SILVER SPOON
With a title alluding to the expression "Born with a silver spoon", this project raises a critical statement about the historical bases of private property and how they configured the current axiomatic paradigms of labour and ownership.
The base material which I used to raise these and other considerations were 30 naturally mummified pigeon carcasses.
These bodies come from a single location, the attic of a house where these birds had garrisoned forming a populated colony.
In reaction to this unwanted appropriation of the space, the owners proceeded to seal off all existing exits from the outside, confining the trapped pigeons in an closed environment, in which they eventually died. Their corpses, mummified by the specific conditions of the place, were recovered by the artist decades later.
Through an electrolysis process, the mummies received a metallic silver coating that hermetically sealed them: The resulting pieces hide the organic remains of the birds underneath an aseptic layer of noble metal, which now safeguards them from the passage of time.
The exhibition display was divided into two differentiated modules: On the one hand, all the pigeons were distributed horizontally on the ground, in grids corresponding to the first 4 square numbers, thus generating sets of 1, 4, 9 and 16 elements.
On the other hand, a silver spoon was presented, fixed to te wall. It contained all the small grains of sand, pieces of glass and tiny stones that were recovered in the stomachs of the original mummies. In this way, the artist explores the use by living organisms of external elements to optimize the effectiveness of their biological mechanisms.
By combining a spoon made of a metal with aseptic properties and a symbolic and economic value with the mineral remains ingested by birds, I aimed to reaffirm the potential of the object as a catalyst for complex meanings.
SILVER SPOON
With a title alluding to the expression "Born with a silver spoon", this project raises a critical statement about the historical bases of private property and how they configured the current axiomatic paradigms of labour and ownership.
The base material which I used to raise these and other considerations were 30 naturally mummified pigeon carcasses.
These bodies come from a single location, the attic of a house where these birds had garrisoned forming a populated colony.
In reaction to this unwanted appropriation of the space, the owners proceeded to seal off all existing exits from the outside, confining the trapped pigeons in an closed environment, in which they eventually died. Their corpses, mummified by the specific conditions of the place, were recovered by the artist decades later.
Through an electrolysis process, the mummies received a metallic silver coating that hermetically sealed them: The resulting pieces hide the organic remains of the birds underneath an aseptic layer of noble metal, which now safeguards them from the passage of time.
The exhibition display was divided into two differentiated modules: On the one hand, all the pigeons were distributed horizontally on the ground, in grids corresponding to the first 4 square numbers, thus generating sets of 1, 4, 9 and 16 elements.
On the other hand, a silver spoon was presented, fixed to te wall. It contained all the small grains of sand, pieces of glass and tiny stones that were recovered in the stomachs of the original mummies. In this way, the artist explores the use by living organisms of external elements to optimize the effectiveness of their biological mechanisms.
By combining a spoon made of a metal with aseptic properties and a symbolic and economic value with the mineral remains ingested by birds, I aimed to reaffirm the potential of the object as a catalyst for complex meanings.