Category: Installation

Under the epigraph of the fierce people with which the Yanomami indigenous community of the Amazon is identified, we established the paradoxical relationship with the place, not exempt from conflict, where the work was carried out: Puerto Ayacucho on the banks of the Orinoco River, the natural border between Venezuela and Colombia. 

Suspended from the ceiling by their own vines, ten Yanomami baskets contain ten smiling Colombian faces. The laughter, deceptive and seemingly fierce, is combined with the pungent smell of coffee beans that accumulate in the center of the room. From the back, a small painting shows a mouth ready to bite, the image of a predisposition to ferocity. The "ferocious Yanomami people" and "the ferocious Colombian people.”

THE LITTLE FACE OF THE PIG or the violence of tenderness.

From the mask of a little pig, made by a 6-year-old girl in the Venezuelan Amazon during a creativity workshop with "15 children from the conflict zone", we made the mould for fifteen clay pieces in which the little pig's face was surrounded by achiote, a red vegetable dye that symbolizes blood for the Yanomami. 

Notes on Preamble and Conclusion

The abstracted image of an elephant has haunted me until now, as an iconographic constant. Ever since I was a child, I have seen elephants in circus surroundings, as huge living masses tied with chains to the ground, and I always found it difficult to relate to the magnitude of the sensitive mass of this enormous animal with the submission to a circus prison. At first, I only stopped to think about the problem of freedom. Still, over time, as I began to use metaphors to compose the ideas visually, I became intrigued by a very particular phenomenon, typical of animal behaviour in situations of deprivation of their freedom: the suggestive repetitive and undulating movements of the enormous grey bodies in a kind of ritual of conciliation typical of the intimacy and concentration of the autistic.

The suggestion of autistic movements as a metaphor for the isolation of the present-day human being within the occupied territory - the city - has been a conceptual constant in my work. In a series of progressive steps, it has evolved towards three-dimensional forms in which modules, in the manner of small sculptures, have transformed the external vision of the works, configuring small installations complemented and enriched by the appearance of short texts and the consequent change of construction materials.