Artist Statement
I always give my figures the same instructions, although I know they won’t do them any good.
First, come from somewhere. It doesn’t matter where: nobody knows, and neither do they. Second, look around and choose something to resemble. Anything will do: a person, a gesture, a laugh heard from far away whose meaning nobody quite knows. Third, imitate it with the utmost seriousness. Huddle together because the ones outside huddle, raise a hand to the mouth because the ones outside do, produce heads by the dozen in case one of them, by sheer force of numbers, gets it right.
What I don’t tell them is the only thing that matters: that they exist only from the moment they begin to resemble the other, and that the more they resemble it, the more they disappear. If one ever became what it imitates, it would be over. So when one comes too close, I stop it or undo it. I don’t want to reach that point of certainty.
They don’t know they are failing. For them it is neither failure nor success. It is just an attempt. From the outside it looks ridiculous, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, and almost always both at once: the melancholy of the grotesque.
While they wonder what the outside is, I keep looking at them with the question reversed: who are they? I don’t know if we’ll manage it.
La Desgracia was the first time I took them out into the street. The exhibition is over, but the misfortune goes on.