Until I bite into your Bright side

Lima is, by excellence and by survival, a patchwork city. Structured by the enduring fragility of remnants and fragments, Lima sustains itself through a perfect balance between uncertainty and an eternal desire to live, as if they were equal weights in a walk along a tightrope. Through her many comings and goings between Peru and Belgium, inhabiting a migrant skin and becoming part of the global Latin American diaspora, only later to be among those who return, the artist Jimena Chávez Delion has seen and felt Lima from multiple vantage points. This has allowed her to identify the condition of the fragment as part of the matrix of that toolkit carried by those in constant movement. Within this toolkit we also find recurseo, the Peruvian slang for a type of resourceful making-do, which operates as both the skill and compass of the fragment. Together, they become mechanisms of resilience for confronting and re-enchanting cities that would otherwise be hostile and present countless barriers to simply existing. These barriers reveal themselves in endless bureaucratic processes that seem designed as obstacle courses, constantly testing one’s patience, endurance, finances, and emotional ties; in hostile architecture, in the form of railings that block passage or studs embedded in surfaces that, were it not for them, would easily become spaces for rest. Both create an urban landscape in which bodies move nervously and wearily, awaiting any factor that might completely throw them off balance and bring about the fall so deeply feared, or, alternatively, a gift: that radiant stroke of luck capable of changing everything. On the tightrope, Jimena has found a new balance born of chaos in the becoming-fragment: multiple fragments form links in vast chains that create a safety net, a kind of support network that softens the fall. Yet, if the fragment could speak, it would tell you that every fall still hurts, and comes at a cost. Until I bite into your Bright side brings together sculptures, video, installations, and drawings developed between Belgium and Peru over the past four years. The objects in the space gather iconography from the streets of Brussels and Lima, gestures of hostility and support embedded in the urban design of both cities, such as spikes on benches and handrails on buses. This iconographic medley is infused with a speculative emotional cartography, guided by the question of what feelings these objects might hold or have overheard. In a city that constantly calls out to request and to search (“help wanted” or “se busca” in Spanish), Jimena searches for and finds possibilities within the fragment, the recurseo, and the exchange of glimmers which, like sparks and tokens of exchange, operate as networks of support and shimmering opportunities for care and yearning.