El Origen 99%

Sofía Márquez, the artist, eventually took her hidden canvas to a gallery. She titled it No me he ido del todo — “I haven’t entirely left.”

It is not a map. It is a list: The mango tree behind my house. The crack in the sidewalk where I played marbles. The sound of my mother’s hands making tortillas at 5 a.m. El Origen

In the high, thin air of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, the Arhuaco people do not ask where you are from. They ask: “Do you remember your Origin?” Sofía Márquez, the artist, eventually took her hidden

“I painted El Origen as a wound,” says Sofía Márquez, a 34-year-old Chilean-born visual artist now living in Barcelona. Her latest series, Rostros del Principio , depicts faceless figures emerging from cracked earth. “I left Chile when I was nine, during the dictatorship. My parents never spoke of ‘before.’ So I had to invent an origin. Not the traumatic one — the one before the trauma.” The crack in the sidewalk where I played marbles

A woman in the audience wept. She was from El Salvador. She had not spoken of her own village in forty years.

“You can lose your papers,” he says. “You can’t lose this.” Linguists note that in nearly every indigenous language of the Americas, the word for “origin” is also the word for “breath” or “beginning of a song.” The Nahuatl īīxiptla (origin) shares roots with ihtoā (to speak). To originate is to speak yourself into being.