Jamie Denburg Habie’s Tiempoanimal (Timeanimal) explores the space between the mineral, the animal, and the human as a threshold—a boundary that simultaneously reveals our humanity and its fractures. This threshold does not merely divide; it serves as a point of convergence where experience is liberated from the rigid categories of Western thought, challenging dichotomies such as mind/body, nature/culture, and observation/action. In Tiempoanimal, the threshold becomes a space from which to reimagine time, the body, territory, and politics as interconnected elements in constant transformation.

Denburg Habie explores the subjectivity of time through both the body and matter. Works such as Partituras para parpadeo (Scores for Blinking) invite the audience to blink repeatedly, examining the physical effects of this simple action. Neuroscientific studies suggest that blinking increases dopamine release, subtly altering our perception of time. This is juxtaposed with works like Volcanes más tiempo que mar and Mar más tiempo que centro (Volcanoes More Time Than Sea and Sea More Time Than Center, respectively)—poem-artworks that explore the differing temporal scales of oceans and mountains. By contrasting these experiences, Denburg Habie places the subjective perception of bodily time and material time on an equal plane. This shared dimension culminates in Partituras para medir el tiempo restante de luz con las manos (Score to Measure the Remaining Light With Hands), a series of two paintings and a performance where the body is aligned with the horizon, transforming it into a clock that measures the day’s final moments of light.

Time unfolds in relation to space, and in Tiempoanimal, is treated as a dynamic, living territory that encourages movement and interaction. The spectator is not a distant observer but an active participant who activates the relationships embedded in the work through presence and motion. In Mis huesos tienen ojos (My Bones Have Eyes), Denburg Habie uses holography to reimagine space as an architecture of light: a bone photographed from different angles contains a poem that can only be read by moving around the hologram. This work challenges the relationship between language, movement, and space, referencing how the neurological evolution of language is deeply tied to the body’s sense of spatial orientation. As audiences move through these works, the body becomes a vessel that activates its surroundings, uncovering a tactile and kinesthetic system of meaning that connects viewers to the material and spatial narratives of the exhibition.

As such, the exhibition is transformed into an expanded ecosystem where aesthetic experience becomes an embodied act of presence. In the first gallery, space is traced through light, as seen in Mis huesos tienen ojos and Partitura para medir el tiempo restante de luz con las manos. In the main gallery, the audience is invited to “read” the works with their feet, tracing the letters as part of an embodied act that involves touch and movement. Finally, in the series Cabeza de cuerpo, cuerpo de cabeza, the works are presented as scores to be traced with the gaze and breath, evoking decentralized and collective bodies that challenge any hierarchy between thinking and feeling, as well as between beings and the spaces they inhabit.

Along these lines, in Tiempoanimal neither space nor time is neutral. The interactive methodologies respond to a frustration with purely intellectual approaches, which often replicate the same systems of violence they aim to dismantle by reinforcing the separation between mind and body. Drawing from lived experience and engaging in dialogue with science, politics, and embodiment, the artist seeks to reconcile fractures by making interconnectivity visible and tangible. This gesture is then materialized in layers of pigment and somatic marks that link the body to the earth, transforming artistic production into a ritual.

The historical and political significance of materials plays a central role in Tiempoanimal. Pigments like indigo, cochineal, bone ash, volcanic ash, and sand from the Pacific coast construct a visual and corporeal vocabulary that resists the inherent violence of the division between mind and body, human and world. Bones, transformed into pigments and letter stamps, evoke a mineral language that binds humanity to geology. These pigments, marked by histories of colonization and resistance, take on new meanings as they narrate the body and time. Through their integration into somatic rituals, responsibility shifts to the human body, which is invited to recognize these materials not as consumable resources or mere aesthetic pleasures, but as ancestors within a shared geological and biological history that spans time and space.

Collaboration is also essential to Tiempoanimal. Part of the exhibition was developed collectively during a creative-curatorial laboratory in Michoacán, Mexico, in the spring of 2023, where Denburg Habie collaborated with Mexican artist Galia Eibenschutz and myself. During this encounter, we found connections between the themes explored in Denburg Habie’s work and María Zambrano’s poetic philosophy in Claros del bosque [Clearings of the Forest] (1977). In this text, Zambrano proposes a way of thinking that arises not from conceptualization but from direct experience of the world. She introduces the idea of the "clearing" as a symbolic space where clarity is intuitive and sensory—a meeting point between the visible and the invisible, where thought emerges from the body and feeling. Incorporating this perspective into our reflections on bodily and collective time led us to ask fundamental questions for the project: How do we feel time in the body? How are our emotions and identities shaped by it? What does it mean to liberate time from power structures? This collective approach underscores the interdependent nature of time and the body explored in the exhibition, emphasizing the importance of shared meaning-making.

Ultimately, Tiempoanimal invites us to inhabit a transitional space where mind and body, feet and head, find common ground. Like the clearing in Zambrano’s forest, this space "appears like a trembling mirror, a flickering clarity that barely allows something to take shape as it simultaneously fades away," enabling a place for encounter and movement. The exhibition invites us to think of the body as territory and time as a shared experience, to measure the world with our feet, to read it with our bones, and to listen to what matter has to say. In this act, the animal, the mineral, and the human blur together, generating multiple ways of inhabiting ourselves with greater openness.

—Paola J. Jasso (MEX), 2025.