Press Release

Mónica’s work enmeshes autobiography, material process and historical archive. Her pieces are composed of assemblages taking the shape of animated domestic objects that are spilling over, optically distorted or in a process of transmutation. She considers materials and objects through their circulation and reproduction under consumer systems of production and exchange. This approach is conceptualized through the neobaroque, a logic of excessiveness, ornamentation and exuberance where states of in-betweeness and opacity of meaning can exist in parallel to hegemonic narratives. The neobaroque also draws from traditional baroque logics, such as the confusion of the borders between things, the introduction of perspective and a dramatic movement that refuses cartesian divisions and euclidian geometries.

SHADOW BOXES

In her current work series presented at Liste, Mónica explores forms of reproduction that might sit outside of nuclear family structures, industrial means of production, efficiency and futurity, and the violence that these logics impose on different bodies. Mónica explores these ideas through a close engagement with the life cycle of the bombyx mori silk moth - an organic reproductive process that has been irrevocably altered by human intervention, domestication and industrialization.

In order to fully extract a silk thread for use in textiles, silk moth cocoons must be boiled in order to kill the grub inside before it can hatch and break through the single line of silk it used to create its cocoon. Those moths that are allowed to hatch do so only to breed and shortly die; thousands of years of production-oriented domestication have rendered the moth blind, albino and flightless, with a vestigial mouth that cannot feed. The silk moth cocoon, therefore, contains a multitude of semiotic and biological meanings - both those of extractive violence, biopower and heteropessimism, but also the potential for the breaking of linear logics, the refusal of reproduction, and the embracing of mutation.

‘Shadow Boxes’ are wooden gridded objects that are employed for scientific categorization, division and taxonomical separation in the drawers of archives and museums. Discarded ones are often used by individuals for collecting small memorabilia, appropriating the grid as a subjective and personal mechanism. Mónica has been using these grids to reproduce bombyx mori silk worms, allowing them to hatch and preserving their cocoons intact by covering the boxes with botanical imprints that break with the grid’s structure.