Servicentro

Servicentro marks the second solo exhibition by Gloria Sebastián Fierro with Instituto de Visión. On this occasion, the artist draws inspiration from their grandfather’s gas station, reimagining it as a site of personal and collective transformation. Through a series of textile works, Fierro intricately weaves together fragments of family memory, childhood imagery, and aesthetic reflection, constructing a visual narrative that moves seamlessly between the intimate and the historical.

Using printed images taken from the bed sheets of their childhood, the artist builds visual compositions that unfold like comic panels—episodes of a story that trace their family’s passage from rural to urban life. Each tapestry functions as a chapter within an affective rather than chronological sequence, guided by the emotional memory that threads through the entire body of work.

Fierro reclaims sewing and patchwork—practices traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere and associated with the feminine—as powerful visual languages. The use of scraps and recycled materials evokes both precarity and resilience, transforming remnants into sites of meaning and resistance. Their family’s history, set against the backdrop of Colombia’s mid-century modernization and the rise of the automobile industry, mirrors broader narratives of displacement and adaptation. The gas station becomes a symbolic threshold between two worlds: the countryside and the city.

Each textile corresponds to a standard bed size—from crib to California King—marking the passage of time through intimate, everyday measures. The bed, a space of rest, desire, illness, and death, carries silent traces of lived experience. By reclaiming these fragments as archaeological evidence, Fierro reconstructs the presence of their family within their own formation, weaving memory into form, and domestic space into the language of contemporary art.