Xafeu, Xafeu… i trobareu
(Seek, seek… and you will find)
Installation
created in collaboration with the artist Merche Pereira
2025, March 27
Casa Cuesa, Xativa, Spain
Art curators: Chiara Carzan, Martillopis
Material: round esparto rug, rectangular esparto rug
Photos: Merche Pereira, NEA, @vcarrion
Contextualisation – The Esparto Mat
The fibre of esparto grass has been used since prehistoric times by various local Mediterranean communities. In a symbolic sense, it speaks to a connection with the earth, a symbol of the human bond with one’s surroundings.
Both the activity of harvesting the fibre and its transformation and braiding required profound knowledge of the natural environment. These became collective and almost ritual acts of community cohesion, reinforcing a shared sense of identity.
Braiding esparto grass produced container objects such as baskets and saddlebags used to store and transport food and belongings. This ability to hold and preserve seeds, grains, and other elements was essential for human survival, but it also gave rise to protective items such as mats or footwear.
From a symbolic and ritual perspective, these containers could also be used to hold offerings. The act of “gathering” the fruits of the earth symbolised the interrelationship between humans and their territory, strengthening their spiritual bond with the environment. The braiding process itself was considered an act of protection and care—ennobling a material that shielded and insulated against dampness.
For this reason, we wish to re-signify l’estora d’espart—the esparto mat—as an element so versatile in Mediterranean farming households, both practically and symbolically. Used as an insulating protective layer in homes with earthen or stone floors, it protected from cold, humidity, or heat, while offering a more comfortable surface. It also helped maintain cleanliness and defined different living areas, contributing to the organisation of space. Another function was to cover and protect goods or food.
In rural homes and farmhouses, l’estora d’espart marked the threshold between the outside world and the domestic interior, embodying protection and intimacy.
Thus, l’estora becomes a metaphor for defining and protecting our spaces. Woven into its fibres is the imprint of craftsmanship and the connection to the land, symbolising memory and the passage of time.
Conceptualisation – The Esparto Mat as Shelter
By re-signifying l’estora, we aim to create a threshold between past and present, between the intimate and the collective, between the visible and the invisible—the infrathin. We turn it into a micro-system, a living object in constant transformation. It not only defines spaces but also harbours life within it—dust, earth—it welcomes and protects.
This estora will shelter cultivated soil within a subtle fold, as a vestige of the past, capturing the imprint and memory of the territory, and breaking the boundary between interior and exterior, between the object itself and what it symbolises—the latent memory and the fragile interdependence between human beings and their environment, between what once was and what is. It is about inhabiting a space with care, concealing and protecting its secret. One mat spread out to define a space, another rolled up, in a state of latency, waiting to be activated.
But all mats hide dust and secrets—and what if, in addition, it held magical connotations and could transport you to another place, acting as a threshold or portal for displacement? It would no longer only be an object that redefines and delimits a space, but one that expands and disperses it across different dimensions.
These dimensions lie between past and present; between inside and outside; between the visible, the invisible, and the latent; between the ephemeral and the permanent; between memory and fable. By hiding dust and cultivated soil, it transports you to another landscape, on a journey through memory—a latent memory that connects to the present, a faint trace of its temporal displacement. The concealed earth is a fragment of a territory in becoming, transient.
The Esparto Mat as a Line, an Imaginative Opportunity
Its braids unravel, releasing fibres that wander in search of ideas, magic, surprises. Fibres that come and go, from past to future, fibres that are re-braided into a line—a liminal space that is, at the same time, a junction of eras, of stories, of meanings layered within the material.
Upon the estora, brushed by feet and glances, words fall, and as they soften, they insinuate themselves among the braids, filling them with legends and memories. Beneath the estora, secrets wait—covered in just enough dust to make them tangible, to carve their path between the ground and the mat.
The estora is the meeting point between sky and earth. The estora is us—feet dusty and sunk into the soil, heads caressed by stardust.
Above and below: dust and earth
Inside and outside: dust and earth
The estora both hides and shamelessly offers a gesture of apparent comfort, in a community seeking to intertwine like the braids themselves, in search of closeness. Lifting the estora to see what lies beneath—discovering patterns traced by dust and earth, allowing yourself to be surprised by encounters with memories, with the unspoken, with hidden fragments of lived experiences. To act by lifting the estora, or to walk upon it, pressing the dust and hardening it into a new layer, an integral part of itself.
A mat, the estora, protects the memory of the past, shelters it, giving it form and volume through dust. The object itself becomes a medium, making visible Duchamp’s fleeting concept of the infrathin.
Facing the extended estora, another stands rolled up, vertically, becoming a totem—a totem alluding to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s very concept of totemism, which refers us to the past in order to relocate us in the present. A present where natural-fibre mats are cleaned, brushed with artificial rollers—the same rollers that artist Pino Pascali displayed as trophies in the pristine museum space.
All that remains is to use the estoras as if they were blankets, or wall coverings, or as the roofs of huts—enveloping and intimate like Mario Merz’s igloos. And from within the huts, in warmth and contact with the earth, we can look through the gaps in the roof and contemplate the dust of the stars.
To re-signify in order to relive,
to live again,
to keep on living.
