‘It is your perfumes, woman, that keep me going…’. Mejía Godoy

… ‘No one played and no one hurried on that street, not even the swirls of the land wind, heavy as stones.

There was no longer anywhere to go out to or anywhere to go in to. The fog or the sun were of sand …’

Excerpt from Crónicas del Niño Jesús de Chilca. 1982. Poem by Antonio Cisneros.

As in the Cisneros poem, in which we almost feel the sand on our skin, the exercise of memory reaches into a number of corners that, in converging in a whole, produce a personal imaginary unique to the person who recollects it.

In the case of Dreaming Rose (2009) the sensuality of the smell presides over and gathers in all the other colours under its aroma.

The theme of the work is autobiographical, and has to do with the memory of a lost flower garden. Painting roses on the skin is the act that is closest to the earliest tribal tradition of tattooing: to announce one’s origin, there is nothing closer to the act of putting on perfume.

The title in English playfully engages two moments: that of the person dreaming (Rose is dreaming) and that of the act of remembering the roses (Dreaming of roses).

And, by way of that image, the aroma appears, to stay forever.

Cecilia Paredes