The moths are part of a series of scraping and extracting exercises that came to life in 2014 when I was invited to participate in a project called «La Mancha» in Argentina. I wanted to somehow grab or rescue the materiality and history of people in a particular period in the country. I went through many ideas, but I was confronted with an impossibility. I thought about the essence of these people, their memories and their bodies. Where did everything go?
The inability to obtain, led me to the action of scraping.
While wandering the city of Buenos Aires, I recognized that in the walls of its buildings there was probably history. I couldn’t speak to these people; I had no access to them, but I had access to the walls. I wanted to literally extract the materiality: to realize an effort and a silent dialogue that would make me feel that with my action I remembered/honoured them.While scraping, the dialogue occurred. The matter answered me: I was as vulnerable to time as them. Since then, I have done the same silent action in many different places, encountering many stories, redefining my own notions of everything and “I”.
These moths are made of remains of different buildings resulted from the scraping exercises. They contain pieces of the different layers of paint and wall papers that the constructions have had over the years. With the action, time superimposed me in the space of all the people that inhabited these spaces: they became part of my identity and somehow -at least in my reality- I became part of theirs, just like the building.
While scraping, I had to think about the fact that I can cease to exist as “My name”. However, I also found that despite the consciousness of my finitude, the destruction of matter beyond what my identity can conceive, is impossible. That is to say, in the urgency to retain what I want to keep, I understood that this cannot be retained, nevertheless, this “something” that goes away, that can’t be stopped: continues existing …
I thought about the vulnerability of our identity. I point it vulnerable because it cannot exist on its own; it depends on many other factors and it is fragile to them … It depends on others, on time, on space, on the state of our body, on our mental state and on our existence, among other elements. Yet, time is the one that is vulnerable, which we have made up to understand and give ourselves a place in the constant movement.
In the dialogue with the matter, I was told that I was matter, that I wasn’t just “me”, that I am beyond “me”. I’m matter as everything else is. Therefore … I started to think on many «other» beings… Mainly on those that inhabited the spaces where my scraping exercises took place. I saw mostly insects and I had to think on how they have existed long before humans and on how they evolve in countless species to thrive. For instance, there is no knowledge on how many types of moths exist and the fact that they constantly mutate makes it even more impossible to know. In the Colombian Orinoquia region for example, an abundant species in a certain area won’t be found a few meters away, as it is replaced by another species that did not inhabit the former area and yet both species are interconnected (the disappearance of one can mean the extinction of many).
I thought about the moths in my grandmother’s closet…
The moths became my memories.
I had to think also about the process of metamorphosis and my impossibility to completely understand what it implies to the being. Will I undergo a metamorphosis process during my death?
Moths… Their shortest stage is the «adult» stage. Do they grow «old»?
These beings that are intrinsically related to each other, somehow often go unnoticed to us. Do we go unnoticed to them?
While making and researching I also found interesting notes in our language. Some of the moths I decided to build belong to the family of geometrids, which is derived from the ancient Greek geo γη or γαια "the earth" and metron μέτρων "measure" in reference to the way in which their larvae seem to "measure the earth". I was measuring time while scraping, while some other insects were measuring the earth.
I have found myself then scraping a space that ages while I also age, transforming part of it and leaving it to the time. It makes me think about cycles: birth, death and rebirth.
Finally, to calm my mix of fear of and admiration for time, I have also imagined that, since there are so many species of moths in continuous transformation, there is a big probability that one day I would be a moth.
*Butterflies may be sell apart.
