Project: Mythstories
Artist: Carlos Castro Arias
Curator: Gustavo Adolfo Ortiz Serrano
Booth 1162

Myths are constructed to express realities beyond a logical understanding and help us to comprehend concepts that are difficult to explain with ordinary language. Carlos Castro’s work is located precisely where contemporary society faces a mirror but is afraid to open its eyes. Through the ancient medieval technique of tapestry and with the use of an iconography that links the ancient and the contemporary, he conceptually weaves a new understanding of our recent history with the biases of the hyper-communicated, transcultural, hybrid and eager for meaning society. In the midst of complexity, it is necessary to appeal to myth to approach our existence in a symbolic and binding way, a resource that enhances imagination and emotion to assimilate the succession of moments that will become history.

Each of Castro’s tapestries explore the relationship between myth and history; these woven tapestries illustrate contemporary myths by interlacing imagery from medieval tapestries and twenty-first-century news media. Castro’s work is also an invitation to create or recreate our own myths, those that allow us to transcend experience to redefine culture and the social meaning that is implicit in it.