We don´t even know if we exist.
With Rafael Sánchez Mateos Paniagua.
We don´t even know if we exist. Site specific installation for the exhibition Arcu Atlánticu curated by Virginia López. 18 Ceramic plates. 20cm x 40cm. Rafa SMP and Coco moya. (2019)
We don't even know if we exist is an installation in the public space of a series of handmade ceramic plates, with drawings and reliefs elaborated around the transmission of the secret of the feminine and its transcultural imaginaries. The work is considered as a collaboration between artists, which merges the investigations of Coco Moya and Rafael SM Paniagua. On the one hand, the secret as a device for encryption and transmission of women's knowledge; on the other hand, the symbols of hospitality and generosity inserted in popular dynamics.
The work is a collection of figures that speak of the power of the feminine and its alliance with the reproductive forces that sustain life. A hidden symbolic force but also continuously transmitted through time and represented in all cultures in different keys, from prehistoric bird-goddesses to Peruvian mountain-virgins. Flowers, shells, marine elements, snakes, virgins... thus make up a syncretic and heterogeneous collage around the knowledge and power of women, offering us an alternative response to their supposed disappearance in history, also in art, as well as the possibility of reactivate the energy of this iconographic program through artisanal reproduction.
Its shape would recall, on the one hand, the religious ex-votos that were offered to the Mediterranean divinities to thank or ask for favours, but also the tiles installed on the access thresholds to popular homes, inspiring a society of hospitality. Among other things, these objects of offering and generosity serve to highlight the ability of communication not mediated by any agent that is not part of the secret, reflecting on what belonging means when it comes to acquiring knowledge, but also the importance of popular culture as a repository of a tradition to be rediscovered.