Guadalupe Martinez: Sensorial Visualities: Embodying Together and Alone

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Guadalupe Martinez, "Reflections on a window glass," 2020

video still. Courtesy the artist.

Sensorial Visualities is less a formal exhibition than a proposition to learn together, differently. Drawing on her expansive multi-disciplinary, empathy-led, and haptics-focused artistic practice, Guadalupe Martinez creates an intervention on SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus that challenges inherited models of Western academia to explore ways of learning that encourage vulnerability over mastery, community over competition, and embodied presence over detached consumption. Her affective process, which will include movement workshops, listening experiments, shared readings, experimental writing, and collaborative performance—all informed by invited guests’ knowledge of somatics, esoterica, dance, philosophy, and Indigeneity—will open to the public as a site for sustained dialogue and the material record of a collaborative research effort.

This project’s germination began in a 2021 curatorial seminar led by SFU Galleries Director Kimberly Phillips, whose students developed the outline for its realization. Their semester of discussions culminated in the question “What does it mean to be a body in relation to this time and place?” Sensorial Visualities is the first in a series of projects that challenge presumed pedagogical frameworks and open the edges of the university classroom.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Guadalupe Martinez is an artist and educator now working in Vancouver, conscious of her presence on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Peoples. Martinez makes works that reflect on art, pedagogy, and place with the hope of creating spaces of connection, care, discovery, and future dreaming. Interested in the complex relationships between history and memory, Martinez places the body at the centre of her work. Through somatic practices and collaborative actions, she looks for hidden narratives that may be foundational to individual and collective healing.