Hoja Santa [Holy Leaf]

Hoja Santa [Holy Leaf]

"Hoja Santa [Holy Leaf]" is the story of a journey. It stems from an urgency to understand oneself through the gaze of others: an expression of a primordial mirror. It’s the result of a psychogeographic journey in which Maciejka Art will encounter the need to recompose the pieces of her own soul.

A magical and distant place, the Afro-descendant community of the Costa Chica is a fragment of the kaleidoscopic Mexican soul, only recently recognized on historical and political maps.Art’s women keep the access keys to the atavistic rituals that open the path to the profound nature of emotions. They are “curanderas,” “parteras,” fisherwomen, lovers, and activists. They are the resistance to the eternal conflict with the masculine.

The collages thus become visceral maps mediated by time and emotions. Signs, cuts, colors flowing from encounters and scars restore meaning to images and photographic memories contaminated by layers of dream narration. They encapsulate the desire to express one’s emotions on a dark wall from which faces and places emerge. A shadow line crossed by a narrow passage. Shamanic rite.

In the subjective counterpoint of projections and sounds, Art’s gaze seeks the reflection at the end of her labyrinthine path. This is a dark and mysterious place, a Jungian shadow, entered through a vertiginous portal. Access to a cave: a place of passage similar to the maternal womb, from which we are born and symbolically reborn —the linked cosmic site to the depths of the sea and sidereal space.

Text/Ramon Pez

ARTIST: Maciejka Art

Born 1983 in Łódź, Poland.

Lives and works in Mexico.

Maciejka Art grew up in Italy and currently lives in Mexico. Her projects run from documentary photography to fine art, but she is also experimenting with mixed media techniques and multiplatform projects. Her work reflects her multicultural background: it engages with questions of femininity, diversity, and migration. From 2017 to 2023, she was involved with a number of projects in Mexico as well as joining art residencies and exhibiting in many countries. In 2017, while in Afghanistan, she filmed a documentary for the NGO Emergency. Her work has been published in international magazines such as Vanity Fair, Elle Decor, and Vogue.

CURATOR：Ramon Pez

Born 1975 in Udine, Italy.

Lives and works in London, United Kingdom.

Ramon Pez is a creative director and curator. His studio practice is based in London and focuses on stories and narrative experiments within editorial and art projects that blend different platforms. As well as that, Pez is currently art director at Thames & Hudson Publishing and creating experimental workshops on books.

His art direction projects have received numerous awards and nominations over the years. The most recent include: A History of Misogyny – On Abortion, by Laia Abril; Libyan Sugar, by Michael Christopher Brown; Afronauts, by Cristina de Middel; Ponte City, by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, and the art direction of Colors Magazine.