“Western science loves a single beginning,” she told me over coffee in La Paz. “A first cause. A spark. But my grandmother’s stories say there is no first — only cycles. The world has ended and begun again many times. El Origen is not a date. It is a ritual.”
“They ask for your origin at the checkpoint,” he says quietly. “But they want a country. They don’t want the smell of rain on dry dirt. They don’t want the name of the dog that followed me to school.” El Origen
Sofía Márquez, the artist, eventually took her hidden canvas to a gallery. She titled it No me he ido del todo — “I haven’t entirely left.” “Western science loves a single beginning,” she told
It is under the floorboards of a demolished home in Michoacán. It is in the recipe for sopa de piedra that no one wrote down. It is in the curve of a river where a boy first learned to swim. It is in the moment before a photograph is taken — the breath held, the future not yet fixed. But my grandmother’s stories say there is no
“I painted El Origen as a wound,” says Sofía Márquez, a 34-year-old Chilean-born visual artist now living in Barcelona. Her latest series, Rostros del Principio , depicts faceless figures emerging from cracked earth. “I left Chile when I was nine, during the dictatorship. My parents never spoke of ‘before.’ So I had to invent an origin. Not the traumatic one — the one before the trauma.”
In the high, thin air of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, the Arhuaco people do not ask where you are from. They ask: “Do you remember your Origin?”