The piece presented in this Biennial consists of the shape of a corral for cattle called “funnel”, used in Uruguay since the 19th century, which the artist has reconstructed from an old, barely legible photograph.
It has the form of a place for certain bodies, but is exhibited without them. Removed from any context, it is offered as an empty cell, as a phantasmatic stage whose lost memory is now waiting to be replaced by the presence of other bodies capable of occupying it.
The label The Law of the Funnel, with which he named the installation, is a popular term alluding to the inequity of the legal system (the wide for the few, the narrow for the many) that corresponds to the prison form of the artifact, whose two entrance and exit gates are crowned by guillotine-like portals, all of which suggests a mystical ritual or sacrificial function. Part of a history that spans more than a hundred years of rural labor in the Río de la Plata is synthesized in this political machine destined to select and decide the final destiny of the bodies, so it can also be read as a metaphor about power and the animality of the human condition.
There are two aspects conjugated in this proposal: on the one hand the format of architectural complexion and on the other the theatrical vocation of the installation. The first is due to the original function of the “funnel”, by virtue of which it has portals, accesses, breaches, walls and other devices that give the whole a configuration appropriate to the human scale and close to the language of architecture. The second is tributary to the conditions of assembly, to its scenographic conception, which invites the visitor to dialogue bodily with the artifact to cross the virtual barrier imposed by the spectacle. Such characteristics give the work a historical reason and a current function ready to play with meanings, which separates it from the classical minimalist drift.
Its inert presence, despite conforming to human stature, exerts a formal and scale friction against the architectural “envelope” of the pavilion strong enough for us to recognize in it a monumental aspiration that insinuates, at the same time, a mysterious and ritualistic character. This last aspect enables the suspicion, among others, of being in front of a container suitable for sacrificial functions: a chamber with two openings (one for admission and the other for emission) that operates selectively on all those who are under classificatory and discriminatory laws. The decagon of the central space has its most disturbing indicators in two high portals that crown the link with the exterior in the manner of guillotines, all of which encloses the conviction that there is something we are missing, something that is beyond the sphere of the sphere.
Commissioner: Alejandro Denes
Curator: Gabriel Peluffo Linari
Photos: Haupt & Binder