Nury Gonzalez is the director of Chile’s Museo de Arte Popular Americano (MPOA). Gonzalez has been working hard to expand its collection of latin American handcrafted artefacts.
The Forgotten Fabric was a collaborative based artwork between Gonzalez and Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios. Arsanios sent Gonzalez four curtain panels that had been removed by the artist from the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Beirut, a building standing as a living reminder of the civil war that lasted fifteen years. Gonzalez submerged the curtain panels in the ocean in south Chile for seven days as part of a ritual to cleanse the fabric from the gruesome acts that they had witnessed and the stories that they told.
The artwork comprises of both video work and images documenting the processes that Gonzalez went through to cleanse the fabric and to clean them from the horrific atrocities they had once witnessed.
For me the sheer simplicity is what draws me to Gonzales’ work the minimalistic style but the great amount of thought and detail that goes into every decision she makes when producing an artwork. The thoughts of what the objects have been though and how they can be improved, cleansed and reused to show that good can come from bad.