Facsímil | Facsímil

Residency 1.1 is a program carried out between the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) and the Art Research Institute of the University of Costa Rica (IIArte). It represents an opportunity to establish dialogues between an internationally recognized artist and young Costa Rican creators, aiming for an exchange of experiences and the generation of knowledge.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria (Bogotá, Colombia) appropriates objects, events, and past stories to reconstruct them with new and different configurations. The act of repeating and replicating what already exists but with another meaning is what imbues his work with significance.

In this exhibition, the viewer is confronted with two apparently identical bell jars, though one is merely a copy of the other. By creating a replica, Gaviria invites the viewer to question the dual, parallel reality through the process of reproduction. Instead of undermining the uniqueness or authority of the original, the power lies not in the act of selecting and rarifying an object by placing it in an institutional context to which we find ourselves attracted, but rather in the creation of a dual, parallel reality manifested in the encounter of two facsimiles.

The implication here is that the copy is as original as the original, as both are informed by a collection of experiences and memories that are constantly being rearranged. Similar to a carousel of slides, another work in the exhibition titled “History’s Carousel,” our minds play with reality, and sometimes, clinging to the memory of an event matters more than what was experienced in it, and at some point, they become interchangeable.