The project "Archaeologies," to which this piece belongs, involves the collaboration of individuals who, as emigrants-immigrants, are part of a kind of inverse recolonisation developed in the so-called first world. We seek a qualitative record of their personal vagaries through a pictorial strategy of action-experience-aesthetics that, in principle, create metaphorical fictions that are the product of chance, recorded using silk-screen printing techniques on cartographies or fictitious maps as guides to the establishment.

In "You are here," two spectator-protagonists are invited to create paths in the form of absolutely personal itineraries. The fictitious map - a metaphor for location - is covered by a thin layer of mud that, once dry, cracks following the folds of the cloth placed at the disposal of the protagonists. Behind every gesture of folding, stepping on, crumpling, there is a register, a nerve fibre printed on the canvas as a product of the need of each one to follow a line of behaviour, each one has a particular way of folding, of moving, of cleaning each trace in the manner of the archaeologist who is discovering his own history. The individual who is part of his own migratory invention builds his own city, wherever he is, establishes his own urban experience, identifies himself by recreating his own family memory, that "small memory," a mixture of fiction and reality, which differentiates us from each other.

Moreover, the question of migration is also a matter of distance. The space generated between two points, departure-arrival, can be a non-place of emptiness, the beginning of dis-location. In these times, full of migrations and moves, human beings look for the place they dream of, and in the end, the chosen site ends up becoming that dreamed-of place; thus, the subject creates their own image of the location, situation, while filling the void left by distance. The individual absorbs at the same time as he yearns, mutates, and adapts without ceasing to be the product of his own circumstances of estrangement, absence, and uprooting; he situates himself in that starkly natural way, in which we invent the world in which we live WITHIN our intimate environment to survive in it. Perhaps we are only shedding our skin, like the snake that abandonS the remains ON THE SPOT, in the place where the transformation ended, WHILE the flesh is preserved intact. After all, we too are constantly losing residues of our skin, we are constantly shedding. 

The canvas loses the appearance of a canvas, of a painting. It is a blurred image, like the faint reflection of what we finally are, of what remains of us.

You are here - Detail