All My Life I’ve Been Afraid Of Power

Featuring Andrea Ferrero

August 30th- October 7th 2023

Swivel Gallery is thrilled to announce the solo exhibition of Andrea Ferrero, All My Life I’ve Been Afraid of Power. This immersive installation project marks Ferrero's debut in New York and offers a cunning examination of  the dynamics of collective colonial domination and exploitation that reflects, historically and currently, the global trade of cacao and sugar, as a metaphor for troubling symbols of power and deep-rooted societal behaviors. 

Starting in the fifteenth century, operatic spectacles staged around food and feasting typically represented aggressive displays of political power and resources in European courts, and have since continued into contemporary bourgeois society, where opulent banquets were hosted to show off the abundance of precious new exotic food and rare products extracted from economies of newly controlled colonies. These demonstrations of decadence enacted power strategies similar to the imposition of western-inspired monuments used as marks of dominance and cultural superiority, which in Latin America, as in other territories, most often resulted in a purposeful erasure of the native traditions and symbologies. 

These reflections on history are the starting point for Ferrero’s research, which revolves around the idea of food as a spectacle in relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics, adopting eating rituals to expose persisting dynamics of power and exploitation through humor and fiction. All My Life I’ve Been Afraid of Power dominates the gallery space with eight massive Doric columns flanked by ornamental lions. Although they appear at first glance as solid pink marble, each work is made entirely of white chocolate, melted and casted by the artist, and meant to be consumed and decimated. The construction, arranged in an orderly composition, recalls the timeless monumentality of ancient Greek and Roman temples, inevitably destined for ruin. Similarly, these edible facsimiles are designated to turn into ruins in a social experiment that invites the viewers to participate actively in their destruction, consumption, and digestion, in an effort to collectively metabolize rooted legacies of colonialism. Once a ritualistic and sacral ingredient in Mesoamerican culture, the chocolate is purposely transformed once again into a new commodity for rituals of luxury consumption. Lurking between decay and growth, the installation unveils how in architecture and ceremony alike, excessive opulence became a display of political control and power play. 

Ferrero intentionally confronts these persistent manifestations of colonial ideology in Latin America with her ephemeral chocolate bacchanalia, thus orchestrating a canny re-enactment of history while playing with notions of counter-memory and counter-history. The architectural grandeur of these relics is revealed by the artist as a romanticized, vulnerable, and malleable copy–generated with an industrial silicon mold and therefore subject to time, human greed, and the desire of power. In this sense, the artist’s invitation for the audience to participate and progressively destroy this temple, taking pieces for ourselves, becomes a social experiment that urges us to consider our individual capacity to reenact these mechanisms of power and exploitation in our daily behavior. How far will we take our own greed, with our gluttony and desire of possession? In staging this fictional reality, Ferrero playfully encourages new ways in which we can challenge, reappropriate, and resignify these symbols.

Andrea Ferrero (b. 1985, Lima, Peru) lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, where she creates works which critically consider iconographies of power and our relationship with them. Her ouvre intends to challenge the way in which ideas of power have been inserted into built space and embedded into collective consciousness, reflecting on dominant political ideologies and fantasizing with fictional scenarios and alternate narratives to official histories. Using archival material, imprints, molds, and digital processes such as photogrammetry and 3d models, her work unfolds in sculpture pieces, installations, instagram filters, and digital experiences. Recently, she has focused on researching food as spectacle, eating rituals as stagings of power, and their relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics. In this, she seeks to challenge colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction, creating edible pieces that focus on the process of eating, digesting, metabolizing and excreting. Ferrero holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.