Mapi embarked long ago on a personal quest for self-knowledge through her work. The light passes, gives heat and transforms her body, that is a receptacle. Like a fruit that is shelled, or comes off its skin, it dresses and undresses to show us how it receives that glow. In her photographs, in her videos, she appears alone, almost superimposed on a neutral, heavenly, sky, sea background; playing, manipulating spheres: stars, particles, atoms, planets; or fabrics, feathers… trying to blend as much as possible with those pure backdrops to be part of the whole. Her work cannot be understood without her spiritual, initiatory vocation. In her vocabulary, the terms "heart", "love", "rebirth", "light" refer to languages of mystical knowledge. It does not matter from which culture we approach these inner processes, several inspire us. Perhaps Vedanta is one of the most intense approaches to this "mystical intuition" that avoids ordinary thought, which is born from superconsciousness, which brings you closer to the absolute, to the "atman", from love, and in this union, love embraces everything… you at the first place, achieving that desired goal: fusion with the universe without seeing separation. This state of complete absorption, to which the Sufi poet Rumi sang so beautifully, receives various names, from the eastern samadhi; to ecstasy in Christian mysticism; and describes the moment in which the person, finally, feels alien to the outside and bathes in the waters of one. "There are different ladders in a pond to get to the water, but water is one", said the ascetic Ramakrishna in Calcutta, while describing her state of transcendence with all kinds of body modifications that she described as: fires, burning, flow of. tears and tremors.

Mapi Rivera also searches these waters and the borders between religion, astronomy or art are blurred from her vision. She has clearly expressed this personal investigation: “It is now after my being has undergone the alchemical transformation that I want to contrast this experience. And it is that just as Hildegarda de Bingen knew the firmament through her visionary condition, I also recognize the universe through the lens of my heart ”...

In this sentence, she condenses all her imagery from recent years. The heart, "eye of the soul", an open window to the universe. And she continues: “Everything in life, in the universe, has a heart; the solar system and the atom have hearts, everything is made up of small particles with a heart nucleus, it does not seem strange that the smallest thing reproduces the immensity, nor that in the heart we can find the mystery that scientists, mystics, artists are able to experience and live " ...