Guadalupe Salgado | Low-Budget Archaeology

“Low-Budget Archaeology” is an artistic research project that explores how objects, symbols, and cultures participate in the construction of power, desire, and national mythology. Through a speculative approach to archaeology, the project examines how civilizations transform objects into symbolic devices that naturalize hierarchy, origin narratives, and collective identity. At the heart of the project lies a fundamental question: Why is there something rather than nothing? This question is addressed through culture, understood as a repository of human attempts to stabilize meaning, power, and identity. In all civilizations, objects have served as anchors for mythological narratives that legitimize authority, territorial belonging, and social order. Over time, these artifacts lose their original purpose and are freed from the function of the object, but they respond to a desire of a different nature: testimony, memory, nostalgia; they become objects of desire. We are not certain what they were made for, how they functioned, or what they symbolized. We can add an interpretation, but there will always be the benefit of the doubt; nothing is completely certain.

Based on theories of simulacra, desire, and symbolic exchange, “Low-Budget Archaeology” focuses on what Jean Baudrillard calls “ancient” or “marginal” objects; objects whose functionality has diminished while their symbolic charge has intensified. These objects circulate today as museum artifacts, collectibles, national icons, or souvenirs, revealing an insatiable desire to possess history and legitimize identity. Salgado’s proposal for her residency is based on cultural syncretism. Syncretism is understood as stemming from a cultural clash in which one culture assimilates—adopts—elements from another, without disappearing. In this case, she is interested in taking as a starting point Greek icons, architectural ornamentation, and myths, studying them and seeing how they inhabit and survive globalization, decontextualized, desacralized, and domesticated in the present day, and the relationship humans have with them in thinking about and possessing them as objects of desire/trophies or vestiges of past glories. From this process emerge sculptural objects conceived as simulations rather than reconstructions.