Carpet Crawlers

After his mother’s death in 2015, Melanio Zapata reflected on the work his mother carried out as a housekeeper at a motel in Nogales, Arizona, where her daily activities consisted of cleaning rooms and vacuuming halls.

Zapata conceived of Carpet Crawlers as a way to emotionally reconcile himself with the void left by his mother in his own life. But the work also reaches towards the existential parallel of migrant Mexican workers in the United States, whose lives remain hidden, plunged in everyday invisibility as they provide cheap labor for tasks that others refuse to perform.

Zapata set about anonymously stripping and surreptitiously stealing pieces of carpet from the halls of luxury hotels in Southern California where he lodged. He systematically gathered these fragments to create a mosaic carpet that covers a sound installation on which audiences can walk and as they listen to the subtle melody that emanates from the ground.

The song Carpet Crawlers (1974) by Genesis is about fantastical beings that live in the apparent invisibility of rugs. Zapata turns this melody into an anthem for a surreal and moving world populated by lowly crawling creatures struggling to take their place in a world that belongs to others.