Tatton Park Biennial: Sited Commissions
MANUELA RIBADENEIRA is developing a scent piece linking Tatton’s Pineapple House to Milagro, or ‘Miracle’, in Ecuador, which grows the best fruits in the region. Like ‘bringing coals to Newcastle’, there is a local saying used to stress absurd or seemingly pointless actions: ‘like sending pineapples to Milagro’. The artist has also produced a series of pineapple fountains sited with the growing pineapples.
 |
 |
|
'Milagro (miracle) is a city in Ecuador known for the production of sugar cane and the best pineapples in the country. When one drives through the city or in the main market one can see piles of pineapples by the roadside and people selling pineapple slices to go in transformed bicycles turned into carts. I can remember the smell of fresh pineapple driving through, sweet, slightly too sweet. I can remember thinking that this must be the smell of the exotic, for those who think in those terms. The smell of Eden for it is linked to the exotic. I wonder what the exotic smells like, for those who grow up with this smell.
I can imagine that, historically, and for those who long for warm sun and exuberant nature, for those who look for what they are not, the exotic smells like a pineapple. Where is the line between the exotic and the absurd?
I could imagine the conquerors of pineapple lands smelling the fruit after months at sea; I can almost imagine the face of the king and queen of Spain when presented with the one surviving pineapple that crossed the Atlantic for the first time with Columbus or the face of King Charles II when presented with the first pineapple grown in England.
A smell, a proustian moment stronger than a bite, in what trip does this smell take you? Where do you go? '
 |
 |
Biography
Manuela Ribadeneira (b. Ecuador , lives in London) views her artistic work as a social, political and spatial investigation. She is particularly interested in symbolic meanings attached to real or imagined territories and the borders that define them. Her practice is based around constructions of objects and sound, utilising strategies of participation and performance in work that comments or intervenes on social and public spaces.
She represented Ecuador in the Venice Biennale 2007 and in the Havana Biennale 2003, and was one of five Ecuadorian artists selected for the Sfiles Biennale at the Museo del Barrio in New York 2007. Was one of the selected artists for the Solo Project for ARCO 2008. She has produced a number of large-scale public art works, including a piece commissioned by the Architecture Biennale in Quito, Ecuador, in 2006.
Her work is represented in public collections in Ecuador and in private collections in Europe and America. She is a founding member of the art collective Artes No Decorativas S.A.
Forthcoming exhibitions in 2008: Something Less Something More at gallery one one one, London, solo exhibitions in Teoretica, Costa Rica and at dpm gallery Miami, USA