This installation finds its genesis in an experience that has been constant throughout my life. Since my childhood, sports have been an uninterrupted practice that has left an overall mark on the progress of my body over the years. The deep-rooted habit of maintaining this habit, added to the fact that I don't remember life without exercise, sparked in me an interest in linking this experience with art. I longed for the opportunity to exhibit, in some way, the traces that this experience has engraved on my being over time.
My objective was to arrange all the pieces that make up this installation in space and have them enter into dialogue with each other, because in the end they were all born almost at the same time and developed in the same period. Additionally, I arranged them in such a way that they generated certain tensions and invited the public to walk through them.
Pyramid
Sculpture 21 cm in diameter X 4.50 m high. It displays a vertical accumulation of jars of sports supplements from the smallest (base) to the largest, forming an inverted conical column (the height depends on the space where it is displayed. For this sample a height of 4.50 m was achieved).
I conceived this work from several perspectives: (i) as a representation of the reality of athletes, where the use of supplements is almost a necessity to perform at optimal levels, especially for high-performance athletes, generating constant consumption and daily accumulation of these products. (ii) As a component of the sports field that promotes the rise towards physical strength and sustainability in sports practice. The hierarchical structure of the jars reflects from those of lesser importance, consumed due to ignorance or fashion, to the most fundamental, such as protein, which is often unfairly relegated. The inverted pyramid symbolizes this hierarchy. (iii) An allegory of the athlete, a being who strives, supports a weight, supplements himself and faces the vulnerability inherent to sporting effort, remaining balanced, resisting and getting up even in the face of the possibility of falling or being knocked down.
Diary
Pen ink on printed paper (printed image: photograph of a sheet of torn paper). It consists of 730 papers measuring 10.5 cm wide by 15 cm high, which form a detailed month-by-month 2-year calendar. This work represents a meticulous record of my weight, diet, training routine and supplementation. I started this diary in August 2017 and concluded it in August 2019. It explores the theme of accumulation, obsession and anxiety, being a testimony built from a daily routine. The act of sitting down daily to record what I ate and trained reflects the daily experience of an athlete. With a level of obsession equal to or greater than mine, I know that many athletes carry out this practice of keeping this type of diary, which is common in the world of sports. With this piece I sought to expose additional concepts such as repetition, routine, the passage of time, progress, strength, lifting, change and discipline. Concepts very present in all my work in general, as an artist.
Teach me how to measure anxiety
Sculpture: a 30-meter strip made up of the intertwined sequence of Trident gum packaging that I consumed during that period from 2017 to 2019. This work arises from the habit of automatically folding the packaging of the gum that I constantly consumed. Since I was little I always folded and made figures with the packaging of the sweets I ate, and at school, I learned how to weave with candy papers, and since then, when I have one or more packages, I begin to create figures or intertwine them. In this way, without thinking too much and acting naturally, by removing the wrapping of the gum, this piece began to be built. It became a routine, a way to pass the time, and in one way or another an obsession with wanting to knit them all, because sometimes they accumulated.
like a snowball
Sculpture 8 cm in diameter, made up of a sphere made from chewed gum accumulated from 2017 to 2019. The work arises as an expression of my fight against the anxiety generated by the pressure of maintaining a rigorous diet to achieve my sporting goals in said period, combined with everyday experiences that, together, trigger emotional imbalances and episodes of anxiety, reflected in repeated binge eating and weight gain recorded in the diary associated with the work.
In my search for recovery and self-healing at that time, I found in the act of chewing gum a small escape that I adopted as a constant habit. I consider this piece as a therapeutic action, since its evolution allowed me to be aware of my moments of crisis and my emotional improvement over time.
The sculpture stands as a testimony that addresses not only the specific anxieties of athletes, but also the anxieties, obsessions and fears shared by the general public. The gum ball is presented as a tangible representation of these universal realities, evoking themes such as anxiety, accumulation, obsession, hunger, eating habits, health, illness and the passage of time.
100kg
Drawing composed of six pieces measuring 27 cm wide x 34 cm high. Each piece captures the imprint left on the paper by the impact of the discs when executing an Olympic movement during a sports training session, replicating the natural fall of the bar to the ground, characteristic of Olympic weightlifting. The series is organized into three levels, each made up of pairs that progressively represent an increase in weight: the first pair reflects 60 kg, the second 93 kg and the last level, 100 kg. These levels, arranged from lowest to highest, maintain between each pair of pieces the standard distance of the Olympic bar (135 cm).
The origin of this piece arises from an experience in the gym, where reflecting on how to plastically capture the sporting experience, questions emerged about the visualization of progress and the indirect representation of a workout. As I performed my routine, the roar of the loaded bar mixed with the questions in my mind, creating a dialogue between sound and contemplation. Observing the bar on the floor after each lift, I was aware of the position on the rubber platform and the visual and sound impact it generated. This revealing moment inspired the idea of capturing, through a medium such as paper, the imprint left by the weight and force of the bar loaded with plates as it falls in each Olympic movement, and as the weights were increased. Thus capturing the practice, the weight, the fall, the strength and the progress in this work.
Chew
(Video that appears at the top of this page)
Video in mp4 format, 7.9-inch screen, with a duration of 2 minutes in a loop. The visual content focuses on a close-up of my mouth chewing gum. This video, like the gum sphere, represents another expression to document anxiety, revealing actions that usually go unnoticed but that, when observed from another perspective, become conscious. It immerses itself in repetition, reiterating the narrative of an obsessive behavior related to constant chewing.