Espacios Despellejados 02

Ferrero is particularly drawn to the human body, how its remains bound up with arquitectonic reality and how memories are permeated and materialised in the surfaces of inhabited spaces. In her series “Espacios Despellejados”, she seeks to explore the relationship between body, space and memory, as well as the juxtaposition between inhabited space and the bodies that inhabit it and how every movement that ever left a mark is imprinted permanently, as a wound on our skin, which can heal but never disappear, allowing space to function as a memory map of our bodies: an (auto)biography –a patient mnemonist- who remembers every single action, carrying within it an inevitable human presence. She therefore explores the ways in which inhabited space bears a skin that carries the same marks, prints, scars, moles and memories than that of a body, proposing a hybrid skin between body and space and creating powerful large-scale installations that portray a fragile spatial memory of what once was a solid construction. Once the “skins” are detached, taking the imprint of the space with them, the inherent lines, marks, scars and living proof of said space become apparent, notably fragile, but at the same time monumental, while the metal structures create a clear contraposition, alluding to more solid memories that make us wonder about reality. Using hard and bland surfaces to create mental maps of our memory of space (and of space’s memory of us), the fragility of both space and memory itself are reproduced, rearranging space with ghost-like pieces that float and almost seem to linger between memory and reality itself.

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities