Sculpture
2025
2025
Calados Hasta los Huesos (Soaked to the Bone) highlights the open wound left by Spain’s historical Pact of Silence which whitewashed the crimes perpetrated during the White Terror against more than 114,000 victims who remain missing. In these crimes of enforced disappearance, quicklime’s caustic properties were used to bury and dissolve the bodies of political and gender dissidents in unmarked mass graves, accelerating decay down to the bone and rendering them unidentifiable.
Inspired by the symbolism of queer poet Federico García Lorca, whose skeletal remains are still of unknow whereabouts, the sculpture stages a slow cycle of corrosion and preservation -mirroring the tension between quicklime’s duality, its violent legacy and its use as limewash in the aftercare of the dead; an annual ritual in the cemeteries of rural Andalusia, where niches are limewashed as a mourning tradition and form of maintenance.
Marking the 50th anniversary of Spain’s transtion to democracy, Calados Hasta los Huesos was presented publicly during Dutch Design Week 2025, at the DAE Graduation Show. (Eindhoven, Netherlands)
Production assistance: Shao-Chun Hsu