All The King's Horses, 2024

dark chocolate, natural pigments,

stainless steel refrigerators, wrought

iron fences, red carpet 

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Andrea Ferrero’s installation, commisioned for Otrxs Mundxs at Museo Tamayo, 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. Ferrero’s life-sized replica of the original has substituted bronze for chocolate, undermining the inherent power relations that Tolsá’s work embodies in the context of Mexico. All the King’s Horses imagines a posible 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, Ferrero’s work captures these narrative histories within industrial refrigerators atop a theatrical red carpet that foreshadows their eventual consumption and a reckoning with the past.

 

Text by Aram Moshayedi