Bats aren’t birds and whales aren’t fish.

And yet they all breathe.

In among the large number of books I read or consulted while preparing this text I came across a piece of paper used to mark a particular chapter. Now turned into something else, the paper had the word “transfer” written on it in uppercase. It more than likely had to do with an economic transaction, an unthinking straightforward note that managed to survive, totally removed from the meaning I could or would like to give it now: a meaning assigned to an open process like the narrative that accompanies these works and their coming together in the one place.

A word that kept cropping up, to be looked at or perhaps to look at us in and through it.

It strikes one as odd that, in the dense jungle of definitions, a certain symbolic order of inclusions and exclusions is still at work, which in fact serves to tell us that the boundaries between words and gestures are increasingly fuzzier. And it is here, in the terrain of polysemy, when language becomes an act of replacement, an element that is not just the outer wrapping of thoughts but something those words use to mediate and give meaning to something. If possible, transforming the word into a bodily gesture, despite knowing that we are trapped in a continuous process of mediation.

Over the course of time, any endeavour to define symbols and gestures has derived into a somewhat dispiriting action. This might be due to the fact that gestures are intuitive and intangible, while symbols are slippery, reminding us of the elusive nature of things. Because in this perpetual present of accelerated dynamics in which we find ourselves, left hanging in suspension, we need to focus our gaze in order to respond to the exuberance that still exists in reality. A daunting reality in which, for all intents and purposes, almost everything can be symbolized and which continues to tentatively reveal the ritualization concealed in everyday actions, which can only be captured through another distinct underlying simplicity.

However small it may be, the ritual act is both cause and effect. It preserves, encapsulated, a rich perceptive world rife with magical potential that enables a dramatic redefinition of our corporeal capacities and, with it, makes identity vanish in a new inside and outside that endlessly circle around one another. The ritual impregnates the gesture and it is then when the manipulative process can be translated from ideas to organs, expanding like tentacles that penetrate the muscles, contract the joints and take over the act of breathing.

Our breathing.

The works of M Reme Silvestre and Young-jun Tak co-inhabit this space for a limited time, producing a new corporeal affection in those engaging with them. Each one encloses every particle of the visible in a boundless latency, co-opting us into an intimacy that seems at first to be both impenetrable and at once redolent. As subjects, we become something akin to accomplices in these works. We give them meaning with our presence when the gesture encompasses our gaze, our bodies or our oxygen and all of this expands unknowingly to whoever receives it. Because belonging to a mass allows us to erase our individuality and it is in this contextual relativity when the mix comes into play.

In this rite of initiation of sorts one can discern the metaphorical stain of the soul, which needs to be reconfigured under creative processes that present the world to us in a precise and sensual manner, wonderfully accessible in a realm where everything possesses a singular authenticity. And so, under a powerful erotic metonymy, we can taste the fear, anxiety or pleasure which all share the same synchronicity.

The atmosphere is heavy with another gravity and with nuances permeated with meanings now freed from the constraint of words, instead displaying those constant, overlooked features we conserve from a much more primitive conception. The world is still a cryptic place, revealed now by a succession of planes in which, when removing all mystification, we can continue to extend our appendages. Acknowledging that matter can be wonderful even if it has no purpose.

As subjects we walk alone and yet all together, levelled in this space by circumstances. We are strangely beautiful in our self-absorption.

We have breathed in fire, only we haven’t realized it yet.

We keep on burning.

(Text by Diana Guijarro)