Can we learn to dance to the rhythms of life and death as they exist in nature?

Descansos, meaning resting places, show where a journey has ended. They are the roadside marks where people put flowers and objects to remember and to bless the soul that has gone. 

This pop-up art show is a garden, a metaphor, where degradation and creation are woven into the fabric of life. Here, descansos represent the past. All the places where I felt loss, the death of a loved one, parts of my identity, relationships, the departure from my homeland, they symbolize where something has ended. As you wander through the garden, I invite you to explore an intimate journey in life threaded through with hope and grief. It is a sanctuary amidst the ruins, where waste materials extend beyond mere physical structures. Can we gather up the pieces left behind and weave them into something whole again? 

It is work that requires patience, stitching pieces together and breathing new life into them. It is an act of resurrection: leaving behind what needs to die, saving and repairing all that can be revived, leaving space for what’s yet to be born. The artworks made from waste textiles are the transformation: a metamorphosis, a new form from the broken pieces. They carry remnants of the things we’ve lived through, the lives we’ve had and the people we’ve been, with the potential to be born again.

Fanni Kopácsi

During the exhibition people were invited to make their descansos and leave it in the garden. Two chairs were put in front of each other with a table in the middle. One chair was used where people could sit down and write their losses, another chair in front of them inspired by a specific method some therapists use to process grief called “the empty chair technique”. 

Curator: Patrick Benazet

Venue: Utópia