Liste 2019

Avocado comes from the Nahual Ahucatl word which means tree’s testicles. For the Syrians and Arabs the liver was the center of life and in the Hebrew tradition the kidneys are considered the fundamental organ of the body. In the old testament the kidneys appear as a recurrent metaphor for temperament and are used to exemplify vulnerability. Over time, liver and kidney have passed from myth to organ to belong to the field of science; in the same way, avocado no longer represents masculinity in nature, but a luxury product. The body and the sensory experiences present in the poetic capacity to understand reality have been displaced by concepts related to logic and rationality. Avocado, the staple food of the inhabitants of Mesoamerica, was internationalized by Rudolf Hass, a merchant from Los Angeles who planted the first seeds of this variety at La Habra Heights in Los Angeles in 1926. Since then, this fruit has become the favorite of health gurus reaching unattainable prices for families in North America. The geopolitical and economic relations that imply its production, commercialization and consumption, as well as the relationship between political territory and body, are points of departure for this exhibition that arises from the dialogue between Carmen Argote and Mandy El-Sayegh. Deterioration and Power is constructed within the framework of a set of experiences, ideas and images from the artists’personal relationship with displacement. From an idea as vague and powerful as memory, they both generate a topography in which their interests and previous works are translated around the presence of the body and the remanence of memories in a poetic dimension. In the case of Carmen, her works are in constant negotiation between the natural and the architectural landscape of the city. The process of painting with avocado and the transformation of the decomposing fruit into ink exposes a process in which a corrupted matter acquires a metaphysical dimension and is redefined by a new context. Mandy, meanwhile, proposes a correspondence between the territory of Palestine in constant turmoil and the social climate of Bogotá, in which modernity and complex rural systems are in permanent confrontation. From a complex relationship with her Arab heritage, which is manifested in a series of calligraphies, the artist questions the power relations in the occupied territories of Palestine and the pathologies of the bodies. Deterioration is understood as a natural movement in which bodies are in a constant process of transformation and notions such as empowerment and decolonization are present through an eschatological vocabulary. Matter in a state of crisis is transmuted and acquires new dimensions. In Carmen’s work, vegetables are subjected to processes of chemical alteration to turn them into pigments and in Mandy’s, the proximity of organs and fragments of inert bodies are transformed into abstractions that evoke maps of territories.