P007 → Things Losing Their Hardness
Things losing their hardness is an ongoing project engaging excerpts of text from poetry and literature while exploring materially the idea of book, text and communication. I was interested in emphasizing the nature of language and communication as a durational practice, and the reason I started thinking about materials that had a temporality or a sense of duration. I wanted to create something that had to be witnessed, but also that expanded the duration of a speech discourse beyond human speed.
Things Are Losing Their Hardness, 2024
Using a short fragment of one of the six soliloquies in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and 3 borrowed/appropriated images I built seven things demanding duration and my own reflection on the use of language. Candles meant to be consumed by the fire and disappear emulate the nature of spoken words gone with the wind. Images expected to communicate more than a thousand words are somehow silent.”
Things losing their hardness, 2024, beeswax, hardware.
Common Ground (2025) exhibition view.
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Entre el cielo y la tierra (Between Heaven and Earth), 2023
"Between Heaven and Earth" is an installation composed of two opposing poems, as if they were a message and a response. The first poem, borrowed from Lope de Vega, is entirely made of paraffin. Each letter of the sonnet was taken from a mold to write the sonnet, forming a candle resembling a tombstone destined to disappear.
As it burns and melts upon itself, its message erases progressively, becoming inaccessible and unintelligible, like a discourse that is forgotten after being spoken. The second poem, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is arranged on the ground over six white tiles. It is made of black smoke pigment and presents itself as fallen residue that can only be erased by the wind, a distracted foot that shakes it, or a mechanical force that makes it vanish.
Although both poems are closely situated, one tends upwards with the flame as an intermediary that produces soot, blending with the space, while the other can only remain tied to the earth due to its weight. Both messages, clearly expressions of love, accompany and recite each other, without the possibility of becoming one.
Entre el cielo y la tierra (Between Heaven and Earth), 2023, Paraffin, wooden shelf, industrial tile, black smoke pigment.
Installation view from the exhibition “Amar la hizo libre” in Centro Cultural Hacienda el Cedro, Museo Francisco de Paula Santander.
Although both poems are closely situated, one tends upwards with the flame as an intermediary that produces soot, blending with the space, while the other can only remain tied to the earth due to its weight. Both messages, clearly expressions of love, accompany and recite each other, without the possibility of becoming one.
This project was produced in the context of “Amar la hizo libro“ a curatorial project by David Julián Cortés and María Antonia Fernández for the Centro Cultural Hacienda el Cedro, Museo Francisco de Paula Santander. The proposal gathered a handful of Colombian artist from emerging to established and intended to reflect upon the role of Telenovelas
(Soap Operas) in the conception of cultural identity and the artmaking practice. The invitation to participate in the exhibition came along with a comunal exercise in which all participating member agreed on watching and creating a work inspired by “La Pola: Amar la hizo libre”.
From this curatorial exercise and the interviews with artists involved in the project, David made “ASCENSO, INFLUENCIA Y CAÍDA DEL CÍCLOPE” the video document acompanying the exhibition and whichcan be accessed here in Spanish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwR83L2Kkco