Silvia Gruner, La extracción de la piedra de la locura (planta)[Extracting the Stone
of Madness, Plant], polyptych, 2017

In Silvia Gruner’s (born 1959 in Mexico City, work in Mexico) work, the loop is the medium and temporality a mental structure in order to deliver mentalscapes of inhabitable locations. In her work, the surfaces of objects and the figments of the mind correspond to each other and film and video go beyond their status as indexes to function as analogies that suggest emotions, moods or states of mind. Her polyptych, La extracción de la piedra de la locura (Planta) [Extracting the Stone of Madness, Plant], 2017, cannot be subject to interpretation and neither does it document anything. The entire Modern Western apparatus of thought functions on the logic of representation and resemblance, subordinating our world to a higher order instituting hierarchical non-reciprocal relations in which the earth is a pale reflection or a degraded copy of the reign of ideas. Since dislocation is a key concept in Gruner’s work and thought through which she ceaselessly underscores the impossibility of being identical to the self, as the self is subject to constant metamorphosis and transformations, her works operate on the logic of resemblance and similitude, a different form of relationality than representation. Under this logic, every being resembles all others because we all derive from the same flesh and the world is in constant transformation and flux, an open order in which new forms and meanings can be delivered from already existing ones. Gruners’s La extracción, thus refers to a mental state and thus the image becomes the medium in which the “I” from the past-present communicates from the “I” from the present-past to enable healing transformation.