Rengifo 

by Fernando Cuevas Ulitzsch

Colombia

Without atmosphere there is no life. This thin gaseous varnish allows us to exist as we float in infinity and experience the taste of chocolate, tickling, pain or an orange.

To experience our existence is the invitation of this piece (and in general of Sandra's works) to assume our complexity, our fragile humanity, the impermanence of that trembling hand that indicates that we are alive. The subjects of this piece are all of us, insignificant controllers, facing a finite flow in these expiring bodies, excreting crunchy, perfect images... megapixels that show nothing.

Just as our atmosphere protects us from solar ultraviolet radiation, Sandra and her bodies, by the action of their aesthetic force of gravity, envelop us and invite us to the vital experience, to the invocation of the event.

This piece not in vain arises from the fusion of ἀτμός (atmós) 'vapor', or, 'air', and σφαῖρα (sfaira), 'sphere', since what it presents us with is an embrace of luminous energy capable of pulverizing the geographical and fusing Greece with the Colombian moors, the human with the machine, the Peloponnese with the Cauca Valley... inviting us to traverse the landscape with the resource of repetition.

As long as I have known Sandra, she has created from her bodies: her theoretical body, her emotional body, her sensory body, her visual body, her familiar body ... and very much from within herself. Sandra loves and conceives projects unconditionally: from her entrails, her viscera, pouring all her financial, vital and theoretical resources. If Sandra chooses to give birth (art, love, care, theory, joy) she does it with all her bodies and from all her bodies.

This triple body conjures the simultaneity of our emotions, pointing out to us our vital myopia: we are screen cyclops; it invites us to root our gaze sheltered by sound, wandering towards the perceptible. AtmoSphaira invokes the contradiction in our organisms -ephemeral on the borderline between the analog and the digital- overcoming the visible and wrapping us in the sensitive.

Here we become a nebula, a flash of light that fertilizes the experience of the tremulous, imperfect reality, revealing to us the sacredness of the tangible impurity; confirming to us that what is truly human is to err.