"The first puzzles were born in England and were initially used as an educational tool to teach children political geography. The territory depicted in these puzzles has been changing ever since. Surely most of those wood cutouts have undergone all sorts of displacements and today would no longer fit correctly. The works collected in the "Territory" project propose an alternative distribution, a subjective reconstruction, but with a randomness similar to that observed in the course of events on the territory and its inhabitants. This reconstruction proposes a new scenario, a new vision of the world. Some of the maps used in "Territory" tell, from their lack of operability, from their obsolete condition, the story of a world in continuous kinetics. Behind the color codes and lines are the anonymous inhabitants of these physical spaces or those displaced during these processes. A representation that by its very condition is nothing more than a still image of history, as faithful as it is ephemeral. The maps, turned, randomly ordered, folded in on themselves, show us another scenography, equally provoked and in continuous transition. These operations on the objects show us their progression towards obsolescence as physical objects, metamorphosing into fragments or useless remnants of the past. These territories fold in on themselves and, as objects, have the possibility of changing format depending on whether they are folded or unfolded for viewing, also playing at being territory, mark, limit. In many cases, these are objects rescued from oblivion, full of "wounds" caused by time, by contact with our hands, with our places and objects, lines and traces that finally articulate themselves as still lifes, involuntary vanitas that return the real image of their fleeting destiny and the impossibility of escape from this end. Creating different maps, different territories, and varying their final disposition before the viewer proposes a divergent narrative from the one inherent to these creations, the merely informative one. What is written is altered like a collage that decontextualizes images to generate a new narrative. These associations deliberately eschew concreteness, consciously hiding their power of representation. The exchange between what should be shown through its concealment and the narrative of the same object on its reverse side operate by articulating a broken narrative, an interference in the proposed discourse. These new limitations on the territory, and these resulting new landscapes, propose a broader reflection, without offering answers, merely improving some of the answers. New maps that, like their original referents, are also simple lines drawn on paper." -Suso Fandiño
Suso Fandiño's artistic practice is distinguished by a sustained critical gaze towards the mechanisms of art itself and its capacity to construct narrative. His work is not limited to the production of objects but constantly interrogates the systems of representation, legitimation, and circulation of images in the contemporary context.This critical stance is articulated, firstly, through a conscious relationship with the reproduced image, which the artist extracts from its original context to reinsert it into new formal configurations. Secondly, his ability to integrate object, image, and text into compositions that function as open reading devices, where materiality and discourse are simultaneously activated, is noteworthy. Finally, his work is supported by a solid theoretical and historical foundation that allows him to address complex issues with a contained, clear, and accessible formalization, without sacrificing conceptual depth.
