Adriana Kanal
Etnia House of Arts presents “Este metal sabe a sangre” (This Metal Tastes Like Blood) by Adriana Kanal.
This work questions the observer's blindness toward colonial extractivism through a body in constant mutation. Hand-forged with melted tin, these glasses have transformed, through experimentation with the material, into a living creature or monster through which it is possible to see.
The piece functions as a critical prosthesis where decoloniality begins with the hands and traditional crafts: an exercise that traces the artist’s personal journey to decolonize her own gaze, dismantling learned biases, mindsets and perspectives. Built upon its structure, medals and imagery of the imposed Catholic faith appear deconstructed and fragmented, interwoven with a resin that embodies the blood spilled during colonial invasion.
By breaking and rearticulating this iconography, the work reveals the strategy of Indigenous resistance that concealed its own gods and cosmogonies behind the figures of colonial saints, encoding the clandestine survival of ancient knowledge and deities that refused to vanish, and whose struggle against colonialism remains alive in the present.
“La supervivencia clandestina de saberes y deidades milenarias que rehusaron desaparecer.” — Adriana Kanal
This work questions the observer's blindness toward colonial extractivism through a body in constant mutation. Hand-forged with melted tin, these glasses have transformed, through experimentation with the material, into a living creature or monster through which it is possible to see.
The piece functions as a critical prosthesis where decoloniality begins with the hands and traditional crafts: an exercise that traces the artist’s personal journey to decolonize her own gaze, dismantling learned biases, mindsets and perspectives. Built upon its structure, medals and imagery of the imposed Catholic faith appear deconstructed and fragmented, interwoven with a resin that embodies the blood spilled during colonial invasion.
By breaking and rearticulating this iconography, the work reveals the strategy of Indigenous resistance that concealed its own gods and cosmogonies behind the figures of colonial saints, encoding the clandestine survival of ancient knowledge and deities that refused to vanish, and whose struggle against colonialism remains alive in the present.
“La supervivencia clandestina de saberes y deidades milenarias que rehusaron desaparecer.” — Adriana Kanal