El Origen ✧

But for the artists, poets, and migrants who have carried the phrase across borders, El Origen has become something else: a portable homeland.

“Western science loves a single beginning,” she told me over coffee in La Paz. “A first cause. A spark. But my grandmother’s stories say there is no first — only cycles. The world has ended and begun again many times. El Origen is not a date. It is a ritual.” El Origen

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.” But for the artists, poets, and migrants who

By A. Reyes

“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.” A spark