Janus' Fortress Folkestone

Pilar Quinteros has created a new work for Waterfronts, for the town of Folkestone, co-commissioned with Creative Folkestone Triennial as part of England’s Creative Coast.

‘Janus Fortress: Folkestone’ is a new multifaceted work located on the cliff-top overlooking the town. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames and endings, usually depicted with two faces. Quinteros’s sculpture, which likewise presents two faces — one faced inland and the other gazing at the sea — symbolises the duality of borders: of looking outwards while protecting inwards, a dichotomy that the pandemic has made extremely pronounced.

The large sculpture is made out of a carefully calibrated plaster composite that resembles the chalk cliffs nearby, and its substance is similarly susceptible to weather and to human interaction, liable like the eroding cliff face to disintegrate over time. Quinteros cedes sculptural control to her materials through her work’s built-in fragility and metamorphosis, and in this way her work suggests an acceptance of mortality and of not being able to control life. It is, she says, “a monument to uncertainty”.

‘Janus Fortress Folkestone’ is also part of the 2021 Folkestone Triennial, ‘The Plot’, and the work will form part of a procession that ends the exhibition — and closes England’s Creative Coast — at the end of October.

Explaining the ideas behind her work, Quinteros states: “For much of human history it was believed that we lived in a world of binary nature, of opposites. Working for ​Waterfronts ​for England’s Creative Coast, and the specific location of Folkestone makes me think of that region of the country and its history being an important border, as a place of simultaneous entries and exits. It is a precise place to think about supposed opposites and what can be in the middle. Art, I think, opens that possibility.”

Pilar Quinteros’s art is underpinned by an abiding interest in public spaces, the way they function and the diversity of human behaviour within them. She experiments with both structure and material, testing the boundaries, resilience and resistance of fragile and unstable substances and how these transform over time.

‘Janus’ Fortress Folkstone’ is also part of Folkestone Triennial 2021

About the artist
Pilar Quinteros (B. Santiago, Chile, 1988) lives and works between Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). She works across drawing, sculpture, performance and video, often using cheap or recycled construction materials that are deliberately delicate and degradable. Physical labour and construction are central to the work, all undertaken by the artist and documented throughout the process in photography and video. Her projects often involve interventions in public space and consider the continual destruction and disappearance of what is taken for granted and to provide a bridge to imagining unexplored worlds.

Selected exhibitions include El Faro del Progreso (Beacon of Progress), Gabriela Mistral Contemporary Art Gallery, Santiago; Amigos do Movimento Perpétuo (Friends of Perpetual Movement), Leme Gallery, São Paulo (both 2017); 32nd São Paulo Biennial – Live Uncertainty (São Paulo, Brazil, 2016); Oopart, Art Space Sagrada Mercancía, Santiago (2016); Cementerio Indio (Indian Cemetery), Sala de Arte CCU, Santiago; and Ephemeral replacement of a previous state, Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2015). She was a winner of AMA Scholarship 2018 for a three months residency at Gasworks, London; special mention of the jury at the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts of Slovenia(2015); finalist of the Future Generation Art Prize 2014; Winner of the third place of CCU Art Fellowship (2013) and winner of the Jean-Claude Reynal Scholarship 2012 (French Foundation in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux).