Blanco y Ceniza

History is made of silences in movement.

Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky

Prelude

Mute the white cube or leave it speechless. Pause a space. Move between silences. Silence, a sign that structures all language. Architectures that evoke the need for supports that sustain the unsaid or what will be said. To enter a place where silence becomes the note that generates the sound of what is missing.

First Movement

Deconstruct general linguistics, tearing apart the positivist doctrine that would allow the promised progress. A manual decom(posed) on itself, which, with millimetric precision, leaves the book mute.

Second Movement

To evoke the imperceptible by making it appear among the disappeared. To turn ash into a material of memory. To trace in history, written with capital letters and made of milestones marked by progress and industrialization, the truths hidden in the ideas that modernity deified as solid. In what remains of the solid, we find a story that turns into a greyish trail that functions as a volatile testimony. An ethereal story whose constitution could be blown away by the wind. In the ashes is that which can no longer burn. A history that, with time, could become earth.

Third Movement

To transform the interior of a book into the container of its own residue. To show in its open body what remains of the words that inhabited it. Volumes that burned in its interior becoming mute lines. Remnants of charred letters, of readings that have been set on fire; turned into cremated bodies. Some readings are capable of such intensity that they burn bodies.

Fourth Movement

Put the reading support in motion. Sheets of a book that levitate like a lit candle and flutter gently in a moment of pause. The passivity of reading as an instant of suspension of time. A living flame that interrupts habits, that makes it possible to stop and makes us float in that which its pages tell us.

Fifth Movement

To turn silence into an architectural matter. Piles of white sheets that gag bodies of words turned into tongues. Structures that can speak to us of our forgetfulness of the materials that let things exist. Book and leaves share their origin in the word bark, from which the manufacturing material used in both was extracted.  Cellulose ignites in contact with fire, some books work as silent flames that ignite the bodies of readers and, many times, are the spark of revolt.

Sixth Movement

Clinging a large number of white sheets to construction structures. To produce spatial dialogues where the paper is the element to support. Turned into a plastic substance, the pile of paper twists and contorts. The flimsy material accumulated in layers needs an architecture on which to lean upon.  The white silence of the pages seems to become even more fragile in the robustness of the elements that support it. Piles of immaculate pages that perhaps represent what is to come or the hundreds of minimal, minimized stories that HISTORY does not tell.

Seventh Movement

To count the silent actions that take place, during one minute, between a computer and the server. To break down the exchange, to turn it into physical material. Illegible codes that become data. Invisible and silent navigating algorithms that remind us of the passage from Big History to Big Data. History is composed of data (datum), books are composed of stories.  Datum finds its root in the passive participle of the verb dare. Books and Big Data share dare as a function.

Closing Movement

To dialogue with the inevitable, get closer to silence itself. Death is perhaps that which we dare not name and want to forget that, like the sword of Damocles, hangs by a thread over our heads. It is always there.  It is the infinite silence, it is the mute color, it is the movement we make to approach the ultimate stillness.

An exhibition can be read as the ashes that are scattered to commemorate the departure of that which, at some point, will be forgotten. This exhibition offers havens of silence in a stifling sea of words. Blanco y Ceniza (White and Ash) imprints silences in space-time to make the reflective experience possible. Some silences work like a wild roar that suspends the frenzy of current lives that are increasingly stagnant in novelties, full of distractions, adorned with activities. Juan Antonio Cerezuela’s work turns the act of keeping silence into an active and necessary experience.