Some Words
Family
Christian Fuchs
Opening September 14
“We agree that judging another culture solely through the criteria of our own mental framework prevents us from understanding it deeply; we call this ethnocentrism. Yet, we interpret our own past through a lens that has nothing to do with the way of being-in-the-world prior to modernity. We are profoundly ethnocentric towards those who preceded us; we cannot read our past properly, and for this reason, we are unable to understand where we stand.”
Samuel Loncar
1
Family can become torment; what is most cherished is also that which holds unparalleled potential for creating hells.
Our parents, grandparents, siblings—these are the constellation of affections and our ways of relating to the world, and even the tiniest crossed wire can turn into a refined nightmare.
The family labyrinth has a lived, visible part that remains afloat as long as memory does not break, but there is also an unfathomable, submerged part that genealogically extends back into darkness.
Christian Fuchs was unfortunate enough to suffer the worst possible triad in his immediate family: madness, death, and abandonment. Yet, he was also fortunate enough to overcome this thanks to his grandmother, who raised him in a house in Lima filled with portraits and stories of the past.
It was in this amphitheater of ancestors that Fuchs rebuilt his symbolic home, deploying sincere love and an obsessive effort to recover and understand his family history.
Starting from a meticulous study of the characters who preceded him and the investigation of all kinds of files, documents, letters, and portraits, Christian performs a shamanic or performative act around the chosen ancestor.
For months, he reads what they read, eats what they ate, and, as far as possible, seeks to evoke or invoke the ancestor. He then fabricates period clothing and costumes himself as his ancestor, capturing in a portrait a dizzying relationship of contents.
The result is a singular short circuit, saturated with indescribable love, inviting us to meditate on submerged family and to consider what possible meaning those who preceded us hold today.
2
Throughout human history, family and ancestors have been the central axis of our identity; for better or worse, the dead were the lens through which we understood the living.
In modernity, a horizon never before experienced appears: the segmentation of reality into separate spheres (religion, science, work, family, love, sex, leisure), all conceived as the result of our will.
We are constantly forced to decide who or what we want to be, and increasingly, aspects of reality are subject to personal choice.
This signifies a glorious liberation from traditions and the past, replaced by other, more flexible hierarchies. But it comes at the cost of enduring a good dose of existential anxiety—an anxiety that, among many other things, manifests in the contemporary obsession with identity and the way politicians and merchants exploit this anguish.
In this context, Christian Fuchs’s vital solution seems especially unusual and interesting, offering us the opportunity to explore a theme that is, in a way, repressed—something we keep beyond the radar of consciousness.
Alongside Christian Fuchs, we invite you to explore family with us and to participate in a meticulous, passionate exhibition full of paradoxes.
Warm regards,
Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart