2026
Instalation
Duo show with Gabriela Salomón
Modified music boxes, presence sensor, XIAO ESP32, installation tools and materials.
Variable dimensions.
Installation presented at Julio Artist Run Space in Paris, France.
The tools used to install an exhibition, those that usually disappear just before the public arrives, have remained in the space. These objects that pass from hand to hand—a ladder, a crate, a hammer, something kept in case it is needed—do not belong to Espacio Cabeza, the Guadalajara-based space collaborating on this proposal, but they could have. On display, they cease to be mere tools and become witnesses to the amount of work, time and willingness it takes to sustain an independent space.
Perhaps this is precisely how an independent space is built. Without an entirely convincing explanation. With what is at hand. With what someone brings. With someone who opens it once again, even without a sufficiently convincing reason. There is an affective economy in these gestures, a kind of persistence that blurs the boundaries between work, attention and simply existing.
This is why it matters that Chorale takes place at Julio. What moves from one space to another is not merely a collection of objects, but a way of doing things. Two places that recognise each other through their ability to endure, to take chances and to shift boundaries.
The exhibition explores what makes a relationship possible without an external cause to explain it. A closeness, a willingness, a way of being together. Between two artists and two spaces, the proposal sits at the point where sustaining something becomes a way of bringing it into being.
A small music box mechanism joins the installation tools, attached to each object as though it had sprouted there by chance. The cylinder, the teeth, the metal comb—everything is visible. The mechanism responds to proximity. Someone approaches, and the tool sings.
Then something unforeseen takes place in the space. One person activates a sound, then another, and another. The sounds intertwine, fade away and return. Sometimes silence prevails. Sometimes there are too many sounds at once. No one conducts this score. There is no finished piece waiting to be heard. Each person who enters changes the whole.
This is what Chorale is about. A music that does not exist in isolation. Something that emerges between objects and people, between a tool and the person who chooses to use it.
It is also about the bond between the artists, here Diego González Gómez and Gabriela Salomón. And perhaps, too, about the relationships formed by any space that stays alive without our knowing exactly why. Some relationships need no justification to endure, only the additional energy someone brings by setting them in motion once again.
Marco Valtierra