Case studies| 2. Non-rooted root
“Culture has been commodified, but art still has meaning.”
Santiago Eraso Beloki
The second object in the collection is a sculpture made with a guava tree root, approximately 46 centimeters high, 27 centimeters wide and weighing 1.3 kg. It is one of the objects that has been with the family the longest, personally it is one of the first things I think of when I try to remember the house where my grandparents lived, always put together with a paila and a copper jug, but paradoxically it is the least known.
With more than 60 years old approximately, it was one of the first objects that I decided to digitize for its aesthetics and the possible history behind its manufacture and acquisition, but when I asked my mother about this statue she said: “I really don’t know, it has always been in the house”. The biography of this object became even fuzzier when I asked its owner, my grandmother, about it. The first thing she says when she sees it is: “Mr. Cruz, but I don’t remember the name”, referring to the creator of the sculpture. She also recalls that “he was a sculptor, with roots he did things like that”. Apparently, following the first memories that came to my grandmother, this craftsman was related to the school scouts at the time when she started her group, this would give a clearer picture of the time when she was in charge of managing the new group of guides and received help from the scouts.
This story, although without many details, would serve to complement the biography of the previous object and that fragment of the story of its owner, but the blurry part emerges at the end of the interview. When I ask her about what she feels when she sees the objects, when she sees the root she says: “To Mario, because that artisan asked him to take pictures of his work and gave it to us as payment”. Hearing this the history of the object changes completely, now it is related to the life of her late husband, grandfather Mario, who was a photographer for about 40 years, he worked selling photographs to newspapers, magazines and customers who came to his workshop “Foto Don Mario”. The origin of the object is still the same, produced by an artisan with the surname Cruz, the way they got it too, in the form of a gift, but now it seems that it was the product of an exchange between the artisan and my grandfather, as a form of payment for having photographed the catalog of products that this gentleman was looking to sell.
Now, the social life of this object can be analyzed from several perspectives, starting with the exchange theory, central to this story. This line of study proposes that objects acquire their value through the social relations that are established around them. Following Blau (1986) the social relationship is established through a reciprocal exchange of goods and services, in this case it would be the root sculpture for the photographs; on the other hand, this line of research also indicates that exchanges can be symbolic. These two lines have to be considered in order to achieve a better analysis of the social relations that arise around the object. Although Bourdieu (1996) stresses the importance of exchange relations to understand social relations, in this particular case this would be where his biography begins, because all that is known is the reciprocal exchange of goods, what they both obtained by establishing a relationship of production and consumption. What it came to mean for its creator, Mr. Cruz, as well as the interpretations that my grandfather gave when taking photographs of the work of this artisan have been lost. That is why what has been built from this exercise, the memories of my grandmother, the image of my grandfather, his work and the customers he had from this case, this mixture of moments and memories serve as the basis for this sculpture begins to fill with meaning for the family, built from the web of social relations and the constant overlapping of experiences and meanings.
