Guadalupe Salgado (1991) crafts her work as a direct response to her fascination with the human condition. The softness in textile language allows her to dislocate beliefs into tactile metaphors that highlight the absurd while straining the boundaries between the sacred and the common, the visible and the repressed. In a conceptual exercise that fuses humor, critique, and the poetics of ruin, her works function as visual annotations of the false standards and shared fragility that characterize us as a species.
Why do humans do what they do and how do they live with the consequences of their actions? How many lies can we hold to sustain a belief? What's the point of constantly searching for meaning? Are we more than the sum of our contradictions? Why do we find it so difficult to bear the weight of our own freedom? Who owns what isn't ours? At what point did we decide that the intangible was less important? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Generating a kind of archaeological artifact for the future, Guadalupe reveals the allegorical mechanisms that shape our contradictions and the emotional and social survival strategies that allow us to sustain them.
Her artistic exploration originates in photography, where she began documenting everyday scenes that allowed her to develop a sensitive eye for image composition as a narrative tool. This visual and spatial logic has expanded into her work with textiles, understood as an extension of drawing: flexible lines that are sustained, folded, and unfolded in space. This sensitivity is materialized in sculptural installations that articulate a contrast between rigid structures—made from scraps of wood, metal, and found objects—with the softness of textile pieces crafted using techniques such as tufting and needle felting to create stuffed animals and other forms of domesticated tenderness. The encounter between these materials constructs a tactile language where the sculptural composition refers to urban signage where tenderness becomes a symbolic code in the face of the brutality of contemporary life.
In the recording of everyday historical events, Guadalupe's work constructs transitory territories from which she rethinks history as a temporal collapse that enables new ways of narrating the present. In her practice, ruin is understood as a trigger—not as an end, but as a beginning—to explore the decline of humanity and its emotional architectures. Through a Frankensteinian methodology, her pieces emerge from the assembly of materials that strain the boundary between reality and representation, allowing us to observe from a distance an era marked by the loss of the sacred, social exhaustion, and the neglect of rituals. In this context, her work becomes a palimpsest that denounces the fragility of our structures and demonstrates, with critical subtlety, that without ruin, there is no glory.
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