A person is lying on their back in a dark space. Several lit red candles are standing upright on their chest. The candles are melted and dripping wax. The person’s body is covered in red material. The background is completely black.

Photo credit: Vanessa Lara

 

Dagger and Wound
Camila Arévalo

Tickets

Fri 17 April
10:00 - 10:40pm
Duration: 40 mins
Access Key: V


Dagger and Wound (Puñal y herida) is both a pagamento and an invocation, a performance ritual where the body is offered as an altar and a portal. Inviting passage to a dimension where  the wound becomes a site of encounter and flesh becomes both blade and gash.

Arévalo draws on Afro-Brazilian tradition of Quimbanda, a polytheistic religion centered on the relation with Exus and their female counterparts, the Pombagiras. The Pomba Gira is a liminal figure, bound to eroticism, to the night, to the color red, to crossroads, to female sexuality, to gender transitions, to power and destruction. She is the guardian of those who inhabit the margins of desire, which is why many sex workers and trans women in Latin America consecrate themselves to her for protection and strength.

To offer the body as altar is to reaffirm that pact of complicity, materializing in flesh, blood, and fire. An alliance with a convulsive religious tradition that provides those who invoke her with both symbolic and practical frameworks to endure and to sustain life. To offer blood is both tribute and summons, licking the wound instead of hiding it.

This chant emerged after encountering the blasphemous poems of Pinina Flandes, La Ladrida (the howl) of Analu La Feral, the dagger-thinking of Leche de Virgen, and the carnal voice of the goddess of two tongues, mother goddess, cradle goddess, sexed goddess, wet goddess, Gabriela Estrada Loochkartt.

It is a red chant to the South, because to the South the birds migrate, as do the butterflies.

Credits:

Camila Arévalo: Artist
Mue Wu: Soundscape

Content Notes:
Partial nakedness, open flame, ritual imagery, themes of pain and endurance.
Fire is controlled and safety measures are in place.

 
A photo of Camila, a brown skinned woman with long dark hair, she is laid on her back staring at the camera. She is topless and has a red wax bodice on her chest with lit candles on top of it. The background is pitch black.

Photo credit: Vanessa Lara

Camila Arévalo is a transexual, animal, and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance, video installation, and sculpture. Born and raised in Colombia, she currently lives in Chicago, where she is pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sometimes a curator, sometimes an arts admin, she moves fluidly across different practices and mediums. For her, power itself is the primary medium. At the core of her practice lies a pursuit of animality: a becoming-horse that overtakes her body and offers an escape route from the cages of “man” and “woman.”

Her work investigates social choreographies, the performance of everyday life, and the sublime, while embracing uncanny aesthetics and the body as a stage where power is continually exercised, exchanged, negotiated, performed, and eroticized.

Ultimately, art has become her method of auto-theorizing and weaponizing her experience as a trans woman.