On the back of the jaguar I find your face

An evening of performative readings by Anto López Espinosa and isabel wang pontoppidan traversing the terrain of the torso. 

Anto López Espinosa performs ‘Within this mountain, another mother. Within this mother, another mouth.’ In the interval between skins, the work resides. A scar from birth is imprinted on her womb, symbolizing the possibility of feeling, creation, and creativity. Can we dismantle the torso’s armour? The artist embodies new visual and imagined organisms.

At night, the mother writes lullabies for their daughter to rest, sung in unison.

isabel wang pontoppidan presents a performative reading that emerges from the body: the cut body, the anthropomorphized body, the mutating body, the zoomorphized body. Examining the body as a terrain for the materialization of narrative and sensation intertwined, isabel finds imaginative liberation in superimposing the body of a snake onto hers. Overlapping with the animal, new growths appear, monstrous and beautiful. 

Both artists explore the effects and affections of femininities through invoking the torso and their desires. They insist on the body as a bearer of knowledge, restoring the personas that reside within it.

The title of the evening refers to a hybrid image with two faces laid in opposite directions. The hybrid nature of this image traces the poetic logic orienting the artists in staging and writing their work. A multiplicity of dissonant and assonant bodies explore an imaginary they seek to rupture and repair.

Anto López Espinosa is a performance based artist whose practice focuses on displaying a variety of acoustic effects, as a strategy to destabilize the way visual and auditory expectations interact. In this way, they perform sound to interrupt the fluidity of the different sensory scales that make up a context.

isabel wang pontoppidan is a writer, performer, jewellery maker and artistic researcher. Through different lenses of narrativisation, diaspora and commodification, isabel explores the nature of humans as hybrid creatures, composed of biology, objects and ideas—both flesh and not.