Claudia Fontes : el problema del caballo / the horse problem : 57. exposizione internationale d'arte la biennale di Venezia

The Horse Problem was an installation of sculptures made on the occasion of representing Argentina at the 57a Venice Biennial in 2017.
The installation shows a bullet-time frozen scene in which a horse, a woman and a young man are trapped in an infinite causality loop for which fear is the cause and the symptom at once. The horse’s fear of being trapped in the building creates an avalanche of rocks travelling into his direction, the shadows of which form a mirrored image of himself, albeit exploding. The whiteness and smoothness of the material give the scene the quality of an apparition as if the characters and their circumstances existed in a parallel temporality. The audience, as onlookers, complete the narrative.
The point of departure for this image was the hidden presence of the horse’s exploitation in the exhibition space and its materiality: wood, bricks and iron could only have been made and put together by horse-power in the times the Arsenal buildings were built.