The bag, the basket, the sack, the jar or the vessel appear in history not as marginal objects, but as fundamental devices in the material organization of survival. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin proposes precisely this shift: to think that the first great human technology, and a foundational cultural object, was not the weapon but a container. Against the patriarchal narrative built around conquest, flesh, blood and war, emerges the need for things that serve to hold, store and make things last.

The vessel thus occupies a particularly fertile position between device and symbol, between use and projection. It can contain water or food, objects and tools, but it can also contain an image, a reference or an idea. In this transition, it ceases to be merely a utensil and becomes an open form, capable of shifting toward the sculptural, the allegorical or the scenographic. As with the still life, or with certain persistent objects in the history of art, its power lies in this capacity to mutate: to remain a concrete thing while simultaneously activating a symbolic dimension that exceeds it.

In COSAS QUE CARGAN COSAS, a contemporary reworking of these material forms is proposed, now displaced from their primary functionality and traversed by the presence of art. In this gathering of “things,” the hand of the plinth plays a key role, conceived as part of the exhibition design, as a third element that configures and weaves together the project’s central idea. These supports, which elevate, hold and sustain the works, operate as a gesture derived from preservation and presentation, and take on the function of that which has already lost its original purpose. These “plinths” also appear destabilized in their identity, seeking to highlight and accompany the presence of the artwork, at times becoming an extension of the piece rather than a neutral, clinical, reusable and interchangeable device.