Araceli Gómez Castro

This body of work is composed of sculptures -as a result of hypersensual and analytical object-making-, anti-system witchcraft -also known as White Magic-, performance auto-ethnography and collective experiences. 

   I have a deep commitment to White Magic and its potential for a contemporary art practice that is very much engaged with community, care and empathy. We may be in a world of Magic, in which “self” and “everything else” is the same thing. Therefore, White Magic is a realization system that, among other things, allows us to renew bonds within ourselves and everything else. That act —which we understand as a ritual— of asking for help/revelations to expand/encourage our identities. I support this notion of White Magic because is the one my father and the GFU I work with use; being a fluid mixture of informed inter-local theoretical frameworks and indigenous community knowledge in Abya Yala.

I used to accompany my grandmother to La Merced market –Mexico City–, so I grew up in a place surrounded by women full of life. They transmitted the abilities of my ancestors and joyful approaches to singular aesthetic identities. Once I became an artist, those concepts stuck with me.  

For the past two years, I’ve been researching how to encourage collective processes of organising materials in London. I am focused on the taxonomy of materials: on the need to challenge categories and to reconsider further specifications.