Somos Fabricantes de Alimentos en Cuero
Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola,
Ciudad de México, MX
curated by Fabiola Iza
November 19, 2013 - March 2, 2014
exhibition catalogue
press release
This project springs from the interest in reflecting upon the different modes of cultural consumption which lay tacitly in the forms through which the world that surrounds us has been organized. The zoo, the botanical garden, the museum, are just a few of the systems created throughout modernity to catalog, order, and understand a close and sometimes intriguing reality. These figures account for the historical relationships and the institutionalization which condition
the human approach to any phenomenon exterior to itself. somos fabricantes de alimentos en cuero fixes its scope on one of the most employed tools within the aforementioned systems of exhibition and information: vitrines. Their usage is widely expanded –their first appareance probably took place in the early cabinets of curiosities where they traveled all the way to science and history museums, they have introduced themselves with a fascinating and apparent naturalness into archaeological sites and art museums, until equally being inserted into everyday life by displaying the most disparate and diverse objects in living rooms, stores, and research laboratories, amongst many others. Nonetheless, their almost ubiquitous presence suggests to question if any deceit is embedded in its apparent invisibility, the act of effacing its character as a physical and ideological framework.Despite the frankness implied in the transparency of its material, we wish to emphasize on the mediation, distancing, and scholarship produced by this type of exhibition model; to explore its unction as that of a communicating vessel, a receptacle that conveys both visual and intellectual information. Therefore, we have turned to opacity and duplicity, making use of a vulgar material whose practical function is far from being a container which may confer value and by revealing its character in a moment previous to the encounter with the object: surface and interior act like a mirror. Its content, once unique, is doubled. Examining the constitution of value that operates within this model, we wonder, how is it that an object actually accumulates value? Is it an arbitrary transmission or does it depend on where the object is hosted? What role does its isolation play in this matter? Which is the threat that affects a specific object standing next to deliberately ordinary Ones? May a container determine the nature of what it conserves? What is determined by a vitrine? By a box, a cage, a fridge? Through slippages, that is, placing a certain object in an unexpected and apparently unrelated space, displacing an information load, we wish to draw attention towards other ways of producing sense and meaning, avoiding a recurrence to already constituted models and devices by directing a critical gaze onto that operation. The recognition factor changes perception.
This project is not looking to answer any of these questions but it instead aims to share them with the spectator, to allow each subjectivity generated in the encounter to interfere in the reflection upon the object. Through capricious groupings and absurd classifications, somos fabricantes de alimentos en cuero –such as the impossibility its title implies– plays with the paradoxical nature of
the constitution of knowledge and value, with its attributions and logic. The dystopian relationship materialized in such forms of classifying the world resonates in this absurd behavior.
*Project exhibited throughout the garden areas and in the historical building lobby