BERN.- Kendra Jayne Patrick introduces Manuela Morales Délano’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Nachbarn. 

German for ‘Neighbors,’ Nachbarn parses the facts and fetishes of geopolitical borders in a time of supernatural devotion to money. Working with three of her foundational motifs - circles, mountains, and shoes - Délano examines the colonial-cum-capitalist dispositions shaping ideas on the subject. Artworks in this show are grounded in one aspect of this ideology or another, dosed heavily with Manuela’s deft aesthetic tendencies towards camp, double entendre, and (worker) solidarity. She asks, who gets to choose whom we get to call ‘neighbor?’

She grew up in the mountains of Chile, and now finds herself surrounded by the differently mythical Alps. Majestic and dangerous, their geological abilities to protect and boundary their attendant societies make mountains a most obvious landscape to appropriate as a tool of political control. In Nachbarn, a fable-like scene is set by a wall-papered mural of a manmade pebble mountain upon which she stumbled at the border dividing Switzerland and Germany. It is in kinship with the rock sculptures in the other room, wearing striking tiaras fashioned from the pigeon deterrent spikes that line metropolitan buildings.  

The European Union flag and its tondo made of yellow stars, she has reconstructed with taxidermied moths. Délano appreciates their complex beauty, extensive nocturnal journeyings, and risky attraction to manmade light. These works happen to debut during the midst of the political bloc’s own refurbishment of the symbol in its ReArm Europe campaign, where it is newly accompanied by white-skinned fingers surrounding the original star circle, both atop the flag's famous blue. Border control indeed. 

The shoe sculptures appearing in this show are her most abstracted yet. Shoes remain an essential object in her practice, where they pay homage to those migrating thousands of miles for dignified work, those who threw them into Industrial-era factory machinery, and those who dug their heels into farm fields to refuse the demands of the ruling class. They are a consequential item in a show about boundaries. As usual they have high high heels, here interlaced to form an enchanted silvery thicket. However the shoe part is missing his time; she leaves us with only their heels and fasteners. They’re the last thing keeping you from the wall-papered mountain. 

These artworks are grounded in her overarching exploration of the disparate meanings of time to the rulers and to the ruled. Nachbarn elegantly clocks the way the former’s savage implementation of borders remains a most powerful tool for exerting power: commandeering bodies, restricting motion, raking in money, and wasting our time.