Interview with Ligia Dias

Ligia Dias is an artist who works in the fields of art, design, and fashion, combining craft techniques and industrial elements, to create jewelry, sculptures, or “objects with poetic reaction.” The work ANTONI is inspired by the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí who, at the beginning of the 20th century, created models from ropes suspended from the ceiling, to which he added weights, working with gravity to develop the arched and curved catenary shapes that he is known for.

Ligia Dias revisits these impressive prototypes and adapts them to her practice. The sand weights of Gaudí give way to a variety of everyday or elegant objects: Champagne stoppers rub shoulders with beer capsules, crystal chandelier pendants flirt with souvenir key rings, metal elements evoking the world of precious stones mingle with scrap metal. Caught in their gigantic net, one would think they were taken from the nearby lake, traces and memories of a submerged life. Present and suspended, both playful and seductive, these pearls and trinkets could be waste or votive offerings. These objects that we carry, live with, offer, and forget, diverted from their original context and deprived of their primary function, take on a completely different value—no longer practical, but narrative. Can we read a universal constellation or traces of a personal archaeology in this sky of memories? The whole, highlighted and seen from below, transforms the trawl into a dreamlike, off-scale chandelier, below which a collective memory seems to be sheltering, both domestic and magical.

Courtesy of the artist & FRAC Normandie