Studies on the materiality of memory is a collection of works that touch upon the keeping of time as a notation, as a way of moving and arranging skins and layers, going in and out of circulation.
Working with frail ways of keeping things together, through the use of magnets, shoestrings, nails, films, masks and objects found in the studio are rearranged in an embodied manner, touching upon notions of preservation vs loss, memories that are not personal but collective, personal memories that only now exist through their outlines or materials, embedded in them but invisible, tracing the choreography of forgetting, feeling things that are forgotten, still vaguely felt.
Circular shapes make their appearance as coins, key-rings and holes, alluding to the eternity of the serpent eating its tail, the Lion of Judah from an Ethiopian coin alluding to the area as the birthplace of humanity against a backdrop of a metal grid where a padlock is hanging, as in on a bridge where lovers pledge the privacy and ownership of their bonds.
The remains of a face mask on plastic sculptural materials, conductive materials such as bronze, rust from fingermarks that decayed over the time of my studies alongside the cellulose of films.
BECOMINGS, MISTAKES OR ACCIDENTS
Becomings are a series of works made out of blown glass, generated through a collaborative process with the glassblowers on the hotshop floor.
Starting with a piece of colored glass we are improvising, based on the directions I am giving depending on the energy we share in front of the furnace. They started as explorations on mistakes that happened previously during glassmaking sessions, on which I wanted to elaborate further in exploring the dynamics of directing the process. As I give orders to the glassblower on how to shape the piece, I observe how their body reacts and how my words take shape while they work with me.
The glassblowing process is quite short in duration and there is a limited amount of time to work with glass until it becomes cold and immobile, and as each move and step shortens the time we have available, I make decisions on the spot and watch how they affect the process until our time together comes to an end. I am exploring emotional dynamics and intensities on the floor and look for mistakes and mistranslations to shape the pieces. Becomings are essentially exercises on how my uttered words and directions generate intensities that shape the pieces during a very brief amount of time, through an improvised choreography and through directives such as “blow”, “pinch”, “lengthen”, “twist”.