X

All The King's Horses, 2024

Dark chocolate, natural pigments, stainless steel

refrigerators, wrought iron fences, red carpet 

Museo Tamayo, Mexico City​

​

All The King’s Horses is an immersive installation that offers a symbolic dismemberment of the  equestrian statue of Charles IV of Spain by Manuel Tolsá that has pre-sided over Mexico City in various locations and configurations since its completion in 1803. Otherwise known as El Caballito (The Little Horse), the monument is the representation of a sordid colonial history that remains largely unresolved. The king’s omnipotent imperial-idealistic style of portraiture is amplified by the harmonious concurrence of his hand gestures with his warhorse’s raised leg inadvertently stepping on a Mexica arrow quiver. Life-size replicas of the fragmented monument were carefully crafted in chocolate —substituting the original bronze— and caged in industrial refrigerators, undermining the inherent power relations that Tolsá’s work embodies in the context of Mexico. The gates that used to protect the monument back in the 1800’s are replicated in wrought iron and, installed in an open manner, reminisces an open cage from which animals have escaped into freedom. All the King’s Horses imagines a possible future for the artifacts  of a colonial past that continue to haunt the present. Rendered in an edible material that also calls to mind methods of forced labor and colonial extraction, this piece captures these narrative histories within industrial refrigerators atop a theatrical red carpet that foreshadows their eventual consumption and a reckoning with the past. 

​​