The Quicklime Paradox

‘The Quicklime Paradox’ uses quicklime to respond to the historical and
ongoing erasure of queer and trans lives. The project transforms a substance once used in domestic maintenance and enforced disappearances during Spain’s White Terror into a medium for remembrance, resistance and visibility. Drawing on material storytelling, intergenerational memory and queer history, the designer based the work on family oral histories and cultural practices in rural Andalusia.

The installation features two artefacts: ‘Calados Hasta los Huesos’, a self whitewashing sculpture that stages a slow cycle of corrosion and preservation through the chemical reactions of quicklime; and ‘Under the
Limelight’, a contemporary phantasmagoria that utilises 19th-century stagecraft to conjure chimeric projections developed in collaboration with Andalusian drag performer Martyrio. Together, they offer a luminous space where memory resists and care emerges through material rituals of transformation and visibility.