Jimena Chávez Delion (Lima, Perú) studied in the city of Lima and furthered her education at La Cambre in Brussels. Since then her practice has been characterized by the links between material culture, identity and the socio-spatial relationships of everyday urban life. In 2019 she completed the In Situ master's program at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Her contact with multicultural commercial spaces in the different cities that she visited led her work to delve into ideas such as segregation, interculturality, oblivion and otherness. This became an interest in the concept of value and its connections to design, codes, symbols and economic and social relationships

These kinds of relationships are found in the logics of exchange that we carry out daily; from buying in a small store to more complex things like applying for a bank loan to buy a house. When these economic activities are more complex, they would require larger systems to mediate between us and those operations. In that process, these systems are delocalized and transform into material corporate spaces with an aesthetic surface. I am referring to the infrastructure and design that organizes our bodies and behavior in such places, where a neutral bureaucracy of ideally impersonal relationships with users is generated. This contrasts with our daily life’s interaction with small businesses or the informality of alternate economies which rather requires warmer interpersonal relationships. Chávez Delion explores the aesthetic and cultural form of both specific contexts with an archaeological logic; building a symbolic approach from the visible part of the exchanges that are produced in these places.

Long distance evokes a contrast through materiality: An aesthetic experience of the bureaucratic — one that our memory seems to recognize immediately through textures and industrial objects— is interrupted by organic materials and hand-molded elements that represent more spontaneous social spaces. The installation demands a second look at these small contrasts, for they to reveal the presence of a certain marginality and casual exchange.

You enter a bank, there is a feeling of boredom and slowness. Endless waiting, paradoxically opposed to the speed in which society consumes and progressively accelerates. All elements have a specific function. There is always the possibility of making small findings in these spaces: some scratch or imperfection. But everything always ends up being repaired, hiding the traces that could turn this globalized interior into a space with distinctive peculiarities. There is no room to haggle over the exchange rate or the cost of a product. Everything responds to an unalterable order. Its opposite could perhaps be the public space or the exercise of leisure in intimacy.

In a near future, these corporate spaces could only be nostalgic places, disused vestiges that even today seem to correspond to a surreal past. Perhaps that ideal of a closed and global system will persist, but under other means. But this trend towards globalization will not only be governed by the expansion of capital under the terms of the economic interest of a certain hegemony. It will also be led by a diverse and growing multicultural space that organically restructures our way of perceiving the city and our forms of exchange: new trade stores of migrant communities, remittances sent by necessity, migration flows or even just the constant exchasge of information over the internet. This is shaping the cultural and aesthetic changes of the future, opening ways to reinvented aesthetic forms that reconfigure the collective memory and practice.