From Dead Soon Project (Dead Soon) to Innerstela
My motivation
As an artist, for years I was focused on the feeling of my art rather than having an audience for it, although the feelings of the audience and myself are the leitmotif and the fuel of all my projects. I never imagined that my discovery of light on the cremated remains would turn into such a global project, and for that I am humbled and grateful. This speaks more about the great openness of our society and the need to have more meaningful ways to commemorate our loved ones than about anything else.
Portrait of Maricela Ortíz
Why make it available for everyone
These past years a great deal of people have approached me because they want to have this novel memorial and experiment this breath taking images as well, but contemporary art was and is still too expensive for a great part of our global community and I was determined to share this experience of infinite love and profound questionings (galleries would sell my pieces for $5000 usd. they also take 50% to 60% and would keep one piece just because) . This is how Innerstela was born, a way to rebel against this, for myself and everyone that wanted to experiment this as an alternative to the current options we have for memorializing our loved ones. Because the images resemble those we know of the universe, a sense of reconnection is experimented not only with our beloved ones but to the entire universe helping us grieve in a more healthy way which I hope helps tackle a big problem; For some of us, the funerary and memorial services that existed before Innestela are less than not empathetic, gloomy sterile places that evoque disconnection or worst; tragedy, if not we have then to decide what to do with the cremains (ashes) of our loved ones: some of us spread the ashes in beautiful places but would love to have something that physically reminds us of them, some of us don't want to have an urn somewhere sitting in our house. Different options are available: like shooting the urn to space, diamonds from ashes or different art or jewelry that contains their ashes or hair locks but for what I´ve been told these options lack something important; they do not tell us a lot about the person, they are not personal, and they are someone’s artistic interpretations or complex and rather expensive processes. I believe this is the main differentiation with Innerstela prints, there is nothing added to the remains of our loved ones, meaning I do not add anything to the sample, not even my so called artistic approach, there is no one image that looks like another, they are like fingerprints, each one is unique. We don't have to wear it with fear of losing it in a restaurant washroom, we don't have to spend thousands of dollars if we want to share it with our friends and family members, and it is extremely intimate, it is a museum like piece of contemporary photography that can remain like that if we don't feel like sharing what is the meaning behind the image. But the most important thing is that the images are an invitation for us to contemplate the meaning of the deepest questions of humanity;
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
Who am I?
What is the meaning of existence?
Is there an end or a beginning?
What I hope
We live in an era of uncertainty, not only economical and political but we have experienced a global lockdown due to Covid19, creating separation between nations and between humans, we haven't been able to have funerals and we have lost a lot of members of our global community. My hope is that through Innerstela we can feel closeness and connectedness and that we can use this physical separation as an opportunity to go inwards, to understand ourselves, to understand our interconnectedness so we can develop empathy both to ourselves and to every living thing so that we can have a brighter more kind future as members of this beautiful ecosystem but complex geopolitical cluster, so that we can care and protect not only ourselves and our loved ones, but everything that lives and everyone to live more meaningfully and joyfully, so that we can experiment life to its fullest!