Lonely Hearts: An Exploration of Devotional Practices and Imaginaries

By Víctor Manuel Rodríguez-Sarmiento (curator) 

The recurrence of popular religious imagery in Latin American artistic practices is notable. In Colombia, visual and ritual records of this kind appear not only in national music and cinema but also serve as reference points for analysis in the performing, plastic, and visual arts. In an impure and irreverent manner, many Colombian art projects explore the translations between popular, mass, and religious cultures. These projects aim not only to reinterpret these practices and their iconographies but also to link them to broader social phenomena and cultural constructs that shape both the world of social relations and everyday life.

The exhibit Lonely Hearts by María Mercedes Sánchez arises from her experience as a participant observer in journalism and communication. In an ethnographic manner, Sánchez identifies how elements of popular religiosity and the figure of the celebrity, influenced by contemporary mass culture, blend in public and private devotional rituals.

Specifically, she explores the aesthetics of altars where people, through religious devotion, make petitions to the Virgin and the Divine Child as a way to navigate desire and uncertainty.

María Mercedes's artistic project seeks to articulate the cultural elements that shape this practice through the construction of theatrical boxes and collages, where the focus rests on the relationships between people and religious figures.

Using materials drawn from these iconographies, Sánchez stages a world of imaginaries and interactions that form a kind of collective unconscious. To illustrate these interactions, icons of worship transform from religious images to objects of mass culture, to children and people, in such a way that what unites them is the shared religious veneration that sets aspirations, dreams, and desires in motion. The child could become a divine child, materializing a familial and social aspiration; the girl could become a virgin, symbolizing purity and generosity; and the material culture of contemporary society becomes a source and repository of dreams. Sánchez’s insistence on these transfers and translations prompts us to think about the inevitability of mysticism, but also about the cultural and social construction of mysticism itself in a society that desperately seeks to resolve its personal and social dilemmas and uncertainties.