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Memorias de fuego
 

The series is made up of ceramic ballistic plates that, even in their raw state, were shot with weapons of various calibers. The process—captured on video and in photographs—is exhibited in installations alongside the resulting pieces, creating a dialogue between action, documentation, and object.

This is another way of drawing: a monument to the tragic. A drawing projected into an expanded field of material and symbolic possibilities. Here, the pencil becomes a gun, and the canvas is a fragment of raw clay, whose thickness and earthy tones evoke human skin. The clay, by its nature, converses with the pre-Columbian ancestral tradition, while simultaneously engaging with the Western worldview of creation: humankind formed from earth and destined to become just this—“dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Shooting from the irrational is to embody the aggressor, the murderer; it places one outside ethical, moral, or judicial frameworks. A gesture that treads the boundary between violence and creation.

9mm shot
Bullet impacts on raw clay plates, action carried out at the Bicentennial shooting range, photographic record of the process, and results displayed in the lobby of the L. Poma Theater, as part of the ANTIPERSONA exhibition, 2018


M16 Shot

Bullet impacts on raw clay plates, action carried out at the Salvadoran military artillery range, photographic record of the process, and results displayed in the lobby of the L. Poma Theater, as part of the ANTIPERSONA exhibition, 2018

 

(Details)

Ballistic ceramic plates, and at the bottom left a bas-relief engraving of a 38 mm revolver, made of burnt clay, presented in the Lobby of the L. Poma Theater, as part of the ANTIPERSONA exhibition, 2018

 

Video screening of Memories of Fire in the CCE hall, El Salvador, as part of the exhibition MARTIRIO, 2020

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References

"Destruction as a creative passion," to paraphrase Bakunin, becomes a conceptual axis here. The influence of Ai Weiwei also resonates in his radical gestures, such as the act of breaking ceramics, where the irreparable takes on poetic and political meaning.

 

Unlike Chris Burden's famous performance—in which he shot himself in the arm—this time it is the artist who wields the weapon and executes the gesture. No one is harmed in the process: the symbolic violence is inscribed solely on the material. Clay, also present in "My Hands Are My Heart" by artist Gabriel Orozco, constitutes another metaphor for what, in "Memories of Fire," turns out to be a different organ: the skin.

 

In this way, I also build a bridge with the Salvadoran literature and thought of Roque Dalton and Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose aesthetics—saturated with irony and cynicism—illuminate a critical reading of the present.

Contact Vladimir Renderos Castillo

VLADIMIR RENDEROS

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