​The beating of the human heart throughout life is both material and immaterial, an experience that can be recorded physically and electrochemically, but which nevertheless falls far short of explaining the life that resides within. For María Inés Galecio, the starting point of her intervention was the discovery of a heart-shaped potato in her garden. From there, she attempted to explore possible relationships between the tuber and our heart, following the vital activity that manifests as the flow of blood and sap through arteries, veins, branches, and capillaries. The resulting project, Palpita, presents different material forms of the heart: a sequence of photographs, a potato on a bushel measure, and illustrations of the omnipresent heartbeat that resonates inside the chapel, eventually synchronizing with our own. In the grass outside, adjacent to the forest, Galecio has installed a monumental heart made of woven and interconnected plastic bags, whose intense pink and red colors transmit a vital force, across several meters of veins and arteries, into the chapel, as if it were part of a new collective body that now inhabits Comarca Contuy.

 

To create what are widely considered the most reproduced works of art from Ecuador, around 1775 Caspicara (a nickname that means "wooden face" or "stick face") produced four small polychrome sculptures representing the states of the human soul after death: death, glory, purgatory, and hell. These diminutive yet haunting figures circulated throughout Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, passing through different owners until they became part of the Hispanic Society Collection in New York City. Following the publicity generated by the series' inclusion in an international museum tour of the Hispanic Society Collection, the artist decided to transform them into contemporary, realistic-looking figures, recreated using her own face and torso. In so doing, Aguilera revitalized the striking realism of the figures carved and painted centuries earlier by Caspicara.

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