description + text

Artist Alejandra González Soca

Title  Virĭdis

Year 2014

Dimensions 300x300x250cm

Installation.  Old wedding dress with various seeds in germination process, planted in stages. The structure has an internal irrigation system with a timer.

A QR Code located in the installation provides access to the photographic memory of the process of construction and transformation of the piece, setting an accessible virtual file from the blog.

Blog: http://proyectoviridis.blogspot.com

Place: National Museum of Visual Arts, Montevideo

Text

The used wedding dress, the sprouting seeds, the flowing water, the museum space and the white cube inserted there are articulated  generate a dialectic game of meanings. 

The new in the past, the fertile and the perishable, the transitory preserved as a presence in a foreign territory, aspiring to the recrystallization  of consensual symbolic meanings and eventually opening to understanding processes that transcend previous readings.

This acephalous and silente bride, meets a stubborn and inevitable cycle as the alienated girlfriend in the “Ariel” of Rodó (1919:26) “…whose strange an touching madness consisted in thinking every day arrived the day of her marriage. The toy of her dream, every morning she bound to her pale forehead the nuptial crown and hung from her head the nuptial veil. With a sweet smile she then prepared to receive an imaginary bridegroom, all through the day to the shadows of the night, which put an end to the vain hope, and brought again disillusion to the heart.  Then first her madness took a tint of melancholy; but her ingenuous trust  reappeared with each aurora, and with no memory of the disenchantment of the evening, murmuring, “It´s today that he comes”, she turned again to bind herself with the nuptial veil an crown, smiling once more with the hope promised one. It is thus, not as with the loss of an ideal that has died, that humanity clothes itself each era with its nuptial dress an expects  with renewed faith the realization of the dreamed ideal a persistent but touching folly…. When one tries to suppress that sublime stubbornness of hope which is born all winged from the very breast of delusion, all pessimisms are in vain.” 

virĭdis (latin) _ green, vigorous, active, young