Touching the Whisper has the Sweetest Color is a performative activation of Cristina Flores Pescorán’s textile installation Acariciar el corazón del hueso [Caressing the Heart of the Bone], commissioned and produced for the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art.
During the activation, the artist will rhythmically move threads of her installation in response to stories, poems, and feelings, and while doing so, consider questions such as: what magical portals are open when we whisper to the needles? and how does dancing with our grandmothers reveal to us new recipes of resistance? In this process, the loom comes to life and curative possibilities are offered through conversations conveyed by the twists, knots, tensions, and extensions that Cristina will enact upon her work in what she calls a “body-fabric-writing action.” The vibrating threads bring answers that heal the soul.
This program is a part of Your Timing is Perfect: Moments and Movements of Inquiry, a performance series in which artists investigate the body as a living archive, exploring its extraordinary strength and resilience, as well as its tenderness, vulnerability, and limitations.
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This program is made possible by the generous support of the Consulado General del Perú en Toronto and the Women’s Leading Initiative.
Image credit: Touching the Whisper has the Sweetest Color, September 22, 2024. Featuring: Cristina Flores Pescorán. Program held at The Auto BLDG, 158 Sterling Rd, 9th Floor as part of Toronto Biennial of Art 2024. Photography: Rebecca Tisdelle-Macias.
September 22
1:00pm – 1:30pm
This venue is wheelchair accessible.
Artist Bio
Cristina Flores Pescorán
Cristina Flores Pescorán (1986; ella/her/she) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Perú. Her work is a dialogue between her body, healing processes, medical experiences, family memories, and feminism. Reflecting on her own experience of sickness, treatment, and recovery, Flores Pescorán employs a wide range of mediums in conversation with pre-Hispanic weaving, and dyeing techniques using medicinal plants that are part of her daily diet. She incorporates hand-made gauzes inspired by the Chancay culture (a pre-Inca civilization developed between 1200AD and 1470AD), whose reticulated veils are believed to have had magical powers used for healing and protection. Through her practice, Flores Pescorán reflects and challenges what we understand as illness, death, cure, nutrition, pleasure and magic in our contemporary society.
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