“My aim in using rubbish is to highlight the way we are using up resources, through our materialistic and apparently uncaring way of life, in the name of a false idea of progress.” There is a hand-crafted quality about Saelia Aparicio’s work: meticulous, sarcastic, absurd, full of black humour and deceptively naive in appearance.

Through her work she compares different dimensions of the absurd: the real one in which we live and the fictions the artist herself creates. She is also obsessed with modes of perception opposed to conventional social assumptions, which can be considered just as arbitrary as the fictions she constructs, and which our habits or upbringing lead us to accept as reasonable. For this purpose she uses drawing, animation, writing and installations based on found objects, though her starting-point is always drawing. In short, what Aparicio is seeking to do is create situations of a kind that could not occur other than through these created worlds, in which the work itself becomes an experience.

Aparicio’s project for La Conservera arises from the pointless fixation with distinguishing between true and false, from deceptiveness and from the theatrical device of trompe l’oeil, recreating the staging of a parallel world, a dystopic, futuristic hypothesis, for which the raw material is rubbish, borrowed from local factories, scrapyards, recycling centres and other waste management companies. With the exception of generous individual donations, the material will be returned to the suppliers, thus emphasing the value of this waste.

The rubbish is arranged throughout the space in irregular heaps, each of which can be distinguished at a glance by its composition. Various narratives are developed according to this content, within the framework of “secret islands” or spiritual refuges; indeed, the title of this exhibition, San Borondón, comes from an island that never existed. Its ancestral legend tells how it has been appearing and disappearing for centuries; old accounts tell of the appearance of the eighth Canary Island and its subsequent disappearance, whilst other people attribute the strange vision to a buildup of clouds on the horizon or to a mirage effect.

The artist presents a series of proposals in which various sculptures/actors are engaged in inconclusive actions which can be extended indefinitely in time. Many of them are inspired by the behaviour of animals that are generally frightened, taking shelter or hiding from prying eyes, for whatever reason. One example is reflected in the woman unravelling woollen sweaters and living like a chrysalis in the roofs of La Conservera, or the one in the piece we can see with her head buried in a heap of glass, which in turn refers to the myth propagated by Disney’s 1971 classic Bedknobs and Broomsticks, that ostriches hide their heads in the ground when frightened; other pieces, however, mimic behaviour that lies outside the consumer market system, spending their time carrying out useless (that is, unproductive) tasks, such as unravelling sweaters, washing milk cartons, breaking things and constructing non-functional items.