Guadalupe Martinez: I’m Guadalupe Martinez. I’m a performance artist from Vancouver. (0:05) I always go back to the body, and in this case…for one, I was thinking about—I am from a city in Argentina, Buenos Aires, which is on the coast, so there’s a lot of politics around that as well, and I wanted to reflect about this mirroring between the coast where I’m from and the place where I’m now, thinking of the body as this hinge or axis that operates as like a mirror, mirroring of two places. Also, thinking about identity, that could potentially operate as a split, but also as a…perhaps, hopefully like integration around identity. The other thing that I was thinking about had to do with… there’s this really beautiful quote in one of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings that, the writing is “The Chiasm—The Intertwined,” and it was his last manuscript, and he quotes a passage from the poet Claudel that says something around that, “some blue in the sea is so blue that only blood could be more red,” and I love that line from that poem, that—I might be changing it a little bit. But it just speaks to me about so many things around perception and poetry, and also, in a way, about interpretation. And the coastline also is so tightly associated with narratives of colonialism and immigration and migration and diaspora and all of these different narratives. (1:37) Joanne Leow: How do you think it comes through in what you’re trying to do? Like so, what you’re speaking of just sounds so beautiful, especially that line by Merleau-Ponty, and I also think about that relation to saltwater and blood and bodies— Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah, totally. Joanne Leow: —we have saltwater in ourselves too, right, we have a particular kind of salinity. But how did you seek to sort of really embody and materialize all these really abstract ideas in the art that you’re doing? (2:02) Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah. I’ve been focusing on embodiment and I—it has become kind of like a device, in a way, to work with the idea that the body is a space where all of these different ideas and concepts converge, and that through action and performance, there’s like this active relationship to place and to subjects. Again, from phenomenology, this idea that there’s intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty speaks about the flesh as this space that is kind of like the meeting point between bodies, you know, and space, and that there’s a reciprocal relationship. So, I don’t necessarily like to talk about agency as much, because I still find that that’s quite dominant, in a way, but I really like the concept of touch, this sense in phenomenology that seeing and touching is the same thing. So, I’m really really interested in performance and performativity. And even though my work often has sculpture and installation, and I work with materials, with found objects a lot, because I see them as archival material that, you know, where histories are embedded, narratives are embedded. I work collecting materials from construction sites, demolition sites, garbage, debris, and through performative walks collecting things, through performative walks intervening space. I’m working a lot with pedagogy, so at the foreshore a lot of my work had to do with public programming where I invited different artists to participate in giving free workshops that were open to the public where we explored different techniques in movement, in performative walks, in the idea of like decolonizing the body. There were sort of dance presentations around the idea of like trade and the cycles in the tide and…so everything through the body, really, like it’s how I’m exploring and understanding and investigating that all of these concepts can be present.