Julia Huete has been working on identifying the seemingly secondary uses of all sorts of materials used in the rural environment of Galicia, investigating their use and exploitation: scarecrows, fence closures, sacks for grain or crops, improvised blinds or greenhouses, and so on.

His proposal is based on a visual examination of ingenuity in a utilitarian manipulation that lacks hierarchies, in which plastics and fabrics are structural and practical rather than aesthetic protagonists.

Weaving: hierarchies and volume

Textiles in Galicia seem to have a polarised reality. On the one hand, there is a great handicraft tradition and identity linked to noble materials that are linked to the territory, both in terms of needs and in terms of production and use; on the other hand, it is also (and perhaps because of the previous reason) the cradle of several internationally renowned fashion companies that have outsourced and industrialised their production processes, some of which are the flagships of so-called fast fashion. Without making judgements or drawing conclusions, this duality adds nuance to my reading of the presence of fabric in my daily life and in my work as an artist.

On previous occasions, such as my residency in Mexico, I have had the opportunity to explore the coexistence, hierarchy and identity of textile materials according to the environment or stage of production in which they are found. There, I found it stimulating to see both the use of plastic integrated into craft processes (braiding baskets with plastic) and the presence of plastic in the commercial life of a product made of a noble material (for example, a handmade blanket made of pure sheep's wool is transported, protected and sold in plastic and cardboard).

Starting from this approach but focusing on a more rural and Galician environment, my intention is to identify apparently secondary uses of fabrics of all kinds, which generate their own families of forms and provide novelties on the use and exploitation of different categories of qualities such as, for example, scarecrows, fence closures, sacks for grain or harvest, improvised blinds or greenhouses. Thus, my proposal is based on a visual revision of ingenuity in a utilitarian manipulation devoid of hierarchies where the fabric is the structural and not the aesthetic protagonist, although these references will be worked on in a formal way.

Julia Huete

The result of this residency will be the second intervention in one of the most singular and relevant spaces of the Vilaseco space: the palleira (the haystack). It gives continuity to the first intervention, carried out by Rodríguez-Méndez.