Maria Taniguchi on Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Judy Freya Sibayan

(1991) was the first work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres that I saw as a photograph when I was a sculpture student at the University of the Philippines. Five hundred kilos of silver-wrapped candies were laid out like a carpet on the floor of a large and mostly empty space. Later on I read that he was thinking about the mass of medication consumed by people dying of AIDS, including his partner Ross. I can’t remember who showed me that image and therefore has stayed with me because it was the first time I perceived with some depth an intermaterial, intertextual possibility in human-object inversion. This was the 1990s, I was very young, and I didn’t have the words. I thought: objects can stand in for people and be just as bodily, as full of feelings. But of course, eating was always emotional, and in his work the inversion is really not that straightforward. Bodies are fragmented into a thousand sweet pieces to be desired, cannibalized, and metabolized. In his jigsaw puzzles,   (1988), (1991), and (1991), for example, there is likewise a kind of fragmentation, and a kind of reconstruction.