The Pencil as Mirror and Weapon: Giada Gollin and the Subversion of the Object

During her one-month residency at  lagos | estudios y residencias, Giada Gollin has developed a body of work that functions as a semiotic battlefield. Her starting point is a reinterpretation of postmodern furniture—specifically the bookshelf model that utilizes pencils as structural supports—to subvert the object's function and transform it into a critical agent. While in industrial design the pencil is a rigid, functional column, in Gollin’s hands it becomes an anthropomorphic entity: a "humanized pencil" that claims its own agency and capacity for deception.

This metamorphosis finds a fundamental echo in contemporary animation: the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where the protagonist uses a magic pencil to draw an alternate version of himself. This "otherness" that toys with and deceives Squidward Tentacles serves Giada to explore the creation of an identity that escapes the creator's control. In her work, pencils are not mere drawing tools but bodies in conflict; through her pencil drawings, the artist depicts these humanized beings playing, fighting, and writhing together, destabilizing the notion of drawing as passive representation.

The series' color palette is not accidental. The use of the saturated yellow of emojis serves as a tool to critique whiteness and Euro-ethnic hierarchies. By adopting this hyper-pigmented, digital color, Gollin displaces her Eurocentric hegemony of representation, utilizing the "caricature" aesthetic as a space of resistance where the non-white claims its place, even if through irony and artifice.

The artist’s most radical stance manifests in her critique of gender. Gollin seeks to dismantle the objectification of the female body by appropriating the violent language of incel communities. In her sculptures and cardboard pieces—objects that emulate party cakes used to distribute sweets—the inscription FOID (the derogatory term "femoid" used to dehumanize women) appears. By inscribing the phrase "moist for a foid" on these festive containers, Giada generates a disturbing tension: she uses objects associated with celebration and consumption to expose the brutality of digital misogyny and the structures of patriarchal hegemony.

Giada Gollin's work at Lagos results in an occupation of space where the tender and the violent collide. Her small sculptures and drawings do not merely seek to destabilize the viewer's gaze, but propose a new regime of visibility where the body—whether made of graphite, cardboard, or flesh—refuses to be an inert object, becoming instead a vessel for political resistance and subversive play.

    olgaMargarita dávila,
Chief curator

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