ARIA - Arturo Beltrán
El Salvador, 1994
Studied Visual Arts and ceramics in the School of Art of the Universidad de El Salvador. Visual artist focused on the ceramic production processes of sculptural work, as well as working with textiles and etching.
RESIDENCY RESEARCH PROCESS
Aria has created the piece “Sensory Body.” This work, which in its form refers to the tongue, was made on a potter’s wheel with high-temperature ceramic clay. It is a sculpture that aims to question the ways of inhabiting the body from different perspectives that range from labor, the climatic, the tactile, and the gustatory. His experience as a ceramicist allowed him to inquire about the natural elements that participate throughout the production process of specialty coffee, its relationship with clay, and its cooking process. A process that he rightly calls organoleptic, since it seeks to connect the viewer with ways of feeling and perceiving through focusing on the retronasal and aftertaste, through an intricate texture that resembles the taste buds.
– Adán Vallecillo, Tutor –
I considered that the concept of heat was not only present in the sun-drying process on the patios and the toasting process, but also that this heat starts at the labor force that allows the artisanal process to be achieved from the beginning of the process, until the consumer has drank their cup of coffee, the bodily heat of the labor be it in the coffee farm sowing or harvesting, sun-drying, or selecting in order to achieve a quality cup, even the work/endeavor/effort that the barista puts in taking care of every serving detail such as water temperature, costumer service warmth…anyway, a process that is fed by a productive human chain.
Learning more about the labor force and the heat of the effort involved in manual tasks, I carried out an exercise where the portion of clay received that force when closing the hand, creating relief, which is perceived as unique when registering a specific worker’s hand. The process was visualized as a collaboration with all the workers of the mill, where each piece/portion of clay creates relief and texture, representing the hand behind the coffee’s production, which ultimately makes the quality in the cup possible.
Texture and relief from the phalanges and hand palm exercise. The registration is visualized as a collaborative process with the mill’s workers.
Sensory Bodies
Ceramic sculpture – Variable dimensions
2020
Although both processes become similar from the selection stage of the raw material to the final result, the strongest relationship that I found as a ceramicist in the production of coffee was the heat/fire factor in the drying process, compared to the drying ceramic pieces in their raw state.
The work is the metaphor of the body; the texture functions as the receptors that are attentive to receiving stimuli of smell, taste, heat and activate the sensoriality of the human being. It questions the way in which we inhabit the body in a capitalist context that forces us to eat and drink in a limited amount of time, without stopping to perceive the textures and flavors of food and the process or work. This element of the structure also represents the number of people who make the cup of coffee possible. The piece is born from the connection between concept and practice— feeling the clay as a material. The gestures and sensoriality of manipulating its pastiness and humidity as part of a technique that at the same time has a great link with that of the process of coffee. The selection, the drying, and the roasting processes, like ceramics, require warmth to determine the final characteristics and properties of the piece.