Hidrante is pleased to present Desdoblo amnésico, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Claudia Claremi and Johan Orellana.

Through collage and video, Desdoblo amnésico probes the in-between space of coloniality, memory, economy, and history that links the Americas and Spain. The legacy of Spanish colonization and its narrative distortions, depending on the context from which it’s narrated, is mined by Claremi and Orellana to explore how the colonial order not only persists but is reactualized in the present through cultural practices and social spaces, where an apparent ‘forgetting’—or a structural lack of memory—regarding this legacy operates. Desdoblo amnésico traces this legacy in the personal and collective sphere, highlighting the still-present colonial order and codes that bind experiences of identity between the Americas and Spain.

Orellana’s collages, which piece together familiar snapshots with school-book Spanish Casta illustrations, photographs of pre-Columbian pottery, and banana fruit stickers, recontextualize national historical and family archives to delve into the narrative splitting he experienced growing up between Ecuador and Spain. His work also explores Ecuador's banana trade, often described as a banana republic because its economy depends on bananas and multinational corporations, reflected in the wide variety of fruit stickers Orellana has collected. He expands on this banana legacy to connect Ecuador with the Caribbean through similar legacies of agricultural monoculture and the stratified class system that developed under Spanish rule and were integrated into the systems that the United States enforced in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Claremi’s Amnesia colonial trilogy is a series of videos that collect different cultural practices and social spaces where contemporary “forgetfulness” toward the colonial legacy is evident. However, within these contexts, it also unveils a reactivated and persistent colonial order. Shot in Spain or culled from self-published tourist videos, the videos use repetition, looping, and delirium to propose a "discovery" of strategies for whitewashing and trivializing colonial memory. Claremi questions how these places, practices, and mindsets perpetuate narratives of national and colonial pride, operating as symbolic devices of ideological legitimation.