🌎 ESPAÑOL // ENGLISH
Three Blows (2018)
Artists:
Javier Barrios and Joaquín Segura
Three Blows is the result of a collaborative process between artists Javier Barrios (Guadalajara, 1989) and Joaquín Segura (Mexico City, 1980), carried out ex profeso for Fundación CALOSA. The artists were invited to develop a project based on one of the works that make up the CALOSA Collection: Anvil (2015), by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966). The sculpture is composed of a recovered object that belonged to a family of Mexican silversmiths who produced military insignia during the Second World War. “While you are an anvil, endure; when you are a hammer, strike,” reads the commemorative plaque on the pedestal that supports it.
Blow: Emblems
Laurel leaves, wheat stalks, and oat clusters adorn the insignia of heroes and the defeated. Anvils and hammers stand as symbols of labor force and relations of production. Barrios and Segura propose a distinctive iconography that denounces the intransigence of the labor structure, where the foundations are confined to their condition of the oppressed and will likely never come to strike.
Blow: Balance
On September 1, 1965, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz delivered his first state of the nation address as President of the Republic. The former president guaranteed food supply and prosperity for Mexicans through the regulation of the basic food basket prices. This justified the actions of the National Company for Popular Subsistence (CONASUPO), through which a storage network was established by building more than 3,000 warehouses across 21 states in the country. These warehouses were constructed by local workers who would receive their wages in CONASUPO credits.
By 1971, only 15% of the so-called “people’s granaries” remained in operation, and none functioned properly. The discourse of well-being weakened in the face of the cost-benefit reality of these white elephants. CONASUPO ultimately disappeared in 1999, leaving behind these abandoned brutalist volumes as its legacy.
Blow: Consumption
Most of the materials that make up the exhibition are evidence of processes of wear caused either by disuse and abandonment or by labor and occupation. Forgotten railway tracks and decommissioned coins have been stripped of their function and left to their fate. Hammers worn down by construction and paraffin exposed to high temperatures reclaim their histories through the traces of their decay.
Press
Javier Barrios and Joaquin Segura - Artguide/Artforum
Tres Golpes - Excelsior
Tres Golpes - Terremoto
Abre la exposición Tres Golpes - Eslocotidiano
Tres Golpes - Fundación CALOSA