Consuelo Tupper Hernandez

Artist

Hernandez’s work stems from the fact that she finds her own ignorance unbearable. As a kid, after she heard that knowledge is power, she would try to hide everything she didn’t know by frantically reading books, deviating conversations, and —sadly— by keeping her mouth shut way too often.

Over the years, the limits of ignorance have become an obsession and a space she continually comes back to, maybe as an attempt to reconcile with what she doesn’t know and to transform it into an opportunity to think twice, judge better, and eventually speak louder.

This way, she sustains a text-based practice in which manuals, maps, games, diagrams, and dictionaries operate not as clusters of answers but rather as routes to further questions. Where does certain knowledge come from and why do we stick to it? How much of what we know depends on social, political and/or economic structures? Who decides which knowledge is valuable and which isn’t? Can knowledge be arbitrary? Is knowledge necessarily true?

She works from her own need to (un)learn and to question biased models of thought that deem as neutral what we call “information.” Particularly now, as we face a global phenomenon of cumulative crisis, extreme polarization, and growing civic rebellion, I think it’s essential to examine how convictions and beliefs are negotiated, and what are the possible ways to liberate knowledge from individual arrogance and make it instead a tool for a fairer and more empathetic coexistence.