La Piel de la Serpiente

The ghostly skins that snakes shed and leave behind manifest a form of growth through rupture and liberation: a pure transformation that reveals discontinuity and fluidity. This simultaneous dimension between serpentine movement and skin transitions shapes the exhibition La Piel de la Serpiente, which bursts forth from the indeterminate to question becoming on a plane of immanence, and, consequently, a multiplicity of forces, fluxes, intensities, passages and connections – subtle and hidden – that exist in circulation between things, bodies and spaces. The transformative character of skin and transition in this exhibition refers to the very circumstance of the space waiting, which exists in the expectant condition of becoming something else – since it is the place where the future ESAP gallery will emerge, but whose decomposed, semi-ruined and misaligned dimension contradicts the school’s current concerted space. Succeeding in a speciality that is transmitted through the virtual – that which has the potential to happen – La Piel de la Serpiente works from the experience of the place, also existing as a kind of mode, that is, as being inherently linked to a suspension of future meaning, which carries within itself what is not yet. This spectral side is also reflected in the sound that forms the image coming from the distant bustle of the city. The exhibition therefore emerges from this spatial and sonic continuity between the public and the private, the open and the closed, the inside and the outside that are established in this unfinished inbetween-space.

Through circular openings that appear as passages, tears, entrances and exits, La Piel de la Serpiente is part of the artist’s ongoing interest in moments of transition that refer to an animal becoming which, in the artist’s words, is linked to “simple and direct actions, unspoken things, silences, smells, images or, ultimately, the possibility of overcoming any distinction between good and bad, between right and wrong, because animals are never wrong”. To ponder animal becoming, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is to think about multiplicities and radical transformations, where the human joins other forms of intensity – that is, life as a process, power and becoming of fluid, desiring, deviant movements. This process of transformation and potentiality shared between becoming-animal and brujos is central to La Piel de la Serpiente, which thus seeks to approach possibilities of transition between experiences and subjectivities, opening itself up to the enigma, to the unspeakable.

Sara Castelo Branco