BAPTISM - iara Solano Arana

Baptism is an immersive piece, a private and fleeting foray into a caring environment where you can leave your body suspended between the bubbles of a jacuzzi, overflowing with collective liquid memories.

Baptism is a rite of passage that happens for one single person at a time, a piece that invites you to immerse yourself in the simplicity of a gesture of deceleration that eschews spectacularity, and a welcoming into an effervescent experience in a primordial soup where you can become on your own.

The project continues my endeavour to communicate more immediately with audiences by offering intimate spaces within public contexts for reflection and healing, something I explore through alternative relational art formats, which I have been developing for 20 years.

This particular piece was born in the aftermath of the pandemic during the summer of 2021, and invites the audience to embody the desire to reconnect profoundly with our inner selves. Baptism is an individual, private experience, in a space without observers, where the body is symbolically wrapped in water in a womb-like experience that doesn’t reach us through our eyes, but rather delves into the universe of interior images, of suspension, and of our own memories. Baptism is the first piece in a series of liminal experiences for aquatic bodies, followed by [You are here: བར་དོ་].