Deaf Ears
Sculptural Series, 2025
Variable dimensions
White clay, wood, resin
Deaf Ears is part of a sculptural inquiry that engages the trivial domestic object—the cotton swab—to subvert it into a critical device of high symbolic intensity. Presented as a series, each piece offers a monumental amplification of this hygiene tool, whose tips, replaced with stylized effigies in white clay, embody paradigmatic figures of contemporary power: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Nicolás Maduro, Emmanuel Macron, Kim Jong-un, and Javier Milei.
The title plays on the French expression “faire la sourde oreille”—to turn a deaf ear—condensing the notion of willful deafness in the face of reality’s outcry. The artist erects here a sculptural lexicon that interrogates the performativity of authoritarian power—its capacity to obscure, to neutralize, and to symbolically defile the social fabric it claims to regulate.
The cotton swab, as a sensory cleaning tool, is here perverted from its original function. It becomes a vector of accumulation, a receptacle of symbolic waste, where the white matter—ostensibly pure—embodies the hypocrisy embedded in political narratives of legitimacy. The faces, rendered unrecognizable through plastic deformation, are stripped of their charismatic authority and reduced to spectacular, almost grotesque artifacts belonging to a theater of power in decay.
Through this sculptural gesture, the artist questions the modalities of authority’s construction, the fabrication of political icons, and their structural disconnection from social reality. The series thus operates as a dialectical device—between purification and contamination, monument and waste, icon and ruin.