Intuitions
Intuitions is an experimentation process. Experimentation making your intuitions concrete, confronting intuitions with reality. After a first experience with imprinted ceramics, I wondered whether basketry could be used as moulds for other materials as it had served for indigenous pottery. I wanted to keep the trace of the work of the artisan who made the baskets as a testimony of the specific know-how of the Comechingones indigenous culture that fights against its disappearance.
I used blown glass because its transparency and fragility seem appropriate to convey an idea of the fragility in which some indigenous cultures whose knowledge is dying with its oldest members. This is the case of basket making in Copacabana (Córdoba, Argentina). Don Julio Quinteros, a 84 year old basket maker, is the only one who has the ability to make baskets with the finest and most difficult points, the only one able to make basketwork in very high quality.
Blowing conveys the idea of breath, which by metaphor is associated with life “the word designates the force of inspiration, the creative energy and the immaterial influence of the force which animates , inspires; hence its used as a sign of life" (Alain Rey). The blowing of glass therefore metaphorically represents a desire to give a breath to this culture, to help it live.
Blowing is a way of making solid something intangible, here the cultural heritage of the ethnic group in question. This idea of giving life by breath is also found in the work Giuseppe Penone (1978). In fact, he seeks by this work to make visible the breath that is exhaled. "Recalling the ancient biblical myth of Creation where the breath of Yahweh is the giver of life, as also the Greek myth of Prometheus and Athena, where the breath of divinity animates inert matter, the artist is the one who gives life To matter, infusing it with anima.” (LEONI-FIGINI, Margherita about Penone’s work)
