Federico Arnaud
Uruguay, 1970
Visual artist, curator and art professor. In 1991, Federico began to research through volume and space. He creates sculptures, objects, installations, videos and performances. His works address issues such as identity, personal and collective memory, colonial heritage and the sacred space in contemporary art. Federico teaches in his studio and, since 2017, at the Catholic University of Uruguay. In 1995 he made his first solo exhibition, having made 13 solo exhibitions since then. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, Mexico and China. He was part of Uruguay’s entry in the second and tenth Mercosur Biennial of visual arts In 2020, he produced ECCE HOMO, an anthological exhibition that covers his first twenty-five years of artistic production. His works are in public and private collections in Uruguay, Brazil, France and China.
About the work
El diccionario y la tapera
Silkscreen on canvas and wall
This ruin is intervened with serigraphy on canvas based on reproductions of illustrations of three continents — America, Africa and Europe — taken from an old dictionary. The goal is to map the links between culture and nature; especially from the 17th Century when the market economy expanded and changed centuries-old gastronomic cultures and antagonistic modes of production. In the process that evolved from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, nothing remained virgin, everything is hybrid and interchangeable at the cost of human and natural exploitation. The tapera (ruin) represents in our country the symbol of the emigration of rural laborers to populated urban centers. The intervention works as a trigger to rethink the colonial process as an overbearing force of environmental and human transformation as a consequence of the changes in the modes of production and socialization.