The Mexican artist’s new exhibition uses Roman detritus to suggest that we can tell more about a society by what it throws out than the culture it preserves.
In her installation, Roman Rubbish, three towers of stacked ceramics suggest ways that our understanding of the worth and meaning of objects can change. In one, amorphous ceramics have been occasionally burnished with metallic glaze and are stuck through with a hotchpotch of things that can easily fall to the floor, including coins, pins and dice. Another column puts the business of preservation at the centre, carefully recreating pots with breakages and all. The final ceramic work enlarges tiny amulets – “a phallus on one side, a vagina on the other” – as well as toothless combs, suggesting how their significance has grown.

A gauzy curtain connects the works, painted with scripts from the tablets and with further interpretations of artefacts concealed in pockets to make teasing silhouettes: uncertain shadows cast by the elusive past. One clearly recognisable element is old shoe soles; a reminder, perhaps, to consider our own footprint. “Ancient rubbish was sustainable because it’s organic, but our rubbish now is much harder to hide and we produce much more,” reflects Castillo Deball. “The show asks us to think about the present and future relationship we have with objects: what we consider important, what we put in museums and what we throw away.”
Quotes from Skye Sherwin, Life in litter: Mariana Castillo Deball’s Roman Rubbish 

Read full article

The Roman writing tablets have also inspired a monumental installation, a grid of black wax panels covering the gallery’s end wall into which Castillo Deball has inscribed a fantastical image featuring the profile of a Janus-like figure with two heads, a snake and birds eating their own tails alongside other animals and a bull being slain by Mithras. “Everything else in the exhibition is colourful and playful, so I thought it would be interesting to have a very dark work as a backdrop,” she says. “The image is from a drawing I made in 2011 for a project at the Venice Biennale called The Where I Am Is Vanishing, which was about the story of the Codex Borgia, a pre-Colombian pictorial manuscript from central Mexico that ended up in the Vatican Library. Some of the imagery came from the Warburg Institute, where there is a panel of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas that is dedicated to Mithras. One of these images by chance ended up in my drawing. I didn’t know who Mithras was until I started working on the Roman Rubbish exhibition. Returning to this drawing was probably a work of my unconscious, because I already knew that Mithras was there, but I somehow forgot about him.

Read full article