"Dust we are, to dust we shall return... and dust we shall collect."
The idea of creating impossible dustpans is as absurd as it is compelling (don’t ask me why…). Perhaps it stems from the impulse to represent the link between the human scale of the everyday life —those tiny remnants we remove one by one, the fragility of what’s left behind— and something robust, solid, and enduring like concrete.
An evocative paradox. Moreover, to produce an apparently useless object —one that cannot be lifted or used for its presumed function— opens, precisely through its practical futility, a doorway to other purposes and destinations: reflection, play, poetry... and so on.
Below, the curatorial-explanatory text for this virtual exhibition (which could very well become a real one... why not? We’ll see...).
A proposal situated between the absurd and the ceremonial, The Brutal Gesture invites us to contemplate what is left over, what falls away, and yet persists. In this interplay between the useless and the permanent, between the minimal gesture and the brutal weight, the work proposes the need for a "brutal gesture" —one that collects not just matter, but also concepts, ideas, and reflections. The dustpan becomes a symbolic container.
The Brutal Gesture emerges from a material and symbolic contradiction: the creation of these artefacts, blocks —impossible dustpans made of concrete, a material typically associated with permanence, solidity, and architecture— designed to contain that which is fragile, volatile, and nearly invisible: dust.
The piece establishes a dialogue between the everyday and the useless, the domestic and the sculptural. What should, in principle, be functional —to gather, clean, eliminate— is here transformed into a deliberately unusable object: anchored to the ground, heavy, immobile. It becomes an object of contemplation: solemn and hypnotic. This deliberate uselessness opens a crack in the literal reading of the object: it becomes a tool for gathering —among other things— existential residue.
That omnipresent substance (dust), which inhabits all spaces and usually goes unnoticed, becomes the protagonist here.
