After 5 years, Condo Mexico City is back. For this new edition, we are happy to be collaborating with Bureau (NYC), who will present a video work by Lisbon-based artist, Ellie Ga, Quarries, 2022.
In Quarries, Ga’s steady, captivating voice entices viewers to traverse a path composed of seemingly disparate shards of conversations, events and fleeting images which, over the duration of the 40 minutes video, accumulate into a mosaic that links the human hand and its tools with the capacity for resistance.
We follow the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon. The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For the artist’s brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance. An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.