Simulacros de cimiento
Solo show by Sofía Salazar Rosales
Simulacros de cimiento
Solo show by Sofía Salazar Rosales
10 September - 26 October 2024
Credits
Juan Felipe Paredes
Goro Studio
Degree zeroes and the damp earth that architects call bad soil.
Far from the coasts, the bodies that boast of height are named buildings. To reach it, enormous and noisy machines dig into the ground and construct retaining walls. In this space, sheltered from organic constitutions, the land is pierced with thick textured beams that rise, with poured concrete adhering to them. These large underground capsules face the constant movements caused by the fires of the mantle and the heavy moisture of mud and clay. I mythologize the construction of buildings in an attempt to reach the symbolic fibers of height.
As a poetic concept, height resonates with different cultural sensitivities across countless latitudes: temples, trees, stars. In particular, the height of a building carries with it the muffled whisper of nature, threatening to disrupt the tranquility of its carefully crafted system, as well as raising the question of the fate of its workers. From the observer’s perspective, height lifts our heads and pushes us backward, throwing off our center of gravity and straining our necks. Contrary to our experience, the subjects that the artist creates are hunched. About these tensions, and under the watchful observation of coaxial heads of displaced and discarded banana clusters—ancestors and witnesses of a constant journey—Sofía Salazar Rosales (Quito, 1999) draws and constructs with materials closely linked to construction and commerce, creating spaces that contain the emotional memory of people, workers, and transient subjects. Sofía’s work inscribes the memory of water, the very substance that gives body to the concrete that forms cities, and which also represents its greatest threat. This selection of works presents a parallel exploration that Sofía has been developing around fatigue and its various manifestations in bodies not limited to the human.
Thanks to a suspended and provided space, this body of work finds—faced with the insufficiency of established discourses on agricultural labor and the displacement that comes with it—a dialectal articulation in gesture: a cadence in the physical handling of the pieces to make them stand, and a series of tonal characteristics in the material that inevitably accompany us when we leave the room, in the tips of our fingers, the soles of our shoes, and the fibers of our clothes. These works, constructed allegories, protect the subject from being objectified, remove their image from the center of the discussion, and explore their physicalities, sensitivities, and subjects of affection. I observe their unsteady path and become a witness to the discovery of their own structural systems for height. Bodies that are waiting for something curve their spines; Yemayá, the Yoruba deity associated with the sea, also present in Cuban Santería, rests on their shoulders in protection and shelter necklaces.
Underlying these explorations is another poetic layer, one that concerns the effects of travel and displacement on memory and the ways of relating of entire peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, the aftermath of uprooting, and a consequent enunciative power in transit. Over the past months, the plastic that Sofía has used to cover the floor of her studio has borne witness to the production of her pieces, their genesis, and their departures. There are New Age self-help blogs that recommend walking barefoot on the ground, touching the grass occasionally to reconnect with the earth. Barefoot, stepping on the flakes that shed from the bodies Sofía produces would mean piercing our skins with rusty steel. The ground witnesses her passage, that of her pieces, and that of the visitors in the gallery; it holds the memory of them in drawings that fade with the arrival of those who come to experience their presence.
The bananas, already part of Salazar Rosales’ poetics, are absent. We are only in the presence of their culture. “The lines carved in the rocks reveal to us the first impulse of art towards its symbols. Its latent language creeps over the cave wall and, upon descending into the home, surrounds the waist of the oldest pottery. Among the stylized figures of deer and boars, drawn as a mirror of death, shines the most remote poetry of man, almost independent of animal forms, as light as a dawn. Between the fields of the unconscious and the contours of the primitive manual work, its gleam appears in a thread of bloodied grass.” (César Dávila Andrade)
Far from the coasts, the bodies that boast of height are named buildings. To reach it, enormous and noisy machines dig into the ground and construct retaining walls. In this space, sheltered from organic constitutions, the land is pierced with thick textured beams that rise, with poured concrete adhering to them. These large underground capsules face the constant movements caused by the fires of the mantle and the heavy moisture of mud and clay. I mythologize the construction of buildings in an attempt to reach the symbolic fibers of height.
As a poetic concept, height resonates with different cultural sensitivities across countless latitudes: temples, trees, stars. In particular, the height of a building carries with it the muffled whisper of nature, threatening to disrupt the tranquility of its carefully crafted system, as well as raising the question of the fate of its workers. From the observer’s perspective, height lifts our heads and pushes us backward, throwing off our center of gravity and straining our necks. Contrary to our experience, the subjects that the artist creates are hunched. About these tensions, and under the watchful observation of coaxial heads of displaced and discarded banana clusters—ancestors and witnesses of a constant journey—Sofía Salazar Rosales (Quito, 1999) draws and constructs with materials closely linked to construction and commerce, creating spaces that contain the emotional memory of people, workers, and transient subjects. Sofía’s work inscribes the memory of water, the very substance that gives body to the concrete that forms cities, and which also represents its greatest threat. This selection of works presents a parallel exploration that Sofía has been developing around fatigue and its various manifestations in bodies not limited to the human.
Thanks to a suspended and provided space, this body of work finds—faced with the insufficiency of established discourses on agricultural labor and the displacement that comes with it—a dialectal articulation in gesture: a cadence in the physical handling of the pieces to make them stand, and a series of tonal characteristics in the material that inevitably accompany us when we leave the room, in the tips of our fingers, the soles of our shoes, and the fibers of our clothes. These works, constructed allegories, protect the subject from being objectified, remove their image from the center of the discussion, and explore their physicalities, sensitivities, and subjects of affection. I observe their unsteady path and become a witness to the discovery of their own structural systems for height. Bodies that are waiting for something curve their spines; Yemayá, the Yoruba deity associated with the sea, also present in Cuban Santería, rests on their shoulders in protection and shelter necklaces.
Underlying these explorations is another poetic layer, one that concerns the effects of travel and displacement on memory and the ways of relating of entire peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean, the aftermath of uprooting, and a consequent enunciative power in transit. Over the past months, the plastic that Sofía has used to cover the floor of her studio has borne witness to the production of her pieces, their genesis, and their departures. There are New Age self-help blogs that recommend walking barefoot on the ground, touching the grass occasionally to reconnect with the earth. Barefoot, stepping on the flakes that shed from the bodies Sofía produces would mean piercing our skins with rusty steel. The ground witnesses her passage, that of her pieces, and that of the visitors in the gallery; it holds the memory of them in drawings that fade with the arrival of those who come to experience their presence.
The bananas, already part of Salazar Rosales’ poetics, are absent. We are only in the presence of their culture. “The lines carved in the rocks reveal to us the first impulse of art towards its symbols. Its latent language creeps over the cave wall and, upon descending into the home, surrounds the waist of the oldest pottery. Among the stylized figures of deer and boars, drawn as a mirror of death, shines the most remote poetry of man, almost independent of animal forms, as light as a dawn. Between the fields of the unconscious and the contours of the primitive manual work, its gleam appears in a thread of bloodied grass.” (César Dávila Andrade)