CODEX / CODE

Matter and memory are cultural artifacts that flit through my work. Memory is a complex structure of communication that is realized through the few things capable of surviving the ages: ceramics, stone monuments, technology applied to metals, fibers, wood. I think about the limitations of today’s world, about how many of its objects will remain over time. Based on these ideas, I imagine a language, a visual code, and materials that activate this complexity.

The exhibition is a representation of a small world in its contradictions. Central America, my region, functions as a fractal representation of the universe. Transferring that region to Europe is, in my perspective, a game of fractal scales that moves the machinery of civilization.

I am interested in the anomaly of finding clay tablets with the history of Central American art in Austria, the center of Europe. This gives rise to a double game: on the one hand, the evidence of this micro-universe appearing in the exhibition hall; on the other, the literal gesture of burying the tablets at the end of the exhibition. The work becomes a time capsule, and the act transcends allegory to become part of the process itself.

Central America, from Rhizom’s headquarters, is presented as the validation of previous exchanges with the Graz public, without losing the critical force that underlies the pieces: a symbolic tension between the first and third worlds.