“If it’s really strong, it will manifest itself, even if I hide it,” said sculptor Alberto Giacometti to writer Jean Genet when he found one of Giacometti’s statues under the artist’s table. It was covered in dust.

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For several years, Ariela Naftal has been wrapping and sewing objects with tablecloths and napkins to give them visibility, to reveal their existence intertwined with time. “Like an archaeologist, I search for everyday traces that allow me to make the hidden visible, using the object as a witness to our existence,” she asserts. This action has been revamped on various occasions through performances, installations, and videos, which add layers of meaning to the first link in the chain: a tablecloth with tableware (forks, glasses, spoons, cups, among others). From lying on a table, it became a backpack, armor, and terrain, always in relation to a subject.

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Memory is a Body synthesizes and as well as expands the different conceptual and perceptual levels of the journey undertaken by the artist, in a video performance of three simultaneous acts. Memory and body constitute the anchoring terms of this new work, where a web of temporal and spatial coordinates unfolds.

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In one of the videos, a woman (the artist) carefully/fearfully steps onto a terrain, seemingly unknown, in an exploratory attitude. She looks at her feet, feels, and overcomes a stumble. She examines that portion of the world. In another, the object moves like a living being, which breathes, contorts, and rises. Did it swallow the woman? Has a symbiont been created? The boundaries blur, if they ever existed; if things were ever independent of their daily existence, memories, and connections with others. In the third act, the woman wraps the object, which had been a backpack-terrain-symbiont. She shelters, embraces, caresses, and contains it. Until they mirror each other recognizing themselves, both as necessary parts of memories, new encounters, and futures. Because memory needs what still endures. It needs the strength of truth to discover bodies—both inert and alive—that move and stir emotions.

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Laura Casanovas