Omar Barquet is a multidisciplinary artist who works in both micro and large-scale formats, encompassing photography, collage, installation, sculpture, and muralism. His profound sensitivity to rhythm and materials, to myth and poetry, intertwines these elements in a symphonic continuum that feels like a force of nature in constant transformation.
TWS – Omar, it is wonderful to feature you once again in TWS. We are huge fans of your work. In your podcast episode with us, “Ghosts, Hurricanes and Sheer Freedom” (2022), you talked about your upbringing, your never-fading curiosity, and your long-term project Ghost Variations, organized like a symphony. We’ve been following your work very closely ever since…
OB – Thank you very much, Bea. First of all, I have great respect for Max and, consequently, for his team. I deeply respect the value of people who work in cultural management, people who bring others together through collaboration, through building platforms, adding disciplines, and generating content. In other words, people who do this kind of work often don’t get paid off immediately, and that is, instead, a constant wager on continuing to sow seeds and bring things together. For me, it is an honor to contribute to The Weird Show.
TWS – We’re all very happy, Omar. From Oiseaux Exotiques in Miami, Unsleeping Birds for Meta in Mexico City, to your installations on Wall Street, your murals are momentums that interrupt the visual rhythm of the architectural and urban continuums that surround them. Whether painted or built as modular assemblies of enameled wood, put together like puzzles, they feel ethereal, full of grace and dynamism. Tell us about them.
OB – The mural has a platform where the project can be purely painting, but the languages that make up the image come from different sources, and that is where I understand it as a collage. In them, there is always a landscape combined with the concept of musical cadence. I think about solfège, singing, movement, transitions—something very musical—and I try to guide myself through that, whether starting from a specific work that speaks about landscape, wind, birds, or from some element of the local context where I’m going to make the piece.
Therefore, there is an underlying conceptual layer that reveals itself when you observe the work closely, and that coincides or converges with the language of abstraction. Many times, I am tempted to use more recognizable figurative elements, but I am always looking for tension, for a transformative gesture. It can be something that looks simultaneously like a bird and like a musical note, or it can also be a rhythm built from repetitions and scales… In this way, I integrate elements from musical language, or anthropological language, or poetic language. Suddenly, I think, “This could give a twist to a merely contemplative image. There has to be a twist.” Things can be hidden or encrypted, and I’m very interested in that happening in murals.
TWS – Like a polysemy that shows something in an evident way, but at the same time gives you surprises through attentive observation. How do you build your preliminary models? As you assemble them, do you make changes to the original design? What is your conceptualization process like?
OB – I allow myself to experiment, but then I try to understand my own experimentation to edit it and deepen it. That’s how I manage to define the starting point for a longer project. That’s how I made Ghost Variations and many of my projects. Sometimes the beginning is intuitive, and later it becomes logical or methodological. Or the other way around—I start with a method of technical exploration and, in the process, I discover things to reference.
For example, my first mural—the largest one I’ve ever done, and probably the largest I’ll ever do—was with Related Group in Miami. It was 8,000 square meters. In fact, to this day, it is also the largest mural in the history of Florida, and it had to be approved by the City Council because, even though it is private property, it is located in a public space, and the city contributes resources for its maintenance. It is now part of the city’s heritage.
One day, they invited me to make a quick proposal, so I literally made a digital collage with fragments of paintings that already existed, sketched a composition, sent it off, and the next day they told me, “You have to travel to Miami the day after tomorrow to present the mural.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? I just made a quick sketch!”
They picked me up at the airport, I had a coffee, and suddenly I was already at the City Council, presenting the project. I walked out to applause and with the approval, trembling with nerves, not really knowing what had just happened. Then I spoke with the architects and saw the model—they had already photoshopped my mural and expanded it across nine walls. It was only then that I realized the scale.
We had to make decisions along the way, and that gave me space to play. Once it was approved, I completely changed the project. I mean, not a single brushstroke from what I initially delivered remained. I discarded it and started a new project in which I dared to create another kind of collage, much more conceptual, with things I had never integrated before. I had never combined my interest in music, for example, with traditional Japanese graphics—which I love—or with the influence of Miami Art Deco. This mural allowed me to create a language that was completely new for me, which was absolutely challenging, but allowed me to integrate many of my interests.
And then, of course, came the challenge of how to execute it at that scale, with heights between 14 and 20 meters and hundreds of meters in length. It was 8,000 square meters in total, 10 or 12 city blocks. The execution took a year and a half, while the planning took just one month.
It was a huge operational challenge, and I learned how to deal with contracts, timelines, preliminary projects, adjustments, and how to consider all voices. Because, as artists, we are not always involved in the processes of others—in this case, architects and real estate developers. But here I had the good fortune of experiencing the entire process, and from that point on, in all the murals I’ve done, I propose from the outset that there has to be a predisposition from all parties for everything to be negotiable and adjustable. In other words, everything is subject to adaptation. For example, you arrive to paint a wall, and it turns out it’s been changed, or “actually, not anymore,” or the architect redesigned it. So you have to adapt. That’s why I understand projects at this scale as something that has to mutate—where the proposal is the starting point, but when it comes time to paint, there can be many transitions and adjustments.
TWS – Landscape is a space of research for you. Which artists who work with landscape interest you?
OB – Gary Hill, Matthew Barney, with his work on the Cremaster Cycle. They are artists who move back and forth between landscape. Van Gogh, for me, has always been an artist with an exceptional ability to observe space, like very few others. From him, for example, David Hockney derives. I also like the work of Robert Smithson, the Land Art made by Walter De Maria… artists who literally pulled the landscape in, brought it into the gallery, and deepened it conceptually. Ana Mendieta is constantly moving between the interior of the body and the exterior—landscape, nature…
I think of landscape as something beyond a mere compositional element, a decorative theme, or a reference to the world we live in. For me, whether we want it or not, the image constantly exists within it. Through art, you can annul the landscape; I’m intrigued by artists who do this and who turn it into a more ethereal space. I’m drawn to landscape when it appears as a mental space, not only a visual one. I myself have tried to annul it by cutting everything into verticals, as in that mural of mine at Meta’s offices, and even then, a horizontal line appears that creates depth. I constantly revisit the different ways of understanding landscape.
TWS – Your installations are crossed by a material sensitivity in which the different bodies of the world become diffuse, as wood coexists with hair, nails, corals, glass beads, feathers, mirrors, and paper. And yet, they don’t feel like debris, but rather like evocations of something almost metaphysical—poetic logics that inaugurate another sense of time.
OB – That comes, in part, from having grown up in the Mayan world. Growing up in the Yucatán Peninsula marked me deeply, where you would go to the beach, and right next to it, there would be a ruin covered in mud and plants. You are constantly rediscovering ruins; new things always appear to you—things that at the same time belong to an ancient past. In Mexico, we have a great wealth of treasures. You dig just a little, and something appears: bones, coins… we always find something, and in that something there is both a blessing and a curse, interestingly enough.
All of that experience blended with my family heritage, which is also Egyptian and Spanish. References to the Arab world, the Mayan world, and the religiosity of the Spanish world coexist within me. I have always wanted that mixture to be reflected in my work. For there to be a bit of modern typography, geometric abstraction, and glitches very much tied to 1990s technology. I scan things and glitch them, stain them, trying to energize them with what is alive, with the energy of the now. I think in layers—about what comes from before, from wear and erosion. Because wear, sometimes, refines something so beautifully that it turns it into a jewel, a treasure.
When I find things discarded after a hurricane or while walking along the beach—like, for example, some damn little branch that is incredibly beautiful and elegant—I tell myself, “With this I can make a treasure that is already a treasure in itself, but how do I show it to make another treasure?” I understand that a craftsperson does something similar. I’ve always been fascinated by the artisanal work in Mexico: ceramics, jewelry, glass, textiles… name it, and it exists here.
I look at the fibers of a plant that, after going through so many things, has become something completely different—sometimes functional, sometimes aesthetic, sometimes ritual. Having visited ruins and being able to see the tomb of Pakal in Chiapas, when that was still possible, allowed me to understand the entire ritual process involved in preparing someone for eternity, or at least for the memory of their eternity. For example, his jade mask: what was once a raw stone was polished until it became a sheet barely half a millimeter thick so it could be inlaid into a mask, over and over again, thousands of times, until it was achieved.
These kinds of reflections came to me as I made more collage—seeing a little piece of a bus ticket, a little piece of a toothpaste box, which were the materials I had at hand when I started; an earring lying in the street. I would say, “Dude, this would look incredible.” I realized that simply by bringing together what I found, I could speak about my own history, my context, and other contexts, and I understood that I could translate that into artistic experiences with a specific intention.
I often tell people who work with collage: always play, but constantly ask yourself, what are the rules of your game? How are you playing? What are you playing with? Because you can stretch the game within those rules. And then ask yourself, how can you reconfigure them? In other words, you are making variations of your own work. It took me years to discover and understand this.
48 x 52 x 13 cm / 19 x 20.5 x 5.2 in
Postcard, polaroid, shell, feather and rocking chair fragments on wood in glass box with brass structure.
Feedback is also very important, because many people came to me and revealed things I hadn’t understood about my own work. Dialogue is essential—not only with critics, curators, or artists, but with people who come from other traditions. A craftsperson, for example, who contributes from their own tradition. They’ll tell you, “Yes, but look, my grandfather taught me this,” and you realize that it’s about more than technical knowledge, because it also carries history.
But, well, the way you summarized the question is very beautiful. It’s almost a quote—in fact, for me it already is—because you summarize it very clearly. You can see the intentionality and the whole small cosmogony that is created within an image.
TWS – You create a system of communication in itself through the materiality of different objects. And I find it very beautiful what you described about finding things, which runs across the history of our species. I believe we have always searched for clues and traces in the world around us, as confirmations of a vastness that connects all of us to the whole.
OB – In a way, I’m trying to create a code using very recognizable things. I try to get people a little lost in that code in order to encounter questions about themselves. There is an alchemy that I use as a kind of constellation—between the little branch, the small fang, the fragment of shell, the ancient mask… I intend to provoke a kind of discovery, to push the viewer to be seduced by the aesthetics or by the combination of materials, but above all, to see transformation.
TWS – Since this is one of your central themes, I’d like to ask: what is your interpretation of chaos and order in the creative process and in aesthetic representation?
OB – When composing, I try to understand the duality between order and chaos. I’m very observant, I collect everything, I have a side that is very orderly and that needs order, but I’m also very scattered. Once, I read a quote that said, “Organize yourself, and you will be free.” So I try to understand myself through that drive, in that pendular movement.
TWS – You’ve also ventured into the performing arts, designing and staging performances in collaboration with various artists for the openings of your exhibitions. Could you tell us an anecdote about something weird that happened around a performance?
OB – For someone who can be very controlling and precious with images, as I can be, throwing myself into performance is literally jumping into the void. I approach performance with the willingness to learn, to collaborate, to propose a very flexible starting point with whoever is carrying out the actions with me, because I rarely do them alone. For me, performance is a process of research. I’m even collecting actions in an archive that is rarely seen, but I’ve been investigating it for many years.
I once went to work at Manhattan Art Space in New York with a little notebook full of notes, telling the theater artist Laura Lona, “I’ve never done performance, but I think my work needs to happen in performance.” After seeing my collages and my notes, she said, “Okay, let’s try it.” Working with Laura transformed me. She taught me how to breathe on stage. She made me cry. She made me understand that the moment you stand in front of another person to transform that moment into something else, there will be a consensus of communication through the body. That’s why, in every gesture, you need to understand what you are living.
Over time, I’ve been doing actions, and I’ve become aware of my limitations within them. I still don’t work much with dialogue or with voice. I work a lot with physical gestures. I think of them almost as rituals, as symbolic elements. I consider that almost everything I’ve done has been erratic, yet very magical, and I believe that over time it will gain value in how I understand my practice and my contribution to exhibition dynamics.
I’ll tell you a very wild anecdote from Peru. I did a rehearsal thinking about a chapter of the Ghost Variations project that has to do with a shipwreck and with being at sea during a storm. One of the most basic sensations for a person when entering the sea is the idea of nausea, dizziness, and instability. So I made a sketch and invited the bassist of a very good band from Peru to help me create an atmosphere for an action in which both I and the audience would experience vertigo. The performance was going to be presented at a fictitious biennial, a Biennial of Experimental Art.
The sketch included pulleys and chairs, but when I arrived at the gallery where the performance was supposed to take place, there were no pulleys or chairs. And the bassist I had rehearsed with canceled on me the day before. Still, he took me to a punk band concert and introduced me to his replacement. He said, “You’re going to play with him.” It was a drummer who played incredibly well, Santiago Pillado. When I saw him, I was completely intimidated. I thought, “No way, this guy is a genius.” I don’t even know how to read a note—how am I supposed to direct him in a performance?
I only told him about the shipwreck scene and the idea of water—humidity, water entering a ship and sinking it, how someone tries to grab onto a piece of wood and survive, and go with the current. I told him a romantic idea of landscape, you know? The shipwreck and the sublime. And he said, “Alright, great, we’ll do it tomorrow, Omar, but I only have 15 minutes because after that I have to go record.” He lived one block away from where we were going to perform.
I arrived without rehearsing, with nothing. The performance started at 7:00 and had to end at 7:15. I arrived at ten minutes to seven, and he arrived two minutes before seven. He showed up with his drum kit drenched in water. Dripping water. I saw it and just froze, like, “What the hell, man?”
He brought a vinyl record that was completely broken, put it on, and said, “Throw something at me, I’ll follow you.” So I asked him, “Why is your drum kit wet? Because of what I told you?” And he said, “No, my library flooded. All my books just got soaked. And the drum kit got wet too, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.” So he walked over with his drums all wet, his clothes wet. I plugged in my turntables, but there was a voltage difference, and they burned out. The turntables no longer spun, but the audio could still be heard. Fine. And that was two minutes before the performance started.
Then Santiago told me again, “Throw something at me and I’ll follow you.” And literally, out of the shipwreck came one of the most magical performances we’ve ever done in our lives.
I literally grabbed an oscillator, made a loop, and started scratching records that were stopping on their own because the turntable could no longer spin. With those scratches, I generated a beat over which he began to improvise with his wet drum kit. Then I broke chairs and wrote a text using the splinters. The nausea and dizziness in my imagination of a shipwreck shifted from a completely physical action to a more symbolic one, a sonic action in which nausea was no longer literally a body out of balance, but also a record that cannot spin. A dimension beyond what happens to a person.
It’s the anecdotes that make up some performances. Maybe later you see them on video, and you won’t feel them. It’s very difficult to document certain actions. I’ve seen this with many pieces at MoMA and other museums. The videos are incredibly boring, sometimes extremely long, but being there, the presence, is something else. Some performances say everything with a single photograph. I research this a lot. What you’re asking me is part of my living research. I mean, I’m constantly asking myself how to effectively communicate these things.
TWS – Many of us are frozen by the fear of stepping outside the plan, of doing things we don’t know. How do you overcome that?
OB – Despite going through tunnels and very dark places, I consider myself someone who seeks happiness. I try to live without fear, and I don’t have specific fears. I truly couldn’t name one. I’m at a point in my life where I accept what happens, what I can and cannot do. I try to look for joy even though every day I pass through tunnels.
Fear is extremely important, for better and for worse. Unfortunately, it’s been demonized, even though it’s a great teacher. In reality, it’s the path toward your consciousness and your freedom. What it does is transform you. Through however dark the tunnel may be, you find a new balance, learning to be whole within uncertainty. You can corner fear until, suddenly, it comes back. You feel it, but don’t let it affect you or paralyze you. In the end, fear is a defining trait of the creator of the creative person. And I say creative because I don’t like to think in terms of “artist,” but in more human terms: someone who has a creative nature. A creative person starts a small company, a business they have to dare to enter. Of course, they’ll experience a dose of adrenaline and fear, but that dose is what creates a spark, which places you in a zone of challenge. That’s the path of learning, and it makes you very alert, very attentive to what you’re living, because you’re more, more, more alive. In Mexico, we say “estar a las vivas,” which means you’re awake, alert in the present, attentive to what might go right and what might go wrong.
When I was about to go study in Yucatán, I lied to get a scholarship. They gave me the scholarship, and I told my mom, “Most likely my dad won’t be able to pay more than a year of tuition at that university, because it’s very expensive even with the scholarship. Why should I go if I don’t even know whether I’ll be able to finish the degree?” And she said to me, “You don’t know how that year is going to change your life. Live it, and then we’ll see what happens.” And it changed my life. I mean, live things first and then see what happens. Because you’re complicating things before living them: if you fill yourself with fears and knots and doubts and uncertainties, you limit yourself by thinking you might not be able to see the whole movie. It doesn’t matter. Watch half the movie. Maybe you’ll want to keep watching it, and you’ll find a way to do so, or maybe after watching half of it, you won’t even be interested anymore. We can’t always—and don’t always want to—know what comes next. What matters is that there’s a spark. Embrace fear. Be part of it.
TWS – What do you think we could improve in the cultural industry that is contemporary art? Where do you think we need to work collectively to achieve better collective conditions for production, collecting, and dissemination?OB – Unfortunately, an artistic career is very endogamous. You spend a lot of time alone, and it seems there’s a collective fear of talking with colleagues about the difficult aspects of art. And when we do talk about them, it turns into a collection of complaints; there aren’t necessarily solutions, and it’s very hard to arrive at proposals. Even so, it’s important to talk among colleagues. I personally face extremely tough challenges as a professional. The circumstances under which this cultural industry operates are very demanding, which is why it’s important to support one another, to be genuinely solidary and also transparent, to look for ways to work as a team.
I think there should be something like an Artists Anonymous—like Alcoholics Anonymous—where conversation becomes a therapeutic element of care, allowing us to open up, trust one another, and have a circle where you can lean on others and create solutions, you know? And I think more generosity is needed. It’s still a profession with a lot of jealousy. We all go through that until we understand it—until we understand how absurd it is. Because of the way the industry has been handled, the artist has become very dependent. And just as there is no game without players, there are no exhibitions without artists producing art. That’s why we’re also seeing the emergence of artist-run spaces, independently managed galleries, and so on.
Still, I think this is a scary moment. And that’s why it’s frightening too. It’s frightening because the entire geopolitical map is at a breaking point, where the people who traditionally sustained this industry are holding onto their money and waiting to see what happens. As a result, we artists will face a very complex situation. Speculation is affecting this field deeply. So not only artists, but anyone working in creative fields, depends greatly on building solidarity in the face of this reconfiguration. Because once again, those who have a lot are going to try to take everything, and those who don’t will have to fight to hold onto what little they have. It’s polarizing again in that direction.
In my context, there is stress. I see many of the problems we live with in my city, in my country, in the world. They are full of contrasting realities. I’m politically aware, but I look to art as a more spiritual, more poetic space. I believe that in generosity, in management, in these other spaces, there is a more political action—if you want to see it that way. Seeking joy and generosity, for me, has to do with sharing what we do, seeking dialogue, seeking platforms, throwing a party, having a gathering, sharing a meal, and constantly sharing and generating.
I nourish myself from what I live with others, from a poet’s line, from a style, from a film. I’m constantly absorbing from others. I try to fall in love with life, and loving has to do with admiring. I look for the best in people, in situations.
TWS – Now that you mention solidarity and artist-run spaces, tell us about your parallel projects: Carpintruenos and Recover.
OB – These are the kinds of things I get into with my heart, without really knowing what I’m getting into. Carpintruenos began as a gesture of solidarity, bringing a cordless chainsaw to a building that had collapsed at Eugenia and Gabriel Mancera during the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City. I wanted to contribute something, and I stayed working there that night. The adrenaline of being there, helping, belongs to a realm of experiences that can’t really be told. It’s something deeply human, where you feel both anarchy and the very real power of doing something that might help save a life. That feeling became very contagious.
With friends, we opened a chat group to share photos from that moment when we felt like heroes and felt we were helping. And the next day, everyone was like, “Dude, a multifamily building collapsed in Tlalpan—we have to go help.” And the next day, “Hey, this collapsed—let’s go help.” We formed caravans and started meeting every night to work. Suddenly, the idea came up to go to Morelos, another Mexican state that was badly affected by the earthquake.
There, we met people who had traveled from Tijuana or San Diego to bring money. They told us, “We go and give it directly to whoever we decide,” because in the face of ongoing distrust toward authorities, people prefer to support those affected directly. One of our colleagues spoke with them about our desire to build temporary wooden houses for people who had lost their homes, and suddenly, he told me, “Hey, they donated 150,000 pesos to us at the lumberyard as credit, so we can use whatever materials we want.” That covered the first two months, and then people began contributing on their own. For example, I used the influence I have in the art world with clients, collectors, and friends. I opened a call for anyone who wanted to donate something.
In that way, improvisation slowly became organized. We kept accounts, declared how resources were used, made commitments, and the project basically lasted two years, during which we went back and forth to Morelos every weekend. Unfortunately, the project gradually dissolved because life pulled us back into our routines. We did what we could, and it was a very transformative experience on a human level. I was perhaps the most visible face of the group because of my career, and I used that in our favor to raise funds, but I wasn’t the project leader, because our work was horizontal.
In fact, we artists were the ones who learned the most from the masters who actually knew how to build. They taught us—and I’m not talking about older people, but even someone younger than us who had much more experience in construction. We called him Maestro Santiago, but he was just a young guy. Sadly, he passed away recently. He was the energy that brought us together in action. I handled the management and fundraising, and everyone else found their role. In Carpintruenos, each person found, according to their personality, their way of contributing.
With Re Cover, something similar happened. It started as a gathering among friends who, at that time, would get together to watch YouTube videos, back when the platform was just starting and felt revolutionary. There weren’t even ads yet. We would have video nights with a theme, and everyone would arrive with a playlist. We talked about music and exchanged music. Then someone said, “Let’s do an exhibition of album covers,” and I said, “Oh yeah, but that’s kind of boring if it’s just us friends—let’s make it something broader.” That led to an open call with close to 200 artists participating. The response was huge, and suddenly we had a hundred works. Willy Cauce, the director of Casa del Lago, opened the doors of the venue for us to exhibit there. It was also a time when vinyl records were still very nostalgic—they weren’t yet the trend they’ve become today.
It was the time of the MP3 boom, and I felt a deep nostalgia or melancholy for LPs, because album covers were very important in my path. I still believe it’s a very powerful format for visual communication. Even though many successful artists passed through Recover, it’s a project that couldn’t be sustained. I never managed to make it commercial or profitable; I always lost money with it. But I loved the community and the energy that emerged from it, and to this day, I still maintain exchanges and collaborations with many of those artists or people I met there.
I think these projects are very naïve, but also very beautiful ways of doing PR and of opening public spaces of social support. I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to fly a flag, as if to imply that this is also my artwork.
TWS – What is your work for you?
OB – It’s the place where I don’t answer to anyone, only to my soul and my experiences, with the will to integrate them into a circuit of communication. I want to make my work in my own way, because it takes a lot of courage to express yourself in very personal ways that are valuable.
Lately, I want to build, to do architecture, and I’ve been looking at architects that absolutely blow my mind—from Africa, from Asia—who understand materials like bamboo. I wish I had the money to learn from my architect friends, to sit down and problematize space. Sitting with friends to question problems is something I’ve done with musicians when I’ve collaborated with them. From the awareness that they know more than I do, and that’s why they intimidate me—but I cross that fear and approach them with courage, making them believe that we’re going to do something cool even though I don’t know how to read a single note, getting them excited by an image so we can make something together. When I manage that, they do the same in return.
That’s how I’m now working with sculpture and dance. I enter into a conversation, then into designing sketches with choreographers, and then I make little pieces of jewelry to try to approach dance through objects. In short, I try to throw myself into interdisciplinarity with a strong will to learn. I want to feel that my work can go anywhere, expand into any technique, discipline, or process.
Maybe the craziest thing is that I might make an exhibition where I seem like four or five different authors, because I’m bringing together things that happen to me in parallel. And even though they might sometimes seem incongruent, for me, they are very articulate. That’s how the minimalist and the baroque coexist in my work. That’s my kind of madness. I don’t forbid myself from making leaps. I’m playing, and I try to understand the moment when I can share it most effectively for my own work, not so much outwardly, but to find the raw material of communication, a material of transformation where I discover things I didn’t even expect myself.
TWS – And among the things one doesn’t expect, you have an Instagram profile, El camino de la gordi [The path of the fatty], dedicated to your food sharings and experiences. Beyond the obvious, what place does the pursuit of food-guided moments occupy in your life?
OB – I love food. Every time I go to Quintana Roo, I get my mom to cook while I record her and preserve her recipes. I watch how she improvises, and I realize that I’ll never cook like her—I’ll only learn from her and invent my own way of cooking. That’s how I see art. You’re never going to be the artist your teacher is. You’re going to be the artist that you are. No matter how much you try to copy that recipe, you don’t have that seasoning, that sense of smell, that intuition.
I really like thinking of food as something that feeds the creative spirit. I see how many of my friends create environments where food is the excuse to debate, to understand living, creative thought. In their practices, food has a very important value as a place of convergence. But it’s not the place where I situate my own practice. I love eating while I work.
In fact, food remnants do matter to me as part of my practice. There’s a lot of my work where, if you look closely, you can see that the little treasures were leftover oysters, the snail I ate. I took its shell with me and washed it. Or fish bones—I took those too. I had to wash those damn bones and let them dry. People always stare at me in restaurants like, “What the hell is wrong with this guy, this damn vagabond taking all that stuff? They invite him to eat at the fanciest seafood place, and he does this!”
In that sense, I also find something beautiful in food: for a moment, it literally makes class disappear. The fish you eat is the same; it comes from the same place. What changes it are the different experiences—champagne on a yacht or a beer at the fisherman’s table. But for me, that space is very horizontal. Everything dissolves there. I can’t deny the contexts, of course, but in my fantasy, it’s the place where I become equal and where the other becomes equal. Where can we be talking and eating the same thing, right?
There’s an entire sociological discussion around this. But I’m telling you this as a romantic way of understanding that food is everyone’s ritual. Obviously, it changes depending on who you sit with, but in my fantasy, it doesn’t matter who you sit with—you’re doing the same thing as the other, and in the end, the other needs the same thing you do. Absolutely.
Find more about Omar Barquet on his website or Instagram.
Learn more about Omar Barquet at TWS:
TWS Broadcast: S02E09: Omar Barquet Ghosts, Hurricanes and Sheer Freedom
Weird Bookshelf: Omar Barquet. The Passage of Amnesia. Ghost Variations, 1st Regression
Omar’s studio is a place where you feel the bliss of creation in progress, the good vibes of his team, and the delight of great music played at a loud volume. So fun, you even forget it is a working (and highly productive) space.
