as salt is to food
november 2024 - january 2025
november 2024 - january 2025
Listen to me, listen to my silence.
What I say is never what I say, but something else.
-Clarice Lispector
We take a bite. The flavor permeates our tongue, floods our mouth. The salt is salty; we don't see it, but it's salty. It salts our tongue, it salts our mouth. The grains of salt moisten and dissolve in our salty saliva. We inhale and exhale salty air. We cry salty tears. Our world turns to salt for a moment. We swallow.
Pursuing what cannot be seen but is perceived and floods us, Ana Sofia Esteva poses countless questions with her work: What does silence sound like? What shape does breath have? How much space is needed to enclose what has been whispered? How is a broken moment portrayed? How much does emptiness weigh?
But above all: how do we know that what has no form is there? We know it with our tongues, even though our eyes cannot see it. We hear it with the teeth that grind and dissolve it. We barely smell it. We distinguish it in the light because it is what casts a faint shadow.
This exhibition is an archive of formal speculations and explorations of near-nothing; that which has the thickness of a sheet of paper, the weight of a grain of salt, the density of a breath, the length of an instant, and the force of a heartbeat. To explore it, it is necessary to sharpen not only our sight but also our hearing, our taste, and our touch in order to perceive the invisible.
Like Clarice Lispector, who by destiny goes in search and by destiny returns empty-handed, but returns with the unspeakable, Ana Sofia also compels us to peer into the silence in order to find there the murmur of what has never been said but what we have always heard.
Carolina Magis Weinberg