No ser ni la sombra de lo que se fue. Chapter 5

I consider the shadow as an internal and external movement of the body, whether it is a living, dead or inert body. A thing that is always there and that moves in contact with the intermediate bodies.  

When we see a shadow, we tend to try to discover where it comes from – especially where there shouldn’t be a shadow. But sometimes the cause of the shadow is not concrete – there are no bodies involved, or the shadow springs from our memory, hallucination, desire, or love. 

With No ser ni la sombra de lo que se fue. Chapter 5 (‘To not even be the shadow of itself’), Maria Jerez forgets the actual cause of the shadow to focus on the phenomenon of it as a source of movement – as a new image that is no longer generated by a body alone, but is itself also another body. A body that is always in relationship: to light, to the surface on which it is projected, to other, distant bodies. Superpositions, fragments, prejudices, waste, distances, spirits…  

In this way, she frees the image from the idea of ​​having to be original, complete or essential. The image no longer has to choose between reality and fiction, no longer has to be hypervisible. After all, every experience is only a fraction of a whole: embracing the shadow means letting go of the totality. We are never in a place from which we can see everything. A part always remains in the shadow.  

• The work of Maria Jerez (1978) is situated between choreography, film, and visual art. Since 2004, she has created pieces that explore the relationship between art and the spectator as a space in which different modes of representation can enter into crisis. In her latest works, she questions this relationship by opening up spaces of possibility through encounters with what we find strange and alien, emphasizing the performativity of the encounter as a place of transformation. In this process of transformation, the ‘other’ is housed within ourselves, blurring the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the object and the subject, the animate and the inanimate.