THE HOLLOW OF YOUR THROAT
Luisebastián Sanabria
03.01.24-03.15.24
The Hollow of Your Throat is a show about language that is non-verbal and actions that create space for understanding. Through both video and text-based works, Bogotá-based artist and writer, Luisebastián Sanabria, considers the weight of correspondence and the intricate counterbalance of family bonds.
In the two-channel video installation Entre pecho y espalda (2021) the artist and his father hold bags of coffee equivalent to each other’s body weight. “He carries my weight on his back; I carry his weight on my shoulder,” Sanabria writes of the physical and metaphorical gesture of endurance they perform. “We repeated the action throughout 2021, every time I was able to travel to El Playón, the town where he lives and works.” With each visit and filming “our weights changed but, for me, he has always been heavier.”
The seeming simple act they repeat together for the camera prompts multiple reads and possibilities. Are they lifting weight? Or bearing it? Are we watching a competition between father and son? Or a shared act of labor (even love)? And if so—which labor? Art or coffee? Their collaboration shifts, but stands firmly entre—between. Although silent, they are communicating; although separate, they are together.
In conversation with the video installation, the exhibition features two text pieces by Sanabria. In the poem, The knots of my throat, installed on the outside of the darkened gallery windows, an intimate address takes place on a public page:
A ti, que traes a cuestas la siembra de tu padre.
He querido escribirte desde el útero —nada se ve.
The poem Tu nombre sobre mi nombre, asks for a closer read. The limited edition, Riso-printed chapbook was created specially for the exhibition and includes Sanabria’s poem in both Spanish and English. It was designed by Igor Arume in collaboration with the Riso Room at the University of Missouri and is available to visitors.
In all three works, we see how relationships grow in the gaps and in the margins: in the space between bodies, between names, between pages. For Sanabria, to share is not always to speak aloud, but to lift—and hold space.
The Hollow of Your Throat will open March 1st in conjunction with the True/False Film Festival. It is free an open to the public.
Luisebastián Sanabria (b. 1991) holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Javeriana University and an advanced degree in photography from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Writer and artist, he runs “Dos Filos”, a queer publisher house focused on the visibility of sexual dissidents. Luisebastián has participated in Programa de Artistas at Universidad Torcuato Di tella, Buenos Aires (ARG), and in Escuela Flora, at Flora ars+natura, Bogotá (CO). He has been artist–in-residence at KIOSKO, Bolivia; Centro Hipermediático Experimental Latinoamericano- cheLA, Argentina; CAMPO and Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Uruguay; Casa Tres Patios and Plataforma Canibal, Colombia. In 2020, Luisebastián published his first book, Sé huir.
Tu nombre sobre mi nombre. Limited edition, Riso-printed chapbook in both Spanish and English. Designed by Igor Arume in collaboration with the Riso Room at the University of Missouri.
