MUSEO DEL CHOPO/2019

On the occasion of the project The Sense of the Inhabited, for the Universitary Museum of Chopo, Marianna Dellekamp made an open invitation to the public to collaborate by lending a piece of furniture or object with an emotional significance, beyond its function or utility. Since 2009,  the artist has investigated how various sets of materialities -from a handful of earth, medical instruments, and even personal items- can become vehicles of historical, social, personal, and sensitive information, as seen in works like The Earth Library, Collecting Thought (2013) and later in Porcelain (2017).

Marianna Dellekamp generates strategies of relationship and collaboration to articulate the individual with the collective. In  The Sense of the Inhabited, a series of affective bonds are the foundation to materialize an intervention at the museum's Central Gallery. The pieces from different temporalities and contexts configure, for a brief period, into another landscape and in another architecture, where the intentionality for which they were created is the least important. The ghosts of their owners and their motives are visible through the threads of the words on the floor, traced with the intention of blurring with the footsteps of the visitors.  With this gesture, the artist insists on the ravages of time and the way narratives of memory are sometimes unsustainable, fading away in the exchange or when viewed through others' eyes.

Each day when stepping out onto the street, it is impossible not to carry with us our own affections, with our stories and motives. The owners of what is exhibited here temporarily parted with their furniture or object through a generous and deliberate act, as a pronouncement on the reasons for these attachments and the way one's life becomes a reflection in the other.

Itzel Vargas Plata