Hoja Santa [Holy Leaf] is the story of a journey. It stems from an urgency to understand oneself through the gaze of others: an expression of a primordial mirror. It’s the result of a psychogeographic journey in which Maciejka Art will encounter the need to recompose the pieces of her own soul.
 
A magical and distant place, the Afro-descendant community of the Costa Chica is a fragment of the kaleidoscopic Mexican soul, only recently recognized on historical and political maps. Art’s women keep the access keys to the atavistic rituals that open the path to the profound nature of emotions. They are “curanderas,” “parteras,” fisherwomen, lovers, and activists. They are the resistance to the eternal conflict with the masculine.
 
The collages thus become visceral maps mediated by time and emotions. Signs, cuts, colors flowing from encounters and scars restore meaning to images and photographic memories contaminated by layers of dream narration. They encapsulate the desire to express one’s emotions on a dark wall from which faces and places emerge. A shadow line crossed by a narrow passage. Shamanic rite. In the subjective counterpoint of projections and sounds, Art’s gaze seeks the reflection at the end of her labyrinthine path. This is a dark and mysterious place, a Jungian shadow, entered through a vertiginous portal. Access to a cave: a place of passage similar to the maternal womb, from which we are born and symbolically reborn ‒ the linked cosmic site to the depths of the sea and sidereal space.


Ramon Pez