I am not from here but my grandmother is.

My grandmother always said: “He/she  is of good wood”, when she thought that a person was a good human being. She was a very noble woman, resilient in the face of adversity, affectively tough, compassionate, generous, supportive and made of good wood. Her name was María Alicia, but everyone called her Maruja. She was born in Lalín, Pontevedra, Spain. She died at the age of 104.  

During my days of residence in Ourense, while touring the surroundings there were many things that reminded me of my grandmother Maruja. She loved hydrangeas and roses and the town Allariz was full of these flowers. How difficult it must have been for her to have to emigrate to Argentina and leave all this rural and peaceful world in which she lived. I know it was out of necessity. 

Thanks to the landscape and the prevailing silence I began to remember very beautiful moments lived with her and this led me to think about how to merge and try to inhabit that Galician soil to which I did not belong, but my grandmother did.  

“It is good wood” this phrase kept repeating in my head, and I found wood and sawdust everywhere. I understood it as a magical connection between what she had instilled in me and what the place was offering me. Without hesitation it was the element I decided to use.

Trees are turned into wood by humans to give them an infinite number of uses, and as if that were not enough, they also give us their sawdust. This process led me to think about our own evolution, the transformation we go through with the passing of time. 

One of the days I woke up restless with the idea of generating something that would allow me to express my deepest feelings, uniting them with what Allariz was offering me both emotionally and creatively. I began to visualize the possible performance in a visceral and unbridled way. I let the ideas come to the surface so that the action would appear. 

In the performative action, I am lying in a fetal position, naked on the floor, completely covered with sawdust, the material and I generate a mountain. At first I felt calm, I felt protected and with the exact temperature, after a few seconds I began to feel the lack of air as if my body was trapped. I despaired for a few seconds until I came out into the light, when I came out I felt afraid and tried to cover myself again with the sawdust, I tried several times, butI could no longer go back to where I had started.  

When I realize that I cannot turn back time, I let go, I let it go and I leave.  

Within the universe of transgenerational decoding it is said that when your grandmother is pregnant with your mother, the fetus already forms the total oocytes that she will have throughout her life, and from these oocytes will mature the eggs that your mother will have during her fertile life. Therefore, one of those oocytes carries your name. So you have been inside your maternal grandmother’s womb and you carry her information.  

With all that being born implies, I come out of that cozy and noble womb with the genes of my grandmother, who never stopped being a good person.