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Federico Tejeda: Romper la Inercia curated by Raura Oblitas
Now: Gallery
Av. Conquistadores 780, San Isidro, Lima, Peru.
September 2024
Break Inertia (Federico Tejeda. Lima, 1995) proposes a path of inspection into the critique of consumer society through the persistence of assemblage strategies. From this starting point, Tejeda constructs a sculptural and installation-based ensemble as constructive statements that, together, disrupt the linearity of time in which we understand the social life of objects. Industrial waste, washing machine motors, television casings, and auto parts derive from the gestural nature of collage, materializing in a kind of temporal loop, an anomaly that connects with us only as a loop. Tejeda stretches the formula of assemblage to signal the imagined construction of the corporeal within the ruins of the mechanized world. The body, affected by the rationality of industrial society, is proposed as a ghost scattered within collective cultural identity: vertebrae, spine, and eyes are now only accessory parts to motors in motion, resonant and self-testifying. These reveal—for only fifteen seconds at a time—the emergence of the circular moment, of endless labor, of repetitive activity.
Raura Oblitas Jordan
Sympathy for Objects
The assemblages, formed almost entirely from discarded elements of the construction industry, from the buy-and-sell economies of auto parts or appliances (Centro de Lima, La Victoria, El Agustino), are not merely displayed in the space by Federico Tejeda; rather, they precisely produce it. A series of motors activate, simultaneously granting new life to metal structures salvaged from half-finished constructions, and it is precisely their rhythm (vibrating, impassive, for fifteen seconds every five minutes) that seems to remind us the gallery space has, for a brief time, become that of a factory, filled with background noises and deadlines that are impossible to escape. Yet, if there is something objects do, it is to escape: they are always breaking inertia, by way of chance or accident, breaking free from whatever they are confined to, from the functionality attributed to them.
Thus, Tejeda’s gaze is not that of someone seeking, among the ruins, a piece that might illuminate contemporary historical time (as a denunciation or reflection on our very particular form of capitalism), nor a theory of political salvage (à la Miéville), but rather that of someone who can, through other means, reclaim an awareness of the autonomy of form, interrupting its function. This is why, for instance, a hook used in chemical processes linked to the auto industry, through repeated use, ends up accidentally developing bulbs more akin to a rhizome; or why a car seat, waiting to be restored after an accident, is taken from the auto parts market and today sits, drenched in tar, in an exhibition hall.
Accident or chance, dirty economies and informal growth, the transfers between industrial and domestic spaces (as attested by motors taken from washing machines and references to interior design), but also the personal, minimal, affective decision to choose certain elements over others: a sculpture made with structures taken from televisions, now more like crates used to transport fruit, stacked one atop the other, because televisions remind us of our childhood, of the domestic space once again. In this autonomy, one can rest from obsessive thoughts. Instead of stacking thoughts, we stack television boxes, letting ourselves be to the noise (it can be silenced, it can be interrupted, at least every five minutes). These pieces do not say much, perhaps just a couple of things. But not everything has to be said. It appears in action, like breaking inertia.
Matheus Calderón Torres