Aaru, 2024
Ceramic, wood, high-density foam, brass, textile, korean painting
110 x 45 x 120 cm
Ulises, the Homeric hero who emerged victorious from the Trojan War—whose audacity led him to conceive of a hollow wooden horse to infiltrate enemy territory, and whose return to Ithaca is riddled with challenges he overcomes through courage and cleverness—is transformed by Raquel Algaba into a fragile puppet. Algaba’s jointed-limbed Ulises moves at the mercy of the winds. It is doubtful whether he will ever reach his home. Fragments of his frail body are left scattered along the way. He is a castaway of himself, stumbling over too many obstacles in the stormy sea that churns within the pit of his stomach.
In Aaru, our jointed Ulises is nurtured by a maternal figure symbolizing the power of the lotus. Seated on the lap of this oversized character, bewitched by the lotus flower, the small hero appears tiny and helpless, as if he had returned to infancy. The lotophagous figure, with ceramic skin tattooed with lotus leaves, covers its ears with a kind of earmuff that vaguely recalls certain pre-Columbian terracotta figurines. In fact, cultural syncretism is a constant in Algaba’s imagery, seamlessly blending subtle references—sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual—to Japanese, Korean, Greek, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian mythologies. In this piece, the latter is evoked by two masks resembling the heads of Lamassus(protective beings from Assyrian mythology), which guard the island of the lotophagous. The title itself, Aaru, refers to the Egyptian paradise, a place only reached by souls that weighed less than the feather of Maat. Algaba reimagines this field of reeds—the fertile wetland of eternal happiness—as a marsh of psychoactive lotuses.
Aaru was a kind of blessed isle, comparable to the Greek Elysian Fields. By naming the island of the lotophagous after it, Algaba imbues concepts such as happiness, time, and forgetfulness with a sense of ambivalence. Without attempting to appropriate specific iconographic motifs, Algaba succeeds in evoking in us a sense of familiarity with legends from distant cultures. As we wander among her mysterious ceramic figures set atop minimalist stages, we feel like psychic archaeologists, trying to piece together the remnants found along the banks of the rivers that gave rise to human civilization. As if these ceramic relics might offer us clues to once again understand one another in an Edenic language, preceding the Babelian collapse. For silence becomes tangible when we approach these closed-eyelid effigies—a silence like that of a sacred space, where the power of words is suspended.
Anna Adell
Solo Show "En silencio se alzaron lotos"
C3A Andalusian Center for Contemporary Creation, Córdoba, 2025
