Online 2025
Layers
Edition XXIII
RESIDENTS
Andrea Beteta Túpac Yupanqui (Peru)
Javiera González Zarzar (Germany - Chile)
Kevin Brophy (United States)
Saint.ioan _ Yana Volkovaya (Ukraine)
Curated by Paula Benítez
The project/platform is temporarily housed across various temporalities, spaces, and languages. The word becomes a weapon, it becomes matter. The theme emerges as a collective discovery. The effect of contagion is always empowering.
I have always been interested in this sensitive quality of matter, capable of registering the way events affect it. A group of artists allowed themselves to rehearse the collective, from affection and care. Offering themselves to others—image, word, gesture, ambiguity—they became matter disposed to be intervened, recontextualized. In each work molded around and during daily life, a layer of the other is housed.
Artists in Residency: reflections by curator Paula Benítez
Perhaps Javiera fell in love with the patterns, or perhaps I did upon seeing her work.
Geometric and sensitive. Modules that repeat and expand. Rhythm, form, cadence, and color.
Layer after layer, between transparency and slowness, I imagine her submerged in an almost obsessive ritual. Immersed in each layer of color she fixes onto the meshes—these containment grids, suspended—where time is caught through lines.
An architectural gaze placed at the service of the fibers, from which she invites us to think about particular and collective rhythms. Different attempts at interlacing, revealing that weaving is not only weaving, but also an affective network and social fabric.
Forms that are born from forms—rhythm, cadence, and color.
Hypnotic, they remain suspended.
Artists in Residency: reflections by curator Paula Benítez
I see a deception. She deceives us with the appearance of deception. Condensing density and humor. Scams that evoke the collapse of scenes once in splendor.
A false impostor.
It seems as though we might be distracted from the rawness and senselessness we inhabit, but it is only a simulacrum—or perhaps not. I believe I can touch the promise; magic and illusion hide behind the humor.
I wonder whether it is still possible to think that images become revolutionary. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that to become everyone is to make world, to make a world. I would like to believe it. They also propose that even if an event is contradicted, suppressed, reclaimed, or betrayed, it does not cease to signify something insurmountable.
As I move through Kevin’s work, the event thickens; humor sustains the simulacrum. In her voice I believe I can touch the promise. Perhaps building worlds is a way of making world.
Artists in Residency: reflections by curator Paula Benítez
I see a deception. She deceives us with the appearance of deception. Condensing density and humor. Scams that evoke the collapse of scenes once in splendor.
A false impostor.
It seems as though we might be distracted from the rawness and senselessness we inhabit, but it is only a simulacrum—or perhaps not. I believe I can touch the promise; magic and illusion hide behind the humor.
I wonder whether it is still possible to think that images become revolutionary. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that to become everyone is to make world, to make a world. I would like to believe it. They also propose that even if an event is contradicted, suppressed, reclaimed, or betrayed, it does not cease to signify something insurmountable.
As I move through Kevin’s work, the event thickens; humor sustains the simulacrum. In her voice I believe I can touch the promise. Perhaps building worlds is a way of making world.
Artists in Residency: reflections by curator Paula Benítez
The insistence is not for, but from the body and the trace. It is for a surface that her body seems unable to touch.
It is the margin made matter. Corporality, spatiality, sonority, and rhythm.
I see a movement in which the body pauses for a second before continuing the trance. Where the word breaks apart and sound becomes a mute echo of subaltern memory.
The tongue grows heavy and burdened. It longs. At times it seems to miss and long for the human. It invokes it.
Her multiple gestures appear between the reverberation of matter and space, in a world of white and deafening noise.