As If They Had A Soul at The Ryder

Artists: Patricia Domínguez, Sahatsa Jauregui, Julia Creuheras

Exhibition title: As If They Had A Soul

Venue: The Ryder, Madrid, Spain

Date: November 19, 2022 – January 21, 2023

Photography: Pablo Gómez Ogando / All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Ryder, Madrid/London

On 21 September 2022, inspired by the actions taken in protection of the Ganges River in India, the Whanganui in New Zealand and the Atrato in Colombia, the Spanish Senate approved a new law granting personhood status to the Mar Menor lagoon in Murcia. As such, it has become the first European ecosystem to be recognised as a legal “person”, which means it must be protected and preserved by the government and the general population. This recent event, both necessary and encouraging, serves as a useful starting point to imagine how, even via politics, other places can be explored – places where humankind can finally understand that we live in a connected system in which rivers also have souls and in which everything, not only our bodies, matters.

As if they had a Soul emerges out of this idea, with three artists who build universes in which bodies expand and become impregnated with the matter that surrounds them, becoming parts of a soulful whole with a creative power that never ceases to manifest itself. Julia Creuheras creates living artifacts, kinetic entities that look upon the conceptualisation of the body (especially the female body) to rethink the ways in which it has been codified and turned into a spiritless subject, an automaton that only reacts to external desires. For this exhibition, the artist displays a series of animated sculptures that move with a hypnotic cadence, producing choreographies that transport us to a dreamlike space. However, the gears responsible for breathing life into these objects are deliberately hidden by the artist, turning here into an echo. The slight sound of these hidden mechanisms reminds us that behind all that magic there is always a trick, and that behind each one there is a body containing thousands of meanings.

Sahatsa Jauregui’s work navigates the symbolism of the objects that live with us and that build our identity to explore the humanity that we transfer onto them. From this strategic point, she constructs sculptures with sensual taxonomies that question our processes to create collective imaginaries and shared identities. Among the works that Jauregi presents in this exhibition we find Pinchazo, a sculpture that functions as a meaning mechanism in which gears and ropes collaborate to create a balancing game. The body and its memory are represented here through a pair of trousers intervened by the artist and they become the uniting nucleus that keeps everything in balance. In the Aizkora series, the artist works with her relative, a craftsman who makes competition axes. Through a series of sculptures full of sensuality, in which axes are the central element, the artist fully enters a very characteristic symbolic space of the Basque Country, a place in which the axe carries many meanings that have little to do with with desire. Jauregi interrogates this system of meanings with her pieces, inviting it to encounter her skin, touch, emotions, and pleasure.

Patricia Domínguez traces work relationships, affections, and the emancipation between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos, through experimental research that combines ethnobotany, healing practices, and the commodification of wellness. Her videos, sculptures and watercolours build worlds that understand the connection between bodies from a very particular mystique, in which humans, plants, animals and things dialogue horizontally to imagine elastic and magical worlds. For this exhibition, the artist presents a body of work that includes the video Madre Drone, produced during her residency at Kiosko, Santa Cruz, Bolivia. In the video, a dreamy aesthetic makes us participants in a kind of mirage in which a snake-woman has a luminous encounter with a human-like robot; in a kind of cosmic annunciation, the light emitted by these mystical characters connects us with the lights of the student protests in Chile. The eyes of a toucan blinded by the fires in the Amazon are witnesses of this bastard reality, crossed by a thousand stories presented by the artist.

Alongside the video, groups of ceramic vessels and watercolours representing neoliberal dreams add even more content to this series of meanings, and attempt to exorcise a reality that is impossible to encompass and that overwhelms us with its thousands of signs, with its bombardment of objects. In the face of this blockage, Domínguez proposes a different outlook. She creates a dialogue with each object to give shape to worlds that understand the connection between bodies from a very particular mystique: one in which humans, plants, animals and things communicate horizontally to imagine elastic and magical universes.

The constellation of works gathered in As if they had a Soul tries to reflect on these ecosystems with personhood to reconsider our place within a collective and spiritual whole. In this way, the exhibition invites various entities that we previously considered mute, or simply not worth listening to, to take part in the conversation, thus creating an open discussion full of new and elastic meanings that we can unite and weave to narrate a different present.

As If They Had A Soul, 2022, exhibition view, The Ryder, Madrid

Sahatsa Jauregi, Pinchazo, 2020, Leather trousers, foam, steel rods, string, pulleys, and concrete, 300 x 265 x 100 cm

As If They Had A Soul, 2022, exhibition view, The Ryder, Madrid

Julia Creuheras, Nueve coma ocho metros por segundo al cuadrado, 2022, Silver thread, wood, perspex, nylon, motors, and cable, 94 x 48 x 48 cm

Julia Creuheras, Ángel tecnócrata, 2022, Silver thread, needles, wood, motor, and cable, 205 x 40 x 30 cm

As If They Had A Soul, 2022, exhibition view, The Ryder, Madrid

Julia Creuheras, Ángel tecnócrata, 2022, Silver thread, needles, wood, motor, and cable, 205 x 40 x 30 cm

As If They Had A Soul, 2022, exhibition view, The Ryder, Madrid

Julia Creuheras, Ángel tecnócrata, 2022, Silver thread, needles, wood, motor, and cable, 205 x 40 x 30 cm

Julia Creuheras, Vestigio de un autómata, 2022, Silver thread, 35 x 24 cm

Julia Creuheras, Nueve coma ocho metros por segundo al cuadrado, 2022, Silver thread, wood, perspex, nylon, motors, and cable, 94 x 48 x 48 cm

Sahatsa Jauregi, Untitled III, 2021, Aizkora series, Axe, steel leaf, and rods, 51 x 30 x 6 cm

Sahatsa Jauregi, Untitled I, 2021, Aizkora series, Axe, steel leaf, and rods, 43 x 28 x 10 cm

Sahatsa Jauregi, Untitled II, 2021, Aizkora series, Axe, steel leaf, and rods, 77 x 53 x 3 cm

Julia Creuheras, A(R)MOR, 2022, Silver thread, wood, perspex, nylon, motors, and cable, 35 x 82 x 68 cm

Patricia Domínguez, Ol a.k.a. huevo, 2018, Feathers, synthetic hair, metal claw, eye tape, chicken legs, shirt, irritated eye buttons, and candle, Variable dimensions