Waste and omission

"Waste and omission" is the title of Gina Arizpe 's solo exhibition to be presented at Galería Freijo as part of Apertura Madrid 2023.

This project operates as a sort of journey of journeys in which the transit becomes the weft and warp of a fabric that as it grows before our eyes hides the reality of which it is a part. As Victor Gallego always reminds us: "To do and to undo everything is to do" and it is in this doing where waste and omission take shape.

The second law of thermodynamics holds that all processes occurring in the universe take place in such a way that disorder, and hence entropy, always increases, globally and locally, in a small space and/or in a small time interval.

From a cotton bulb to a thread, from a thread to a fabric, from apparently random cold coordinates to a proper name, from a proper name to a fabric. Thus, a few steps lead us to a path that sometimes we would prefer not to travel, but Gina Arizpe takes us by the hand to take us into that path that we would prefer not to know.

This exhibition is articulated around three pieces and the tension generated between them: "Cuestión de tiempo", "Nombres y coordenadas" and "Catalina Suárez (Lo íntimo)":

    - "Cuestión de tiempo", is a long-running piece, a performed production that was first presented at the SAPS in Mexico City in 2018 although its production began in 2014; in 2020 it received the 1800 Foundation Award for the best production of ZonaMaco and has recently been performed in Copenhagen. Throughout its presentations it has been charged with density, as one more layer that can be seen in its formalization: starting from a shapeless mountain of cotton, some women spin with the help of a spinning wheel until they turn it into a fine thread with which they weave on a frame an impossible fabric; as their work progresses they become hidden by their own doing until they disappear before our eyes. 

     - In "Names and Coordinates" it is the artist's own work that hides, on the one hand, the complex research work from which the proposal starts: the full names of the women whose bodies have appeared in a place determined by their coordinates at a specific time; and on the other hand, the reality itself that their murders represent by "weaving" with this data a series of drawings on paper in which their accumulation hides their evidence.

    -Catalina Suárez (Lo íntimo)" Part of the first feminicide in the history of Mexico of which there is a record. The victim and the victimizer were Spanish (Catalina Suárez was the wife and victim of Hernán Cortés) and this fact serves the author to reflect on the binomial feminicide-intimacy from data and situations that occurred in Spain in recent years formalized in a series of medium format paintings and other smaller pieces that recall a certain lost intimacy. 

All these works will be on view until October 28, 2023 at Galería Freijo.

Curator: Ramón Mateos