HUÉSPED
MATIAS ARMENDARIS
Curated by ASMA
"It lengthens in the meadow a leisurely
Shadow, but the fact of naming it
And to conjecture its circumstance
makes it a fiction of the arts and not a living
Creature of those who walk the earth."
-Jorge Luis Borges
huésped (host) :
The invisible body is present,
its armor as a mirror
absorbs our image.
It integrates us all together
and it makes us a single beast.
gobbled it digests us slowly,
and together we become him.
‘huésped’ (host) solo exhibition by the artist Matias Armendaris (Quito, 1990) curated by ASMA, presents an immersive installation that transforms the space into something alive that has a body and receives us inside of it.
[I have always been a living being within another living being. I can not run away.]
The word ‘huésped’ in spanish holds both the meaning of the word ‘host’ and the words ‘guest’ depending on its context. ‘Huésped’ (guest) is someone who stays in a space or house of another person, the guest of a host. However, in biology, ‘huésped’ (host) is any organism that shelters another inside it or that carries it on itself, either in a symbiosis of parasitism, commensalism or mutualism.
'huésped' (host) does not reveal its meaning, it contains the jewel of its mystery. A matrix that becomes an index of possible points of recognition or unknowing. A living object which can be activated in ritual and which in turn a coded document filled with information. alluding to a hidden meaning that puts into dialogue the relationship of desire that is built with the unknown objects of ancestral cultures.
The real world touches us all, we inhabit it collectively and it is home to all other private and shared worlds. Each different version of the world is connected by this greater world, this reality that as a chain brings together all other worlds into a constellation of multiple realities.
'huésped' (host) is the result of the agency of transformation that we possess by generating these intimate languages and our own worlds, and speaks of the power of these spaces over our psyche and reality.