The days and the hours

The days and the hours

solo exhibition, 2019

Los dias y las horas (The days and the hours)

curated by Carlos García-Montero

Drawing from Los días y las horas, a short story by Peruvian psychiatrist and writer Pilar Dughi that follows the everyday life of a subversive militant in the 1990s, this exhibition explored the temporal processes of eros and thanatos through the aesthetic transformations and interventions I shared with friends throughout 2018 and 2019. The body of work emerged from lived experiences and from a research process focused on the intersections of art and desire—often entangled with precariousness, vitality, and fury that I share with friends I admire, love, drift away from, and eventually return to.

In Dughi’s narrative, domestic labor appears as an affective practice deeply attuned to the cyclical tensions between life and death. Taking this as a point of departure, I sought to integrate feminized forms of care, gestures of affection, and expressions of desire into a visual language shaped by processes of change, transition, and self-fashioning. The works also draw on the cultural transformations of bodies like my own and on aesthetic modifications inspired, in part, by ancestral and “primitive” visual traditions from this and other geographies.

Ultimately, Los días y las horas reflects on how time—mutable and transitory—allows for deconstruction and reconstruction, for naming our fears and anxieties, for becoming and unbecoming. So much change produces “abominations,” as Dughi writes—monstrous forms capable of repopulating everything. These pieces are rooted in that possibility: aesthetic reorganizations oriented toward symbolic repair.

The photographic documentation was done by Luz Sarmiento Tello.

“Monstruo”
Installation with sequin cushions, plush, and reflective fabric.
320 cm x 120 cms
2019

“Esperanos para comer”
video-eassay
4’31”
2019

‘Wait for us to eat’ is a video essay developed using fragments from the short story Los días y las horas. The video editing was carried out by Fito Araujo, and journalist and feminist activist Milagros Olivera assisted with the selection of texts.

The video is available through te following LINK.

“Uñas en fiesta”
Acrylic paint, colored pencils, and applications of artificial nails and feathers.
100cm x 70cm
2019

“Mi amiga la culebra (XII)“
Sequins, plush fabric, masks, silicone, burlap sack, and hanging wigs
220cms x 82cms x20cms
2019

“Protesis 2”
Ceramic assemblage with chains, feathers, synthetic hair, acrylic nails and shiny stickers
45cmx12cmx12cm
2019

“Prótesis 1”
Ceramic assemblage with chains, feathers, synthetic hair, acrylic nails, shiny stickers, and a leather choker.
45 cms x 29 cms x 14 cms
2019

untitled
chains, acrylic paint, feathers and paper.
29cmx21cm
2019

“Boca Chavin”
Installation with plush fabric, synthetic hair, and latex.
250x450cm (approx)
2019

“Abstractions”
Acrylic paint, leather, fabric and chains on cotton paper
trypyich of 70x40cm each
2019

“Cartographies”
Acrylic paint, wax colored-pencils and appliqués
Dyptich of 100cm x 70cm each
2019

Profiles
Drawings series on paper with appliqués of various materials on plush fabric.
400cms x 50 cms
2019

“Fire”
Installation of wigs, neon lights, and acrylics.
110cm x 50 cm x 50 cm
2019