Phantom Sensation

 

Phantom sensation can result from errors occurring in the remapping process in the cortex, following the loss of a body part. In this reorganization of the body image, it can occur, for example, the invasion of the representational territory of the face over the territory of the hand, leading one to believe that it is the absent part that is felt.

 

The change we see in our bodies —even without the loss of any limbs or organs— seems, however, to be quite different. It is not a matter of feeling a part that is not there, but of not feeling a whole that actually is. We find ourselves being consumed by a numbness, driven slowly from an anesthetic state to the loss of sense of the physical limits of the body or the erosion of the distinction between its own and other matters. This phantom sensation is no longer localized but takes on a generalized effect.

 

While we speak of sentient materials, of matters and objects with their own agency, the biological body we are carrying loses itself materiality. It no longer perceives itself in its material existence and no longer establishes relations of substance with others. Much as it virtualizes its relations and communications, it virtualizes its members, its organs, or at least its perception of them. Swallowed up by a capitalist system that dictates and sets parameters for all aspects of its existence —from what it consumes to its desires and most intimate aspects— this dormant body undergoes a growing abstraction of its forms, functions, or expressions. Alienated from its corporeality, it perceives itself as being disfigured, shapeless.

 

In Phantom Limb Sensation, Vera Mota presents us with a set of sculptures that lead us to an imaginary of the organic, of something biological, reminiscences or residues of botany or zoology, of the microscopic observation of cells or of geological formations that reveal themselves in the landscape. Organized symmetrically along an axis, they take on the character of different evolutionary or germinative stages, in which each element marks what appears to be only one moment of an ongoing transformation.

 

These objects appear here in the aseptic, cold, and transparent material of acrylic glass and steel. Sterile, permanent, and stagnant, these mirrored forms as a whole architect a structure that resembles a vertebral column, the bones that, deposited here, expect to be intercepted by the shadows of the bodies that visit them, wanting these shadows to mix and interfere with their crystalline transparencies.