The Cucumber Sandwich Club: Second fable
The narrative of this second fable is developed among prestigious London clubs, cucumber sandwiches and baroque saints. It is the combination of autobiographical and fictional elements which results in an ironic storytelling that waves between the Victorian and the Andalusian to satirize and challenge the paradoxes arisen in the confluence of both cultures. All these elements work in an interconnected web of symbols that thorough a non linear narrative breaks with chronology. This heterochrony is built in an interdisciplinary environment, swinging of the spectator in a metaphoric space covered with theatrical and baroque lightning in clear contrast with the white pureness of the aesthetics of this allegorical universe.
The voice from the main video projected in the space narrates the story of the protagonists, three wealthy friends who aim to be saint after their discovering of their new idol: the roman martyr Santa Eulalia. However to reach this sacred state they can only eat cucumber sandwiches, food that they have turned into sacred and, at the same time, they can only eat cucumber sandwiches as a reward after having done a certain amount of physical activity.
Therefore, to fulfill both objectives of doing sport and eating sandwiches, the three friends create “The Cucumber Sandwich Club”, a racket club which opens up the possibilities of eating this sacred and hypo caloric food and, as a consequence, it contains the potential for reaching the wished sanctity that Saint Eulalia seems to have promised them.
Cucumber sandwich, English symbol par excellence, has been historically associated in England with aristocracy, since it is the food eaten by nobles to be distinguished from ordinary folk and who needed meat-based sandwiches to stand long hours working on the country or other type of hard physical activities for “poor people”. In this sense, cucumber sandwich works here within the narrative as a symbol, clear reference to the most pedantic and hierarchic English society.
Saint Eulalia is the other main symbolic reference which gives sense to the exhibition´s narrative. The saint has always interested me for her hagiographic story. As a member of a wealthy and nobel family, Eulalia was a responsible, clever and humble girl who defended her faith and love for God in front the authorities of her time. This brave attitude costed her a long martyrdom which ended with her life. This interest for the moralist nature of her life story together with the representative and symbolic power of the late baroque woodcarving version of the saint made by the sculptor Luis Salvador Carmona in 1760, lead me to use her as the three friends´ figure.
The characteristic elements of a wealthy and pedantic society together with its banal ambitions are criticized through this symbolic “costume”. In this way, opulence disguised as austerity and puritan behavior are combined together to give rise to a sense of absurdity. The absurdity of a pretentiousness that will never become holiness.