Manuela Morales Délano

The work of Manuela Morales Délano spans a range of mediums, often taking the form of site-specific installations that engage notions of colonialism and the political and economic dimensions of its legacy. This allows her to connect with specific contexts and geographies, which she reconstructs to create tensions between imposed narratives, vernacular legends and historical memory. She is interested in materiality as a way to explore exhaustion, fragility and resistance.

Born in Chile and currently living in Switzerland, she is fascinated by the mountains as natural barriers, often translated into state borders. This dynamic reflects the complex human relationship with nature, resisting it or interpreting it to fit our own societal constructs and prejudices. At MGLC Grad Tivoli, she is exhibiting two sculptures, two Scarecrows, each consisting of a stone and spikes used in cities to chase away pigeons. In this way, she emphasises the paradox of limits imposed on birds, the violent ways of delineating areas where they are not welcome, cutting away at the world within their reach. These methods are not far removed from the repressive tactics nation-states use to treat people they deem outsiders – foreigners, migrants, refugees.

What remains constant in these situations, both in the context of humans and birds, is resistance and adaptation. While man-made rules and ways of their enforcement are arbitrary, the will to survive and thrive is fundamental and shared by all living beings. There have been cases, for example, of birds using the spikes to build and protect their nests, just as they might use thorny branches.