LECHE (2016)

Leche (2017) is an HD online archive of El Santuario Virgen María del Rosario de San Nicolás de los Arroyos and its built-environment. 

The following footage was captured in April 2016. I was summoned here months earlier by a footnote folded in the back of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology. The revelation read, “See…the modern case of the woman who claims to have been seeing the Virgin of San Nicolás in Argentina.” This singular line directed my search for the contemporary visionary, Gladys Quiroga de Motta. While reading 2,000 of her encounters with the Virgin, I was transfixed by her calling to communicate the Virgin’s requests for a church near the Paraná River. Soon after, I stood opposite El Santuario Virgen María del Rosario de San Nicolás de los Arroyos and I felt … unmoved.

I used animation to trace my intimate experience as an observer and mark these sites with temporal value and significance. Visions are not things—they are events that hold a culmination of circumstances and embed reality with spiritual substance. Dwelling in the aftermath of my encounter with El Santuario, Leche revealed animation’s potential to bring life to seemingly dense inactive matter.

Computer animation, 39 videos, color, sound, various times, continuous play, dimensions variable.

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AISLES CHANCEL DOME EXTERIOR ROAD ROOM SANCTUARY

SCULPTURE SHOPS STEPS OUTSIDE WALLS WATER