C-14

The "C-14" series presents it self as a visceral and silent metaphor for human corrosion at the core of archaic production. By placing charcoal — the raw material of combustion and industrial progress — inside aluminum lunchboxes (marmitas), the work subverts the object that should symbolize sustenance and life, filling it instead with the residue of a labor that consumes the worker.The title, which references Carbon-14, evokes the ideas of time, dating, and vestige. In the charcoal kilns, time is not measured by the clock, but by the rhythm of exhaustion and the degradation of organic matter into mineral. The lunchbox, a universal symbol of the worker's pause and dignity, is served here with the "food" they produce: charcoal. There is a tragic irony in this composition, suggesting that, within the logic of extreme exploitation, the worker does not consume to live, but is rather consumed by what they manufacture.The contrast between the cold shine of aluminum and the porous opacity of charcoal accentuates the dehumanization present in these labor relations. The charcoal is the worker's body transformed into a commodity; the lunchbox is the casing of a promise of subsistence that is never fully fulfilled."C-14" does not merely document a labor reality; it interrogates the permanence of these structures of exploitation in contemporary times. It is a banquet of absences, where food is replaced by fuel, and the subject is reduced to their energy value, slowly burned under the weight of a system that still guards the ashes of the past.