Damaged Goods (Cabbage-Damage)

  • Ariadna Garcia Chas (Spain)

    Organized by ACSL
    Partner organization: ‘Art Laboratory’ art collective

    ‘Art Laboratory’ Space, Yerevan, Armenia
    November-December, 2015

During her stay at the ‘Art Commune’ International AIR Program (ACSL) in Yerevan, Ariadna Garcia Chas initiated a project which has an intention of deconstructing cultural stereotypes. The artist focused on the fact that not only in Armenia, but in any other country the ‘innocent’ figurativeness of traditional representation of national identities and its content interpretation through ‘pleasant discourses’ cover up the Reality. The first stage of the artist’s Armenian research (the project will be continued in Spring 2016) was directed towards traditional painting, where, starting from the early Soviet years, the depiction of Armenia through a mainly innocent rural landscape has prevailed: the village is peaceful with its mountains, pomegranates, grapes, and the Mount Ararat, whereas the city is absent, the Orientalist landscape is lazy, and urban, political criticism is marginal (if ‘marginal’ is used in negative sense). This status quo is still controlled by the authorities in their representation of the country in a time when the political system is taking the country deeper down. Ariadna Chas offered a new ‘vegetable’ stereotype – the ‘Sis and Masis’ (Mount Ararat) made of cabbages – in order to destroy it.

Ariadna Garcia Chas has graduated from Instituto Internacional, Madrid and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in ‘Audio-visual communication’ (2007-2011). She has also studied Art History at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (2009-2014). In addition, she has received Master’s degrees from Universidade da Vigo (‘Art direction’) and Istituto Europeo di Design (‘Scenography’).