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Presencia ausente
2023


Public space intervention with textiles

Exhibited at the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) for Proyecto Creadoras: Humanidades, Caracas, Venezuela, 2025.

Public ArtSite SpecificSpatial Intervention


Presencia ausente (Absent presence) is a temporary textile installation developed for Barrio Ajuro, Charallave, hometown of the artist. The intervention creates delicate obstructions in the structural elements that allow us to look outside from the typical town houses: breeze blocks, terraces, porches, fences.
             Light fabric and hand sewn sentences alter the houses’ facades to approach different stories of migration; establishing a mesh of familiar tales that dialogue and resonate with each other.  Evoking a communal poetic of dispossession, nostalgia and desertion; not only as processes that are experienced individually, but as collective transformations of identity.
             These typical structural elements made to let the air in during the relentless valley heat, become a symbol of our need for looking outside, beyond our individual struggle; but through this careful veiling, they also become an invitation to look inwards and rebuild an identity that takes these common experiences into account. Just as in this street, the houses can both frame and create a constellation of experiences that are contemporarily nuclear and shared.
             In its white cube iteration, the artist recreates this street constellation as a meta-documentation with fragments of the architectural elements framing each of the houses. The original fabrics were kept and re-used by the neighbours.


Photographic documentation by Santiago Méndez.