In Rite of the Womb, the artist begins this return to sculpture with two elements more and more central to her production. She once again makes use of video installation, but this time on the basis of the register of an action. With no script, production value, or evident wardrobe or makeup, Surel opts this time for a raw rhetoric. She makes use of the grammar of performance through a body, a limited and closed space, a material on which she performs an action, and the register of that action.

Once again, she worked with Omar Cruz, who documented in photographs the process by which the artist molds her own body in clay. When touched, the material bends and adopts to her skin but, in that very motion, her body is sullied, splattered in the color of earth and blood. In this work for the first time, Surel ritualizes—in powerful and resounding form—the trauma of the feminine that she had engaged in previous works: the womb takes the shape of an ancestral space that bears the marks of the past, its history and wounds. In this healing ceremony led by a doula, the participant undergoes a transformative journey. Her pure white clothing is gradually invaded by the muddy water from womb-shaped vessels and bowls that are activated by the artist’s hands. To return to the earth, to the sacred spot that wavers between exhaustion and fertility, to begin again the creative cycle, requires an effort of harmonization and emancipation.

The register of the experience is itself, then, double. It is not only the result of the healing, that is, the possibility of beginning again, of once again mustering the forces of creation, but also a set of contingent ceramic pieces born of the ritual. Those pieces bear the traces of that passage, the resistances and accidents encountered over the course of a session that partakes of birthing but also work in the studio. Hence, Rite of the Womb is a like plowing before sowing seeds.

Bárbara Golubicki, Buenos Aires, 2019