Así se las ponían a Fernando VII

They say that Fernando VII enjoyed playing billiards and that the balls were positioned so that making the shot was almost inevitable. From this comes the expression: “Así se las ponían a Fernando VII.” Some people, even before they begin to play, already have part of the game decided in their favor.

A red carpet runs through the space. On it, billiard balls disrupt the path. What may be arranged in someone’s favor can become, for someone else, something they have to avoid. The same scene thus brings together two ways of understanding position: the position one occupies within a game and the one that determines how one moves through a space.

The work emerges from within the art world, observing its forms of circulation and recognition: getting in, crossing paths, being seen, finding oneself in the right place. But a trajectory never depends solely on the person following it. Where one begins also matters, as does what appears along the way and which conditions were already in place before one arrived.

Not every game begins with the first shot. Some began long before, when someone decided where to place the balls.