Chair Waiting For An Artifice, 2022

UK-Mexican Arts Society
London

From the series Hallaca Chairs, this work explores fluid ideas of home, especially if subjected to displacement, in which rituals work as a vehicle to bring back elements rooted in the collective memory. 

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This ready-made formed by an old chair wrapped in banana leaves and string, in the same way as the Hallaca, a meal prepared in Venezuela to celebrate the Christmas period, where  all the family gathers together for around 3 days to make it, a dish that embodies the idea of home as a ritual. The communal methods of preparation and the diversity of its ingredients reflect on the mixture of races which occurred in Venezuela after the colonisation period. 

In Close to The Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz says ‘I tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion.’ We as humans have the need to extend the life of meaningful things, to put them on a sacred level, especially if those things or places are part of our identity. Well memory, through stories, traditions, but especially rituals, enables us to extend the life of the things and places we thought gone or severely transformed.

In this case, this chair suggests a human present, an object from the past, wrapped in a natural material which is in constant change, and looking like it undertook an accelerated process of ageing, aiming to show what could be the texture of memory. 

This work was part of the group show @casa_x_exhibition at the @ukmexicanarts London, in April 2022.