A little over 4,000 years ago a poem already narrated the concerns that haunted the thoughts of our ancestors, concerns and aspirations that are so pertinent in today’s world. But what does it mean to be human today? Our notion of being human is constantly evolving, it is being modified and readapted according to specific circumstances and situations; indeed, it is bordering dangerously close to that debate on what it means to be a person.

We as human beings define ourselves according to a context and that is where posthumanism transmutes into an umbrella concept that encapsulates us; it combines philosophical and cultural currents that transcend the paradigm of what has been considered as human; it makes us take the reins of our own evolution to overcome
our limitations and not place barriers to the process, either in a natural way or in an artificially selected one to achieve our salvation.

We are at a time in which the knowledge of the world, rather than being thought to objectively "represent" reality, is produced to engender material processes of change; it entails a kind of rhizomatic network where reality does nothing more than operate at various speeds. This means that the concept we had about humanity, of our species as a complex interior, has been transformed until we were understood as "somatic" individuals, beings whose individuality is based on our own flesh, our own bodily existence. It also means that the narratives on illness or suffering that affect the body were sweetened to rebuild our personal life by acting on the body; it entailed applying a braking force to counteract increased social pressures: exercise, vitamins, tattoos, body piercing, drugs, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation ; the bodily existence and vitality of the self has become the privileged place of experiments with the self.[2]

Igual de lleno, Igual de grande I is an oasis, an island of resistance to cling onto when we want to reach a safe haven. It can be understood as a totem that combines an equivocal balance of forces shown through solitary beauty. A work that is a master of enigmas and, like the islands, is exact in its exquisite error of judgement: to make
us believe that we will be safe, that, without a doubt, everything will be better.

The works of M Reme Silvestre are based on ideas or specific facts and are nourished by the complexity of processes in order to let go of other forces. The context and the moment are an essential part for the artist who seeks to generate an immersive atmosphere for each of her pieces, giving the materials a new scale of interpretation.

By understanding her work as a constant task of discovery, she guides the spectators owards that tense and confusing space where things appear to be something which hey are not; in doing so, she gives us the opportunity to question whether this aesthetic that surrounds us is a true reflection of positivity or a clever optical illusion, a trompe l'oeil.

This mantra-like idea that you must change your life is nothing more than another myth that we are turning into reality, a reality that the artist masks under the metaphor of a new human identity in which metabolism is now considered synonymous with existence. It portrays perhaps a conscious retreat towards a life that takes refuge in the body, in the exercise applied to live a life in order to create a posthuman universe that demands always living to the fullest or perish attempting to do so (a cruel irony to which the millennial generation, who grew up in an utopian ethos now finds itself in the dystopian, they are furthermore absolutely used to it). We have here a discourse of a society that is based on this post-factual world, where seemingly, everything fits, everything flows, while disregarding any attempt at objectivity. Ours is a world in which power has already taken care of establishing a “soft administration,” with an almost playful availability of stocks, as it were. We are left to discover a horizon conceived as a theme park modulated to the swaying uniqueness of each being.[3]

The Future that awaits us speaks of a new hybrid subjectivity that guarantees its political efficacy almost without resistance, a game of intertwining that maps contemporary relations of knowledge and power in a separate way. A method that shows the bodily roots of the thought process through the practice of the politics of position and predisposition, with the joyful acceptance of the establishment of a "social smoothing process" that secretly governs numerous collective and individual situations. This construct is destined to prevent minimum friction at all times, thereby achieving an indefinitely smooth common continuum.[4]

So, like the hero of the past, we rest on our back and flop onto a board that is still just as full and just as big; we take a deep breath and make room for insatiable reconfigurations of desires. We only need to rethink what it means to exist as a corporeal subject, to think that we are part of [the world] which we are trying to understand [5] treasuring, if we possibly can, the sensory traces of our own genealogy.

[1] RICH, Adrienne. 1987: Apuntes para una política de la posición. Sangre, pan y poesía: poesía escogida 1979 – 1985. Barcelona: Icaria, pàg. 205-22.

[2] ROSE, Nikolas. 2007: The politics of Life Itself, biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princenton University Press, pàg. 26.

[3] SADIN, Éric. 2017: La humanidad aumentada. Caja Negra, pàg. 85.

[4] SADIN, Éric, op. cit., pág. 138

[5] BARAD, Karen. 2003: Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society, vol. 28, núm. 3, pàg. 801-831.