Exhibition: "THE SUN SHINES FOR EVERYONE." Recent Works by María Mercedes Sánchez

POETICS OF THE SACRED-PROFANE: ETHNOGRAPHIES OF DESIRE IN THE INTERSTICES OF THE EVERYDAY

María Lightowler

Curatorship – April 2025

At the intersection of visual ethnography and interdisciplinary artistic practice, María Mercedes Sánchez’s work constructs an affective archive of devotion rituals that shape the Latin American imagination. The artist operates as a critical archaeologist of popular mythologies—those that hybridize religious iconography with the fetishes of mass culture—unfolding a reflection on spirituality as a social technology to navigate contemporary uncertainty.

Mercedes, trained in journalism and communication languages, brings to the exhibition space the methodology of the participant observer: her dioramas—stage-like boxes combining installation and collage—function as micro-theaters of intimacy, where digital ex-votos, kitsch neon lights, and fragments of advertising rhetoric coexist. This postmodern mestizo aesthetic (evoking Beatriz González’s work in her deconstruction of the sacred) does not seek parody, but rather maps symbolic transfers between the domestic altar and celebrity worship.

The core of the exhibition—a site-specific work that transforms the window of Casa Plástica into a liminal threshold through a constructed curtain, giving the show its title “The Sun Shines for Everyone”—acts as a mediation device: by removing the explicit religious image, Sánchez focuses attention on the ritual itself, on that collective choreography where desire materializes through banal objects (sequins, tulles, tin stars, lace) invested with mystical power. In dialogue with this piece, a conceptual neon commands the viewer with the phrase “call me,” establishing a tautological dialogue with the lightbox facing it: sacredness, the artist suggests, does not reside in the icon but in the performative act of believing.

Through her appropriation of popular sayings and rhetoric, her work exposes the dialectic between the ephemeral and the transcendent: her post-capitalist altars—populated with pop memorabilia and DIY offerings—reveal how mysticism recycles itself in the age of consumption, generating new affective communities around shared precarity.

María Mercedes Sánchez: Chronicler of Everyday Theologies“I am an eternal learner,” Sánchez affirms, and indeed, her work reads like a field diary where the autobiographical merges with the anthropological. In a global context of metanarrative crises, The Sun Shines for Everyone reminds us that faith—in the Virgin, in the algorithm, or in the next lottery ticket—remains the last common language in the geographies of abandonment.

Notes for an Expanded Reading:

• The choice of Casa Plástica—an alternative space housing her studio—emphasizes the processual nature of her practice, where artwork and archive contaminate and feed each other.

• The use of low-fi materials (printed paper, cut acetates) alludes to the aesthetics of the provisional, key in the informal economies of devotion.

• Her interest in the non-monumental (inherited from José Alejandro Restrepo’s visual ethnographies) decentralizes the gaze toward minimal gestures that build the collective.