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Sandra Miranda Pattin: Celebrating Art in Participation
Colombian artist Sandra Miranda Pattin, currently residing in Italy, would like to call herself a mixed media artist. She works in several mediums and her works have found their way to international biennales and art fairs. As an acclaimed performance artist, Sandra Miranda writes about her aesthetics and working process.
 My experience of coming to Italy from Colombia ten years ago has certainly a lot to do with the way my work has evolved.
There is a different side in the process on knowing one self when one is detached from the country of origin, a different way on facing fears. Introspection is certainly very much directed and definitively not soft. For this reason I started considering sufferance of minorities to then move to my own sufferance. It is always that way, the starting point needs to be the observer’s point and then slowly we find the way to walk back to ourselves.
At the beginning it was the actual body to be my biggest interest, it was the only physical witness of my previous life time in Colombia. It helped me to feel more grounded and face the most evident pass of time. I specially studied body reactions to daily life. This experience evolved and become a more intense and less direct research on memory.
It was a sort of confrontation with the political and social parameters that are used to judge every existence, every fact, I guess I was needing to recreate an identity and define in a way the word home.
I’ve always been maybe a bit more rational than an artist might expect to be so each artwork is born from an idea more than from a sensation, an idea that filters until getting very intimate or it can expands, my work is very personal but it is also important for me that it is readable in a universal code, so I research a lot the context where things happen in order to find a point of encounter between me and the external space.
Some of the research also comes from the fact that I’ve always collected almost with obsession small objects, containers, glass, words, things that have stayed through the years hidden in some place until they get the chance to become a vehicle to communicate, sometimes by screaming sometimes by being silent, sometimes they are just waiting to be re discover in the mixed media angle of my studio, like they knew back when I picked them that they were going to be perfect for a project in the future.
I have just had a perfect example of this, I had to send a proposal for a solo show I’m doing this summer and it is going to be about fire rituals because of the history of this town where they still celebrate a very old ritual by burning a pile of wood on May, I thought of making an installation with pieces of woods and red thread and suddenly I reminded these 4 pieces of wood I have kept for years somewhere and they look fantastic now that I have worked with them.
Work has become very much a ritual, it is actually thought to be a healing ritual, a process that discovers wounds and hopes to heal them. It is the discovery of what is already there but we can’t see it, for too may distractions in current world make us sometimes unable of seeing and accepting our own weaknesses and our own life achievement. I believe that strength comes from fragility, is like the natural selection, we achieve what is needed to survive.
I work back and forward between mixed media and performance. Performance felt like the natural evolution of my research specially coming from working long time in memory and healing, physically acting the “ritual” made it very real for myself and gave back to my mixed media work so much more fluidity and power.
I feel it is important to celebrate life reason why invite a lot people to participate in my work and have founded extremely interesting how much space people claims in order to be, to speak, to declare their needs.
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