Waste and omission
Gina Arizpe
from September 13, 2023 to October 28, 2023
"Waste and omission" is the title of Gina Arizpe’s solo exhibition presented at Freijo Gallery as part of Apertura Madrid 2023.
This project operates as a sort of journey of journeys in which passing through becomes the warp and weft of a fabric that as it grows before our eyes conceals the reality of which it forms part. As Víctor Gallego always reminds us: "To do and to undo everything is to do" and it is in this doing that waste and omission take shape.
The second law of thermodynamics holds that all processes occurring in the universe are carried out in such a way that disorder, and therefore entropy, always increase, globally and locally, in a small space and/or in a small time interval.
From a cotton boll to a thread, from a thread to a fabric, from cold, seemingly random coordinates to a proper name, from a proper name to a fabric. Thus, a few steps lead us to a path that sometimes we would prefer not to travel, but Gina Arizpe takes us by the hand to take us into that path that we would prefer not to know.
This exhibition is articulated around three pieces and the tension generated between them: "A matter of time", "Names and coordinates" and "Catalina Suárez (The intimate)”:
-"A matter of time", is a long-running piece, a performed production that was presented for the first time at SAPS in Mexico City in 2018 although its production began in 2014; in 2020 it received the Fundación 1800 Award for the best production of ZonaMaco and has recently been performed in Copenhagen. Throughout its presentations it has been charged with density, like another layer that can be seen in its formalisation: from a shapeless mountain of cotton, some women spin with the help of a spinning wheel until they turn it into a fine thread with which they weave an impossible fabric on a frame; as their work progresses they become hidden by their own doing until they disappear before our eyes.
- In "Names and coordinates" it is the artist's own work that conceals, on the one hand, the complex work of investigation from which the proposal is based: the full names of the women whose bodies have appeared in a place determined by their coordinates at a specific moment; and on the other, the very reality represented by their murders by "weaving" these data into a series of drawings on paper in which their accumulation conceals their evidence.
-"Catalina Suárez (The intimate)" Departs from the first feminicide in Mexico's recorded history. The victim and the perpetrator were Spanish (Catalina Suárez was the wife and victim of Hernán Cortés) and this fact is used by the author to reflect on the binomial feminicide-intimacy based on data and situations that have occurred in Spain in recent years, formalised in a series of medium-format paintings and other smaller pieces that recall a certain lost intimacy.
All these works will be on view until the 28th October 2023 at Freijo Gallery.
Curator: Ramón Mateos
