Hopscotch - Cosmo-agonic is a dynamic interactive painting Installation on a 15 x 5-meter wall, exhibited at Marlborough Gallery Madrid in 2023. A series of 35 small paintings is distributed at different levels on 9 shelves. They are composed to establish a playful cartography. This emotional and random cacophony relates to the vital experience that emanates from the reading of Julio Cortazar Hopscotch's novel and contrasts with events of my own life. The paintings are reinterpretations of concepts such as history, time, migration, and love.

In the visual work, as in the novel, the viewer will be challenged to change the structure and order of the narrative by moving the paintings (for these, white gloves are provided)

In Hopscotch - Cosmo-agonic installation, the physical, spiritual, and geographical journey will be embodied by the symbolic alter ego of the girl I have used since 1993, who represents all Cubans born within the revolution. Like the characters of Oliveira and La Maga, she is also an eternal emigrant and a utopian existentialist.

In the piece, there will also be references to other novels that, with Hopscotch, have been fundamental in my intellectual formation and that, I believe, describe the existential challenges of the human present and future: Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel by the American writer Ray Bradbury and Cities Invisibles by Italian Italo Calvino.

In all my work for more than 30 years, there are many points in common with Hopscotch because Hopscotch is a very visual novel and very autobiographical in which any reader can become a protagonist or identify with the thoughts and experiences of what is narrated. Philosophically and artistically, the referents in the novel are also very similar to me, as well as the structure of superimposed narratives as a collage and the existential anguish derived from humorous melancholy are resources that I have always used.

SANDRA RAMOS. Hopscotch - Cosmo-agonic, 2023. Installation. 35 paintings, shelves. 15 x 5 meters wall.