Ximena Narea: The door

WORK IN PROGRESS

ximena@narea.se

CONCEPT

Throughout our lives we encounter different kinds of borders or limits without reflecting much about them. We learn to accept them as a “fact”, something that exists and to be assumed.

These borders or limits are expressed in objects like walls, doors and locks. Furthermore, we use these objects that we had created as metaphors for different kinds of barriers in our mind. Or, it could be the opposite; we have experienced and conceptualized barriers and translated them into objects that we use in our everyday life.

In my work “The Door” I focus on two aspects of borders: 1. The issue of the inside and outside of a certain space, and; 2. The skin as our physical border to the outside world.

1. Doors are normally openings of walls; they don’t exist by their own but they prevent or allow us to cross a wall. They have two sides, one side faces the inside and the other side faces the outside. In my work I put the door in the middle of my garden (it could stand in the middle of anywhere). No walls or anything that could indicate an inside or outside.

The independent position of the door makes us reflect about borders and why we close spaces for some people. What is it that we want to prevent others to perceive and for what reasons?

2. The first limit to the outside world is our skin, but at the same time it is a kind of door because the skin allows us to “feel” what is outside our body; the skin is our door to the outside world. For blind people the skin, particularly the skin of their hands is the main contact with the outside world.

On both sides of the door I painted a silhouette, two borders of two bodies: the body of a young man and the body of a young woman. These silhouettes cut the green that surrounds them and at the same time they can be perceived as part of the world outside.