Artist: Perla Zuñiga
Exhibition title: Cucú
Venue: Cordova, Barcelona, Spain
Date: December 2, 2023 – February 10, 2024
Photography: Roberto Ruiz, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Cordova
I feel as if this sheet of paper is a window, and in its time, this window was a very deep hole. Before that, it was a mollusk skeleton or a cave made out of ribs, or maybe even a glass pipe.
The best way I have found to begin to give form to this window is through writing. Writing a letter, to you.
Before Mariano left, we had a beautiful conversation in bed.
For the first time, he spoke to me, full of wonder and enthusiasm, about how beautiful our relationship had been and how it continues to be. A story full of circles and spirals, of trains that move past, of intravenous tubes and supports, of both constant and fleeting memories.
We met through his book. An object. This book accompanied me during the first year of Chemotherapy.
Poetry.
I was 18 years old, suffering from cancer and longing to see, wanted to experiment and feel life exactly how he had described it. I wanted to live, and this book calmed my desire. It provided me with that which I couldn’t have. Magic.
Years later, my first exhibition was born out of a poem from this book. Thanks to this exhibition, I met Mariano in person, and we fell in love. Circle.
Possessed by an energy that moves worlds, we turned our lives upside down to be together. After a year of living with one another, I got sick again. I suffered what they call a relapse. I tripped over the same stone. Not once, but twice, like what happened throughout the history of humanity. The difference is that this time, we were together.
Although it had been me who reflected on these coincidences during our time living together, it was Mariano who, on our last day together in our ‘casita’ in Carabanchel, said them out loud as we cuddled in bed.
Circle, magic and poetry ——— Hole
I remember that one day in a therapy session, I spoke about circles and spirals. I felt that with the relapse I was again entering into a spiral, one that I hadn’t yet come out of. My therapist, during the relapse, had understood it to be a new circle, with a beginning and an end. Something different. Not a spiral. If I am honest I never quite believed her.
Cucú is precisely about that, about transforming architecture. Holes in windows. Finding a way of feeling illuminated without the need for light. To recognize the energy that moves the world, that energy, that which is the only way to live, that it is a survival instinct. To love objects because they are magical and they have powers. And that sometimes we see a circle and sometimes a spiral. And that it´s ok.
