Gut Feelings: Reminders of Her

Since curating My Fierce Aunt Bianca, I have been haunted by the lingering presence of Andromeda M. Rodriguez's Reminders of Her. The exhibition marked the first solo exhibition by New York–based artist and filmmaker María José Maldonado, unfolding as an intimate encounter with the life and legacy of her late aunt, Bianca 'Exotica' Maldonado (1965–1996). What follows has emerged from that haunting. 

What is the first thing you think when you hear the candle crackle? Your hands and hers? The wax drips time into pooled remembrance, each warm tear a second suspended. The candle knows what we cannot speak. Smoke spirals across, wispy tendrils reaching through dimensional veils, threading our distance. Incense curls, caught mid-flight, an ephemeral witness. I breathe it in, and it becomes prayer, the kind I don't know how to say out loud. Glass refracts my iridescent invocation, light splitting into spectrum, my whispers, each hold a different colour for the ache that sits in my chest when I try to picture her face clearly. The roses hold their breath. Feathers tremble with invisible wind from another realm pressing close. I feel the pull of the threshold, the way altars create doorways for spirits to cross through.

This is a ritual of what remains when touch is no longer possible. Objects laid out like coordinates, mapping the route back to her essence. The material becomes a way to speak to someone when they can’t easily answer back. Or maybe she does answer. This is a ceremony of tenderness, the arrangement as its own form of devotion. She’s conjured through careful placement, this altar a capture of connection. The love shared between becomes a portal, a place you can inhabit, a shimmering space where two worlds touch and you stand held. I am a participant now, not an observer, my own grief folding into theirs. She flickers here in the illumination from your hands that gathered. The memory and matter contain vibrations with the frequency of her name. The photograph holds multiple hauntings: hers, theirs, mine, all of us who slip between worlds. We recognize the ghost and reconstruct what it conjures. This is how we reach: through smoke, through ritual, through the insistence that love transcends dimension.

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My Fierce Aunt Bianca, presented by FEMME, took place at Strange Field, Glasgow, 22-29 Aug 2025