La Manigua by Ariamna Contino

For her first solo exhibition in Madrid, Ariamna Contino delves into the chaotic universe of Cuban folk wisdom. She uses as her main reference the concept of manigua, a word of indigenous origin that designates a type of very dense tropical forest, present in Antillean ecosystems and that, like the Iberian dehesa, has adapted smoothly to the action and constant presence of man. The basis of her research is a book written in the mid-twentieth century by Cuban José Seoane Gallo, in which interesting medicinal remedies made with plants extracted from the manigua were collected through popular testimonies. A group of preparations that have the virtue of healing ailments related to voice and sight, in other words: perception and speech, have especially caught the artist's attention.

One of the main problems of the contemporary world is the uprooting generated by our constant movement from one place to another. Individual identities are really affected and the true knowledge of the land and all that it provides us with has little relevance to the day to day life of the contemporary individual. As a resistance to the effects of travel on his own life, Contino has decided to build a sort of cognitive map, a basic luggage to take with him wherever he goes. To do so, he has appropriated the wealth of knowledge that can be found in the book "El folclor médico de Cuba" and has generated his own Manigua -with a capital letter-, immaterial and closely interconnected with memory. He has deployed it in Madrid, but not before connecting it, rooting it, contextualizing it. To do so, she has searched among local species and in herbalists' shops for the plants necessary to produce the remedies she needs: vicaria, chamomile, rosemary, white elder, among others. He intertwines the written word, scientific evidence, natural heritage and art in a complex project that, if you will, can be understood as an archive, a library, a cartography; a great single work. The nods to anthropology, relational aesthetics, anthropology and process art are evident. But so is the homage to tradition. Ariamna inevitably feeds her work with the research carried out in the middle of the 20th century by Cuban intellectuals such as Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier or artists such as Wifredo Lam - who bequeathed us one of the most relevant works of Latin American Art, La Jungla (The Jungle).

In the 1950s, in a conversation between Lam and Carpentier, Carpentier confessed that the true motive of observation that led him to paint that imposing canvas, which is part of the MOMA collection, was not the Afro-Cuban religious universe, as is commonly thought, but the whimsical and profuse existence of all kinds of wild herbs and plants in his garden. In his own way, he made a poetic analysis of that small manigua that had taken root in the center of his most intimate daily life. Therefore, that ceremonious jungle, painted in 1943, inevitably connects with Ariamna Contino's research, eighty years later.

Now, why among the thousands of species of the manigua did the artist choose only those that heal the eyes and the vocal cords? Both organs are closely related to individual freedom. And the artist presents us with some ways to heal, repair, protect our voice, our opinion; our perspective, our reality. In the contemporary world, where the appearance of things is more and more deceptive and the exercise of individual power more and more complex, her gesture can be understood as an invitation to resistance and the defense of common sense.

Without a hint of scientific pretension, Ariamna generates this Manigua in the midst of a globalized, alienated, disconnected world. She provides us with a meta-narrative whose tempo is marked by respect for popular culture and the land. It invites us to participate in an intergenerational and timeless dialogue in which the only real question seems to be to discover how to heal. It confirms, once again, that art is a conversation between all men, of all times. It clearly acts as a bricoleur.

For Claude Lévi-Strauss the bricoleur is the person who sets out to epistemologically structure the natural chaos and, beyond building a structure of knowledge from raw facts, recovers and interconnects the fragments of experiences, structures and fossil testimonies of the history of individuals or of a previously existing society that respond to a world in which we no longer find ourselves and that, nevertheless, still serve to create the taxonomies of a new world. The bricoleur is in charge of constructing contemporary mythical thought.

Contino connects his work with paper - a technique that he has developed over the last fifteen years in a very personal way, the result of his deep knowledge of the arts of engraving and sculpture - with a enviroment - which is a fragment of his studio in Madrid - and a complex installation-laboratory - a typology that he has explored both individually and as a duo with Alex Hernández in recent years.

Luis Sicre