Juan Antonio Olivares's 'Moléculas' Animation Explores Memory and Loss Through a Teddy Bear

Juan Antonio Olivares's ten-minute HD-projected animation 'Moléculas' (2017) features a teddy bear named Ted recounting childhood memories on a therapist's couch. The work opens with subtitles referencing a deep memory from youth, panning from the bear's furry feet to its plaintive face, revealing a missing arm. Ted describes crawling out of his family home near a copper mine due to snow-driven curiosity. As the bear limps to a mirror, the perspective shifts inside its stuffing-filled interior, where Ted recalls his mother's difficult life in a mining town, noting she appeared older than her forty years. The monologue feels unscripted and hesitant, touching on themes like maternal preference, her death, and missed funerals. A photograph of a bathroom on the desk leads to an immersive scene where water overflows from a bath, symbolizing escalating painful memories. The bear weeps before exploding into fragments in the final scene, representing death with delicacy and shock. The animation, which avoids clarifying whose story the bear embodies, uses anthropomorphism to explore how bodies are packed with emotions and memories until dissolution. It was first published in the May 2017 issue of ArtReview and was shown at Off Vendome in New York from 19 January to 4 March, though specific exhibition dates are not detailed in the source. The work evokes comparisons to Mike Kelley's explorations of emotion as commodity but focuses on human finitude.