Sábana y Mantel

Sábana y Mantel (Spanish – Bedsheet and Tablecloth) takes its name from a song by María Elena Walsh, the Argentine poet and composer whose children’s songs were, in truth, coded social and political messages addressed to adults. Sábana y Mantel evokes the bedsheet and the tablecloth as the minimal emblems of human dignity in the most wretched of circumstances – thin membranes of Civilization and Culture, guardians of fleeting moments of life.
The work was sparked by a photograph of a vast crowd awaiting humanitarian aid in the ruined Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria in 2014. The dense cubes of compressed metal waste that had been sitting for months in the studio suddenly became a nameless, long-suffering body. Each cube was measured and a small, unique rug was hand-woven for it – a metaphorical Name, a token of regard for an individual life-story, a fragile membrane of dignity.