Calabazas / Gourds 1992. Gourds, polyurethane foam, wood, glue.

CALABAZAS AT GALERIA SALA ALTERNATIVA

Botuto Guarura / Calabazas. Sala Alternativa, Caracas, Venezuela

“ Cardoso continued her investigation into the cultural significance of natural elements in a series called Colombian Materials. In a return to her method of placing preserved animals in positions and arrangements in which order and repetition predominate, Cardoso made a sculptural installation entitled The Amazon (1992), comprised of numerous desiccated piranhas mounted on stands, which face in the same direction as if swimming in unison. Upon their pedestals they are simultaneously magnificent and threatening and yet also inert tourist souvenirs, embodying all the clichéd cultural assumptions about these fish, once menacing natural wonder now industrially farmed. Flag (1992) addressed the issue of nationhood, identity, and the produce originating from the land simply by imitating the form of a flag in the distinctive pink-striped, handmade guava sweets typical of Colombia. An aesthetic of organic minimalism and hand-manufactured readymade meets with an evocation of the consumption of identity, the basis of modernity and of the end of colonialism in the era and politics of the nation-state. Cultural specificity, distinctiveness, and localism are foregrounded over the mass-produced, branded and imported. Gourds is a
series of sculptures that assemble the near spherical, egg-like, and biomorphic shapes of gourds into chains, columns, and clusters like cells dividing. The materials however, also have a popular and folkloric connotation derived from Colombian culture “.

Roca, Jose y Martin, Alejandro.
Animalario de Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
(Bogotá: Seguros Bolívar, 2013), 19.