PART OF THE TEXT " ALICE - VILLE " by BELEN GACHE
catalogue MACRO -

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO ROSARIO - 2005
Alicia Herrero

…A VANISHING EMPIRE
In chapter V of Through the Looking Glass, Alice suddenly finds herself in a shop. Just like that, the Queen has become a sheep who attends the place while knitting a wool garment with fourteen knitting needles at a time.
What do you want to buy? – the sheep asks Alice. Alice looks at the shelves, full of all kinds of curious things, but the strangest thing of all is that every time she tries to fix her gaze on a particular shelf, that shelf in particular seems to be empty. In vain, she tries to decipher what the shiny object is that is on the shelf right above the one she is looking at, which seems to be a doll at times and a toolbox at others.
In the video Imperio (Empire), a still image seems to construct and deconstruct itself before our eyes, always vague and diffuse. Just as in a Rorschach test, we take pains in the attempt to reinstate its contours, imagining its forms. With a bit of luck, we realize that it is a photograph of a set of Empire porcelain, taken from a Christie’s catalog.

THE KEYHOLE AND THE MIRROR
As Martin Gardner points out in his famous text Annotated Alice, a meticulous study of Lewis Carroll’s work, secret rooms and doors were common themes in the Victorian era. Houses were built with hidden spaces and passageways and the fantasy of looking through the keyhole was commonplace, as evidenced by the romantic novels of the era. The space where the video Imperio is projected yields a surprise: there we discover a connected secret room where a ceramics studio has been set up.
The action of spying through hole in the wall maintains strong similarities with looking into a mirror: in both cases a space opens up before us. In both cases we are confronted with the fantasy of passing through to the other side. The wall and the mirror are not constituted as limits, but rather as passageways between a here and a there, between one logic and another.
The immateriality of the video image is juxtaposed with the materiality of the ceramicist’s real body. Empire porcelain, fetishized as sumptuous objects in auction houses, here is turned into evidence of production conditions, hand crafting, into work...