2020

The real worlds is absorbed by the imaginary world, the permanence of solitude makes me remain in a state of drowsiness where my memories and fantasies are reborn. It is in this state of consciousness that I think of my objects and get close to them.

We know that objects outlast the human form. After my grandfather’s death, I stole his metallic potty, bright and seductive. Its shape, content, and smell allowed me to find a relationship between the object and my body.

When visiting Pátzcuaro for the first time, I found a similitude between the mysterious and clean lake waters and the potty for wastewaters. Mountains have throats, they listen to the whispers of the wind, and they gather waters. Meanwhile, the potty contains vestiges of human existence within its borders. Water is the source of life, we take care of it, we caress it; we conserve and converse. The coasts of the lake harbor hundreds of secrets that interact in their depths between the humid and the dry, the abundant and the
scarce, the transparent and the murky.

Our tight relationship with water and the basins containing it is vital. That is why I think of the potty in this way and at the same time I am led to consider how the water also understands our joys and sorrows, life and death, remembrance of oblivion, virtue and evil.

This link to the object might seem simple and repetitive, but from the perspective granted by the distance, our stories of love, life, and death play on repeat.

Our transit through earth is merely that, transitory; we are destined to vanish. Such as paintings, we are erased and evaporate forever. As mentioned by Nezahualcoyotl in Tezcoco in his poem We Are Mortals, “like a painting, we will vanish; like a flower we will wither.”

Inés Verdugo