Commissioned poster series for the San Francisco Art Commission on the theme of Sanctuary
From the Press release:
For A Body Reorganized, Córdova aimed to toy with the idea of religious imagery; in order to do so, she used the composition of the saint tableaux to place the images of six individuals. The artist describes her images as Neo-Orishas, figures derived from Catholic saints in Santeria, a pantheistic Afro-Caribbean religious tradition that evolved from the indigenous practices of the Yoruba people. “A pantheon of new deities is derived from hardship and out of the adaptation of traditions brought from home to a strange, new land,” states Córdova.
The series includes examples of groups who are usually underrepresented in the discussions around sanctuary. For example, she included portraits of a Filipina woman to highlight how sanctuary is sometimes forced upon people, as was the case of the Philippines in becoming a US colony, and a woman from a federally unrecognized Native American Tribe, representing the many tribes who were offered sanctuary in exchange for the acceptance of Christianity. Other portraits include a recent Salvadoran immigrant, and a Chinese dissident who was forced to leave China due to religious persecution, both of whom found new homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. While the faces of her subjects are partially obscured to preserve their privacy, the posters convey intimate first-hand accounts of their experiences.
