Marina Vargas has made use of the vast options offered by contemporary visual language and its disciplines to narrate, in an acute, radical, incisive, and profound way, what words sometimes fail to convey. Trauma resides in the body because it came from the body, and there were silences, but also screams. In her work, one hears a poetic body, but also a political one, in images that are truth, sincerity, in a tempered and paradoxically abysmal manner that I have rarely encountered. She draws on references from the history of art, fundamentally on representations of canonical bodies inherited from Classical Antiquity (seven heads, seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine… a great dilemma), but also on analogies and resources that often come from the unconscious and from letting the mind fly without limits, from chance… or from moving through life without restraint, sometimes abruptly, at other times in torrents.
In these pieces dwell affects, tactility, fragmented memories…, and she allows herself to speak in leaps; linearity is superfluous because the artist accepts confusion and error as modes of knowledge, as a formula of almost magnetic creation that infuses guidelines and energy to continue winding around what happened and what it left us: fear, fragility, strength… the friends who accompanied us in moments of panic. Addressing trauma does not seek to close it, but the simple act of generating an image about what has been lived is a form of repair and also of resistance that makes evident to what extent illness and the formulas with which it is protocolized also have gender.
