The Fire Keepers : Eduardo Sarabia y Lorena Peña

In different cultures, myths and legends have emerged to question how fire has come into the hands of humanity. In all of them, respect for this element as a creative force but also of destruction, is the center of each narrative in which wise characters, human or non-human, acquired mystical tools to preserve the flames or to control them. The Fire Keepers or Guardianes del Fuego are chosen to protect the inflamed burning, to avoid tragedy and preserve its benefits. Some of them have fought to give men and women the power of fire.                       

The bonfire of Plato's Cave projects on our walls a multiform world -sometimes formless- which evokes our capacity of knowledge, the sensible world and the intelligible world. But it is the ignition, the light, its ability to create and project visions that has seduced us for centuries. From the will-o'-the-wisp, the creative flame, the energetic current, the luminescence, the shadow, the tremor and the vibration of the gloom, the flames evoke the light of the universe, the fire and the end of things but also survival and Renaissance. To talk about Fire today leads us to think about the solar explosions that constantly appear after hours of scrolling on our cell phone screens to mention the impact on gadgets, on the skin, on crops. It leads us to remember the noise and detonations of weapons. Fire is also the death that dazzles us, perhaps of a star; bonfire, light, dance, sensuality and smell, sweat and body, breath and food, coven, medicine, prolongation of life, something new.                                                           

Just at the moment when human beings we are facing climate change; one of the most vehement and cruel wars in our history, in plain 21st century; political inclemencies caused by intolerance, inequality and the exploitation of different bodies; art is urgent, thought and culture become as luminaries. It is through art that we turn to history, to memory, to the imagination, that we remember atrocities and also that which inhabits us. We return to the vision of other ways of interrelating with each other, with the biosphere. The artistic producers are the ones who create amorphous flames in whose dance we can see horror, our reflection, or our possibility of the future.                                                

The Fire Keepers brings together artists from different regions and cultures to invoke the power of ignition from the spiritual, the importance of the collective, of creative work and the inclusion of collective practices, to think about (re)production of the life. And it also raises the work of creators from different generations in whose artistic production manufacturing is enhanced from its capacities to call for depth and to question the importance of time, the delicacy in the construction of sensitive objects and spaces, and the sensuality that leads to deep thought.    

      Lorena Peña, curator

Artist: Pablo Aldrete, Felipe Baeza, Marcel Dzama, Alejandro García Contreras, Giovanni Fabián Guerrero, Circe Irasema, Julián Madero Islas, Christopher Myers, Mariana Paniagua, Eduardo Sarabia, Lucía Vidales.