Image credits: James Kendi
Casa del Lago
Mexico City 
2013

Artist:
galería perdida










galería perdida:
somos fabricantes de alimentos en cuero


This project springs from the interest in reflecting upon the different modes of cultural consumption that lay tacitly in the forms through which the world has been organized. The zoo, botanical garden, and 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 that 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 systems of exhibition and information: vitrines. Their usage is widely expanded. Their first appearance probably took place in the early cabinets of curiosities where they traveled all the way to science and history museums; they introduced themselves with a fascinating and apparent naturalness in 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 questions 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 the mediation, distancing, and scholarship produced by this type of exhibition model to explore its function as a communicating vessel. This receptacle conveys both visual and intellectual information. 

Therefore, we have turned to opacity and duplicity, using a vulgar material whose practical function is far from being a container that may confer value and by revealing its character in a moment before the encounter with the object: surface and interior act like a mirror. Its content, once unique, is doubled. Examining the constitution of value within this model, we wonder how an object 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 threat 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 specific 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. 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.