This piece (titled: The house vessels. Dust Structure #1) is the result of the action of scraping an old space / object that no longer fulfils its original function (in this specific case, its function as a home) and that has patrimonial historical value for a state, city or people. In 2019, Remains Gallery offered me the possibility of performing the action of scraping on the top floor of the building in which the gallery was located, which hadn’t been restored. The idea was to extract and classify the material that accumulated there, through the passage of time and to exhibit what would result from this process.
The dust structure contains pieces of the different layers of paint and wall papers that the house has had over the years. The fact of performing the action in a closed space, which was the space in which people coexisted and where now insects and other microorganisms coexist, made me feel that I had entered a kind of organ or organism. In this space, the beings that inhabited the abandoned room became part of it. The mold in the old tapestries did not only live in them but also fulfilled its function of transforming the matter. Me, entering the space on different days and affecting it, therewith also fulfilling my function. I wanted to somehow capture this distribution of energy in the work.
The construction of the house and the room, and the composition of my own body felt alike. I saw an analogy in how our human bodies are protected by layers of skin and the room was protected by layers of material that culminate in facades and walls that isolate it from the outside (and that give it its shape). Our human bodies have blood vessels and skeletons that distribute molecules and energy throughout our body and that not only make us stay alive but – with the help of our muscles – also allow us to stand erect. Similarly, the house needed an internal structure in order to remain standing and to survive in time as a building. The construction beams which are a part of the construction that I normally cannot reach in my scraping action, seemed similar in function to our human bones and veins. I had to think in the skeleton of the house, its anatomy.
I decided to build this possible anatomy with the dust: to construct some “bones” and “veins” of the house with the different layers of paint and wall papers. The work tries to represent part of the house, part of the organism that stood through all these years. Besides, as in every action of scraping that I perform, time superimposed me in the space of all the people and beings that inhabited the house: they became part of my identity and somehow -at least in my reality- I became part of theirs, like the house. It also made me reflect about my identity, human notions of identity, a house, the concept of home and matter itself; my body as a person but also my body as matter -like the matter of a house- that goes beyond my own existence as part of the universe.
