Christian Albarracín

The exhibition Poder Volver is an invitation to bring the universe of play and childhood closer to the experiences we lived in childhood and that in adulthood we lose and long to remember. Why rob these innocent creatures of the joys that pass so quickly? This question that Rousseau asks about the education of children refers to the process through which society insists on preventing the future adult from being a slave to bad habits or from becoming corrupt. From this idea emerges the reflection on the stage of childhood, which is often limited by the rules of behavior in society and the impositions of development models on the human being.

In Albarracín’s first solo exhibition, the question of childhood is based on the representation of corporealities and eventualities that interact through play and toys, from the symbolism that constitutes a place of representation of childhood. Where memory does not reach, strategies are proposed to remember, to incorporate ourselves in our own history, to think about that stage of life in which our perception and relationship with the world is configured from freedom. More than a collection of children’s bodies and toys, they are small fragments of personal and intimate memories that return with joy and play, but also with nostalgia and longing, with ruptures and losses.

The theme of childhood and play is part of the series Sujetos de ciudad, which is inspired by diverse presences and situations in the public space, where the artist, based on the photographs he takes and finds in social networks, subtracts the forms and people from the urban contexts that contain them, in order to give them back their corporeality through sculpture. This is how she develops a work that, from the work by layers of paper, forms bodily geographies. A methodical and precise exercise that leads to manifestations of objects and bodies, generating places inhabited by presences and with which the public can coexist.