variable dimension installation, 2024
“They are exceptionally successful immigrants,” Rebecca Earle says about potatoes. Because they are local almost everywhere. If we look at the arrival of the first potato in the New World, Spanish invaders went to Peru in search of gold and came back with potatoes. The potato and gold arrived in the New World at the same time. Although both are now very valuable on their own scale, it took and is taking years for the potato to realize this value. Ugly, amorphous, misshapen, dirty and tasteless because it grows underground, for a long time it was not eaten by the nobility. For a time the potato was forbidden by the priest in certain parts of Europe. Nowadays, according to “European standards”, potatoes that are uniform, almost the same size and clean are sold in the main markets in Europe. The rest are labeled as “other”, left in the fields or picked by poor people. It was at this point that I began to look at the relationship between body and form through the body of the potato. And also about the ladder going down to the mines and the potato coming out of the ground and the connection between it and gold and the fact that they both go through the same value… “PA TA TA”
