A refrigerator filled with specialty dishes and colorful cakes, alongside essential items from the basic goods basket and common cooking ingredients. The refrigerator features a glass door and constant lighting, allowing the contents to be visible. Commonly found in neighborhood stores, self-service shops, cafeterias, and restaurants. The key feature of this piece is the refrigerator's steel chain and key padlock, preventing it from being opened. This symbolizes the detention of wealth by a select group of individuals who exercise control, facilitated by a system based on cognitive exclusion and the pervasive reality of marginalization experienced by more than half of the population in countries like México.
The title of the piece is the following quote from the behavioral manuals by Erasmus of Rotterdam:
"On the right the cup and the knife; on the left the bread."”
Erasmo de Rotterdam en Civilitate morum puerilium (cap. IV).
This quote belongs to the manual of behavior that Erasmus of Rotterdam systematically developed in the sixteenth century, which played an important role in the process of occidental civilization in the ways of behaving and distinguishing oneself at the table, by being the first manual for the education of the children of the court, mainly the children of the nobility. This quote also takes on a second meaning in our current socioeconomic and political context, in a figurative sense of the symbols representing power and wealth on the one hand and poverty on the other.
This piece was also presented in the group exhibition Recomendaciones mínimas para caminar de espaldas(Minimum recommendations for walking backwards), at Ex Teresa Arte Actual museum in Mexico City. For this exhibition I chose to fill the fridge with food that dialogued with the space: the ancient church of Santa Teresa la Antigua. The piece kept the same title, and the conceptual basis was the same, but in this particular case it contained two groups of foods related to the the Spanish conquest of Mexico, those that were extracted from America and taken to Europe and vice versa, such as beans, tomatoes, potatoes, chili, avocado, corn, among others. And the second group, which have a great weight in the Catholic religion and the process of evangelization, given the context of the museum that was once an Ex-Convent. Mainly unfermented bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, mentioned in religious texts, as well as grapes, figs, olive oil and balsamic vinegars, fine herbs, lamb meats and quail eggs. Both food groups feature commodities, which currently remain expensive on the market and inaccessible to many. In addition, after a month, the process of food decomposition was intentionally provoked in an attempt to symbolized the double moral standard and the effects of the conquest and religion in the socio-political evolution of the country.
Installation of a refrigerator with food covered with chain and padlock, on synthetic grass.
2017 © Claudia Uranga Alonso
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