Isolda Comesaña

Sagrado Corazón is a stage research project by Galician artist Isolda Comesaña Alcaraz, centered around desire, divinity, privilege, and revenge. Starting from a cartography of the heart through vulnerability and emotional openness, she chooses the aesthetic framework of the European Middle Ages: knights in armor, swords, dragons, and unicorns.

The armor becomes the perfect symbol of the many fortresses and walls that are sometimes built around people's hearts, disconnecting them from their own emotions and from those of others. The knight represents the hero who embarks on an initiatory journey, where overcoming various obstacles in order to “save” (traditionally a princess, or to free the kingdom from the clutches of some magical creature like a dragon) is nothing more than an act of self-rescue — an inner journey whose ultimate purpose is to remove the armor and find one’s own heart: that is the final destination.

This aesthetic interest brings with it a necessary political reflection: What do all these legends have to do with the construction of Europe as an entity? How does this medieval imaginary contribute to European identity? When, how, and why was the narrative of the Christian medieval knight constructed, and what relationship does it have with Muslim presence? How much of our contemporary narrative is projected onto that past we don’t truly know? How much racism and ethnocentrism is embedded in that construction? Was — or is — Europe white, Christian, and noble?

Moreover, Sagrado Corazón is a scenic research project that, through a hybrid language blending poetry, dance, video projection, and installation, explores the body as an artistic artifact, creating a tension between the medieval imaginary and the body — specifically, the body of women. Isolda then asks: Where, in this cartography, is desire and eroticism situated? What happens when we look at many works throughout the history of European — and particularly Christian — art? What do we feel when we see those ecstasies, passions, martyrdoms? How can we name this underground conflict between the institution of Judeo-Christian guilt, the monitoring of women’s bodies and their attachment to original sin, and the eroticism of ecstasies, of the sensitive perception of divine presence, as in the verses of Saint Teresa of Jesus? Was Christianity the organizing principle that fundamentally disrupted the peoples’ relationship with fertile, exuberant nature?

In Sagrado Corazón Isolda seeks to question the ecstatic, erotic femininity of fertile passivity — the woman as mother, woman as nature, woman as life-giver — to instead position herself in struggle, in the restoration of agency, through symbols historically denied to women: the sword, the armor, the fire, the war. Like in Sufi tradition, this war is not one against an external enemy, but rather, most often, this jihad is an internal war — a journey through one’s inner landscape and the discovery of the colonizers of one’s own heart.