Hueso de culebra (Installation #2)
2021 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
125 x 5 cm
Christian Salablanca
Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming. These family stories had been told to her by the artist’s great-grandfather, who lived in and with the mountain, and thus, natural medicine, the territory and the animals were part of his daily life. (Snake Bone [Installation #2]) is part of an on-going project that addresses ancestral forms of knowledge, natural medicine and myths, especially through the artist’s interest in the figure of the snake, whose image is frequent in ancient writings of occult botany and magical plant manuals, as well as in the mythology of various cultures including those of Southern Costa Rica. Also interested in the Ouroboros –a snake that eats its tail as a symbol of eternal effort–, Salablanca relates this image to the continuous learning experiences that take place in rural and peripheral areas, where education is not always institutionalized and knowledge is transmitted and kept alive orally through generations. The Hueso de culebra project involves a personal quest that allows the recognition and validation of the ways of knowing that come from living and working with natural entities. It is comprised of a series of sculptures that adapt to the location in which they are to be exhibited through the artist’s instructions. The work consists of a snake-shaped sculpture made of charcoal with an “eraser” head and a tail made of blown glass containing medicinal plants according to the location where the work will be exhibited (or collected). The sculpture is displayed after staining or drawing on the base where it sits suggesting the way “other” forms of knowledge affect institutionalized epistemologies.
Costa Rican artist Christian Salablanca Díaz has developed a body of work around the phenomenon and experience of violence and the ways in which it generates, determines, and conditions history, society, and politics. Methodologically, he uses field studies to create affective encounters that have to do with the territories and populations of Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. Salablanca’s interdisciplinary work is a radical consideration on the cultural relations of violent systems: from the human to the animal, from language to symbolic memory and from the centers of power to the periphery. More recently, Salablanca’s artistic processes have been nurtured by myths and narratives that arise from family encounters with atavistic objects and stories. For the artist, it is important to recuperate and reclaim stories from oral tradition that explain, articulate or mediate different forms of symbolic and traditional knowledge: through narration, Salablanca develop installations, sculptures, drawings and performances and speak of processes of cultural vindication. Salablanca holds a degree in Arts and Visual communication with an emphasis on sculpture from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. He has exhibited widely throughout Latin America and Europe and is currently doing a residency at Gasworks, London.
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