19.09

METONIMIAS / METONIMIES

MUSEO NACIONAL DE SAN CARLOS - MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

Site-specific Installation

This exhibition constitutes a stage of the Metonimias project and is part of a body of work that I developed between 2012 - 2019, having as its foundations, the work in context, the development of site-specific work and process art.

Metonymy is perhaps the most widely used rethorical figure in ordinary language, and in particular is one of the most recurrent in contemporary art. It refers to a semantic substitution that defines the whole from one of its parts. This concept serves as a trigger for a series of dialectical readings, based on the multiple layers of content of the project: the relationship between art and science, Buddhist meditation and performative processes, chance and serendipity, chaos theory and the eternal return to origin.

An important reference of this project is an ancient Buddhist meditation, where the monks went to the forest, chose a stone and during their meditation process, performed the same procedure used in this project; wrapping the stone with rice paper, covering it with Indian ink, letting it dry and removing the paper. After leaving the stone in place, they returned from the forest with the image printed, which symbolically represented their experience.

In 2012, I traveled to Cosautlán de Carvajal, a community between the states of Puebla and Veracruz, to collect and transport with mules and then by car, 12 river stones of approximately 50 kg each, to Mexico City.

Subsequently, between October 2012 and March 2013, an installation consisting of these stones wrapped in rice paper was presented in the Oval Patio of the National Museum of San Carlos, recreating the color wheel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Color (1810).

Likewise, 12 glass bottles containing Indian ink with the colors of the chromatic circle were installed. Through a gravity drip device, the ink was allowed to drip, impregnating the papers on the stones.

After a long process of detaching the rice paper from the stones, with the material collected and then classified, I proceeded to re-construct and re-compose these papers within a predetermined format.

The result were 12 canvases made up of the papers containing the traces of the stones and constituting the memory of the process. The commitment to the community of Cosautlán de Carvajal was to return the stones to their place of origin, which happened in September 2019, seven years after I went to collect the stones. The community donated a piece of land and built a space where the stones are on permanent display.

 
Metonimias Book

Metonimias Book

Metonimias Catalogue

Metonimias Catalogue

12.10 Site-specific Installation, Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Mexico City, Mexico

Curated by : Peter Krieger

Assistant : Ingrid Kaiser

Photography : Alejandro Cuevas / Guilen Errecalde

Supported by : Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte - FONCA

12.10 Site-specific Installation, Museo Nacional de San Carlos, Mexico City, Mexico

12.09 Process of collecting stones from Cosautlán de Carvajal, Veracruz, Mexico