Marcelo Soria-Rodríguezcentrifugal — Odysseys

Human nature is one of disguise. One of the characteristics that humans exhibit more distinctively than other species is their simultaneous fear and need to both know and ignore their fate. Our form of consciousness, of self-awareness, of understanding our relation to what is around us is one that calls, more often than we'd probably like to confess, for the use of totems of support, disguises that carry their own meaning so that we can adapt that meaning to our selves. Uniforms, brands, ideologies that relieve us from having to create our own fate.

But our fate is something we write along our most difficult journey: the one towards within. It's the one trip that one has no companion for, no flags to fight under, no uniforms to disguise the fear that lies inside, because there is not the figure of the other, there's only one with one's inner world. Only one's own judgement towards oneself. It's also the ultimate journey: all the territorial advances within are instantly rewarded in how we navigate what's outside. A known and charted self is probably the best tool for the unknown and uncharted others. A never ending journey it is as well, precisely because it interacts with the infinite others.

In the back and forth that is the odyssey of developing one's self, a word comes to mind that I take from "Vigil", a song by the band The Mars Volta. They say "all the centrifugal ways our lives fall in and out of place", and I relate to that very specifically. One's journey within has the necessary scenario of those others, an environment that pulls us out continuously of our interior exploration, in an endless mutual influence.

This work is a reflection of that nature of human development. External structures in centrifugal motion around an axis that one tries to keep stable. But the axis can’t be always perfectly stable. It all creates an imperfect mechanism through which one relates to both sides of their existence: what’s inside and what’s outside.