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THE SOUND OF THE FALLEN TREE
By Gabriela Salgado 1
After years of absence from her country, Claudia Fontes presents a set of works
made in her place of residence, Brighton, a sea-side town anchored in a past of
vague splendour in the South of England. In its surrounding nature Claudia goes
hunting for images.
The blackened antlers of a deer - remnants of an uncertain hunt - welcome us in
the foyer of the gallery as the spoils of a lonely amputation displayed on the
wall. The deer, an animal native to the northern hemisphere imported
into our latitudes by nostalgic European immigrants who tried to transform our
indomitable Pampas into bucolic European forests by means of mimetic
operations, becomes a memento of uncertain migrations. Lengths of black
thread, reminiscent of umbilical cords, come out from the antlers and connect
them to the diminutive sculpture of a deer, which looks as if blackened by the fire
of an unspeakable past. The small animal evokes impotence with its tiny
figure, not only for its fragmentation- lacking its main attribute - but also by its
forced displacement.
The image of the deer unfolds in Map in the next room, a
drawing installation where a tangle of black thread emanates from a fallen
tree drawn directly on the wall. The tree sheds its vegetable soul into various
organic and inorganic ramifications on the ground: a surreal collection of a
partially recognizable animal inventory.
In Claudia Fontes' work dislocation, colonialism and migration, as well as the
strategy of disappearance of the form - or its equivocal placement - which is the
product of semantic displacements that allude to and pervert power structures.
In the next room sits Mountain, a large sculptural installation representing
a slight and precarious architecture topped by the phrase " The process of falling
to bits reveals key facts of construction” entirely made of fourteen hundred pine
wood sticks. Mountain projects its unstable form onto the
wall, its gigantic shadow formed by a source of light magnifies the possibility
of an impending disaster. Wandering around the room makes us accomplices by
1
Gabriela Salgado is a curator based in London. She has a postgraduate degree in curating
contemporary art from the Royal College of Art and has been responsible for international art events
and exhibitions since 1990.
She directed the Fundacio Llorens Artigas in Barcelona (1990-1995); and was curator of the University
of Essex Collection of Latin American Art -UECLAA from 1999 to 2005. Working as a freelance
curator in the UK and Latin America since 1999, she has been a member of the San Francisco
performance group La Pocha Nostra, collaborating with artistic director Guillermo Gomez-Pena as a
curator, writer and artist. She has been responsible for a large number of exhibitions including Leon
Ferrari: The Architecture of Madness (2002); Arena Mexico (2004); La Octava Región (2006); Open
House (2006), and organised symposia, performance programmes and workshops. She regularly
lectures, having participated in events in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Spain and the
UK.
In 2006 she was appointed curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern where she devises a
programme of educational activities including symposia and conferences, artists’ projects, courses and
workshops for adults. She writes articles and essays for art publications in Latin America and the UK.
http://claudiafontes.com/work/sound-fallen-tree/
producing a play of light and shadows intertwined with the architecture; it
becomes a theater of our potential involvement in the collapse of a civilization at
the limit of its strength.
In Training a video projection takes us to the original forest of these poetic
exercises: a greyhound and a child in tender embrace are the subject of a small
porcelain sculpture that sits next to the projection. They are inert witnesses of
the dreamlike action seen in the video. As if it were a reverie by Rousseau, the
wandering of the camera -which registers the human and the dog vision as much
as the vision of the surrounding nature- insinuates the rapturous dissolution of
individual consciousness into a whole. We are left with an awkward image in
which the hunter is hunted and the escape dissolves into the mist of time, where
life, death and regeneration run together like the wind.
http://claudiafontes.com/work/sound-fallen-tree/