Buen camino

The second scene of Fantastic Interior continues this journey through intimacy with the work of Marina González Guerreiro. In Buen camino, the artist presents a brand-new body of work where she investigates the idea of transit, of transition, of following a path simply to walk, of passing from winter to spring, from adolescence to maturity.

Buen camino constructs a navigable setting filled with disparate moments which, in conjunction, create an aroma of familiarity riddled with nooks and crannies. As soon as we arrive at the entrance to Room A, we encounter something that could be a bedroom, evoked here by a shelf that acts as a seed from which objects sprout: small model bridges used in elaborate Nativity scenes, old candles, calendars, rugs . . . The shelf is a replica of the one at the artist’s family home in Galicia and was made by the same carpenter who built the original one for her bedroom over twenty years ago. With this small temporal pirouette, which brings the substance of the past to the present, Marina manages to turn time into a material that she kneads and moulds by playing with small elements and subtle allegories that accumulate and permeate every object. In this way, she orchestrates a hesitant, blurry instant, like a memory whose details have vanished, leaving only sensations in the pit of our stomach.

After this dreamlike bedroom scene filled with souvenirs of life, visitors are invited to step into the kind of “outside” space that exists on the other side of the shelf. In this open-air interior, the artist presents a series of works that take us by the hand and walk us through the various stages of a path riddled with stops, like a game board full of squares. Along the way, we can stop at different stations where woven palm fronds like those that typically adorn Palm Sunday processions form little paths leading to plastic lakes, to mosaics of rice and flower petals. This series of works traces an exhibition itinerary with no fixed destination, with no clear beginning or end. Yet, far from disconcerting us, this disorientation becomes a pleasurable experience in Marina’s hands, capable of crafting a serene uncertainty from objects imbued with good luck, trustworthy objects that forge empathetic ties and bonds with the bodies that contemplate them.

Scattered about the hall, we find drawings on tiles—small signposts that help us understand the path we are following. These little pointers for pilgrims contain images of fruit-laden trees, calendars, notes, maps, rapid sketches . . . The artist again plays with the logic of time, using a clay kiln to fire secret diary entries, the little notes we once scribbled on a scrap of paper and passed to a friend when the teacher wasn’t looking, treasure maps . . .

However, this path does not lead to a specific goal; its destination is a bridge, an object that takes us to another place, a passage. That is what we find at the end of the hall: a long bridge made of ropes adorned with time and care. Marina’s inspiration for this structure is the Q’eswachaka rope bridge over the Apurímac River, a few kilometres outside Cuzco. Every year, during the second week of June, the communities of Chaupibanda, Choccayhua, Huinchiri and Ccollana Quehue gather to rebuild the bridge after the rainy season, in a tradition that has brought them together for several centuries. The bridge is alive: it deteriorates, requires care and is rejuvenated each year, connecting two parts of the world.

Buen camino constructs an itinerary focused on the beauty of those mundane moments that impregnate our lives and shape the invisible substance which fuels intimacy. Marina González Guerreiro builds this path as if she were crafting an amulet, invoking luck and good fortune as she summons an unknown future that, perhaps, will be better.

Links

• Fantastic Interior
• Marina González Guerreiro