XIMENA ZOMOSA
Mona Hatoum’s grater and the apron by Ximena Zomosa quickly bond in an intimate, feminine dialog. They know each other ‘from the kitchen’. They are connected with the intimacy of the house rituals of cleaning and cooking, taking out and putting away objects, the light bulb in the pantry, order on the shelves and evenly arranged plates (Therrien?). The unchanging rhythm, fixed hours of preparing, serving and washing up, the absolute repetition of clothes, sounds, smells, and gestures would give the impression of being tantric if it were not for their uselessness in deepening spiritual consciousness. Mechanization and routine dehumanize, Robert Therrien’s neatly stacked dishes speak to the scale of production and consumption brought to one role, a mass devoid of reflection. There’s no room for an individual in that industrial view of society, and an individual is without meaning in the fight for survival. Man, that does not sound proud in Therrien’s works. If we were looking from a different planet to get to know the contemporary homo sapiens through the installation of this artist we would understand it to a schizophrenic, shortsighted, compulsive and what is worse, not a very intelligent being, the cognitive effort of which is focused only on increasing the production of what the being can eat. Seemingly close to Therrien, Zomoza sews aprons for giant nannies. A kitchen also appears here, rescaled too but the sense however is very different. House help in South America is a basic pillar of the family, a very important figure in many middle class and higher class households. There are millions of them. Women from the suburbs, without an education, often the daughters of teenage mothers, single mothers and grandmothers under forty. It is not uncommon that they know more about each of the family members where they work than the family members know about themselves. For the children of wealthy families they are a stand-in for the absent mothers. They sing lullabies, they listen, wipe away tears. Sometimes they are discriminated against and humiliated due to the color of their skin or simply for having different habits. They are not aware of their rights convinced as they are by the experience of previous generations, that justice is for the rich. The tow aprons – patterned and white, correspond to two models imposed on women, related to housework and virginity. The uniforms are cut according to a pattern that has existed for generations, which does not leave open the possibility for the slightest variation, interpretation, change or admittance of personal character. The negation of the right to be an individual is done only on the level of external appearance and the outfit normalized to an extreme is a visual symbol of that phenomenon. The five meter apron by Ximena Zomoza is a monument of a woman living with the life of another, stranger family so that her own family would be able to eat. In the operation of rescaling the Chilean artist sees a way of speaking about the phenomena which until recently was a taboo not only in her society. “A Nanny’s or house help’s apron is a part of clothing which changes the person who wears it and makes her invisible. By enlarging them something strange happens: you are augmenting something that should not be disclosed.”39 39
Uniforme de nana gigante da la vuelta al mundo y vuelve a Chile, Jasmin Lolas E., interview with Ximena Zomoza in the newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias, Santiago de Chile, 30 May 2015.
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