Opening: Tuesday July 13th 7pm
alfonso borragán presents an exhibition connected to the research processes in which he has been immersed for years and which, in 2021, took him to Bolivia. Within this framework, he developed his laboratory Goalito, The Stomach, the Stone and the Llama, in La Paz, focusing on the medical, pharmacological and magical use of enteroliths in the Bolivian highlands and the influence they had in Western Europe during the colonial period. At the Centro Cultural de España in La Paz, as part of the Goalito Project, borragán offers an artistic exhibition on the human ingestion of Bezoar stones, which serves as a collective exploration of ingestion, relational poetics, and the symbolic as well as metabolic significance of consuming these stones. Bezoar or enteroliths are corporeal stones formed in the stomach of some ruminants. The exhibition is part of a collective and interdisciplinary research process that has resulted in a wide-ranging perspective on these stones. The study has specially contemplated their effects of inscription in the human body as an act of transformation through a chemical digestive process, and the collective symbolism of the ritual. Goalito is the connection of two stomachs in a circular metabolism, from the animal stomach to the human stomach, from the stomach of the Andes to the European stomach. The body then becomes a mineral, wherein chemistry and beliefs intertwine, leading to a transformative process that can yield a distinct matter.
Image: Photographs courtesy of the Centro Cultural de España en La Paz.
