Manuela Ribadeneira – dpm gallery
  
   “Change is around the corner”

Political and poetic at the same time, the work of Manuela Ribadeneira is articulated through a pronounced use of the objectual. Each one of her pieces constitutes a long and contemplative journey which has as its source certain fundamental ideas on the concepts on territory, identity and history, and that converge to create distinct and seemingly intact formalizations. Yet rather than restricting the possible interpretations, this calculated physical expression that is inherent in her work, gives rise to multiple and unexpected interpretations, endowing the spectator with the responsibility of constructing the meanings from an unavoidably subjective perspective.

What we find at the start of her investigations is her country of origin, Ecuador, a place in which the idea of geographic convention has acquired values that are heavily symbolic. This, however, merely constitutes a starting point from which to analyse the profound consequences that the notion of territory and belonging have exerted on the course of history, and above all on the construction of identities.

Resident first in Paris, and then London from the year 2002, Ribadeneira’s biography is central to her artistic practice. Her condition as a Latin American artist and the cultural specificity that that implies has prompted a profound reaction against certain stereotypes associated with the ways and channels of everyday production in those latitudes. In recent years her work has renounced expressive excesses or formalist rhetoric, without however entirely eschewing certain notions of refinement, to continue speaking about the intense relations between language, power and culture.

Juan de Nieves
London 2009