My Hanami — Ritual Performance, Berlin 2022

We reach the path of cherry trees and leave behind what remains of the wall that once divided two German states, and Europe itself. That time is gone now.
I listen to the birds, to their many songs and the silences between them — a different kind of sound, one I can sink into, where I feel the sun and let the tensions of the present fall away, here, on this side of the world.
What was once a wall of violence is now planted with sakura — Japanese cherry trees that blossom every spring. A gift from Japan, a country that also knows war, offered in the language of trees and flowers. And a gift, too, for me, newly arrived in Berlin.
Lying beneath the domes of the trees, watching the blue sky crackle through pink branches and blossoms, is an experience that opens the heart and the senses — that sensitizes you without words. I think it was in that moment that my intention was born: to make art as a symbolic celebration.
Matilde Cánepa González

Bestiary — Five Sculptures by Matilde Cánepa González
It began as an intuitive movement, reinventing itself in my playful animal figurations — shapes that arose like a calling. An invocation of psychopomps, perhaps, on the journey toward the roots I was leaving behind — because sometimes we have to grow far from home.

This bestiary is a kind of image for crossing from the physical world into the inner one, and back again. Perhaps because I come from the American continent — landscapes I have known, natures and origins called "wild" — I searched for my animal soul in the everyday, in myself and in what surrounds me.
Three of these sculptures took shape in Caracas, Venezuela. Later, in Tenerife, a slower time let the rest of the bestiary settle, each element added almost alchemically.

They are hybrid beings — part fish, part bird, winged, at times hermaphrodite, black and white, day and night. Each one murmured its name to me. They are not monsters, but quiet companions, lingering in silence.

Cartografía Orgánica — Performance
In Cartografía Orgánica, my visual world meets the music Travesía por la paz by Damelis Castillo, and together we move through inner landscapes. Organic forms emerge like traces of memory, nature, and transformation.
 
The performance grows out of a ritual cleansing. Fire becomes a sign of transformation and renewal, and at its center I kindle a spiral-shaped form — a symbol of the inward journey and the continuous movement of life. Within the flames, letting go and new beginnings become one. Image, movement, and music merge into a quiet meditation on transformation, memory, and inner peace.

Spring 2020 — Drawings from the Lockdown
During the lockdown, I sat every day in my home studio to draw. From there I watched the spring arrive in the small garden, blossom by blossom. In the afternoons I would look for a terrace near the house, to feel the sun on my skin while I kept drawing.
This was my way of moving through those days — drawing, watching, asking myself what the silence of that time was trying to say.
Here you can see details of my painting Spring 2020.