By inviting another young artist to exhibit, the gallery wishes to underline its fundamental work for young creation. Born in 1976, Mar Arza works in Barcelona and is showing her work for the first time in Belgium. Her work explores the interstices between words, all the potential unsaid things in a text. She has mischievously titled her exhibition: (...).
In the series Desiertos cicatriz... (Desert scar), with a technique that could be described as "paper marquetry", she restructures the spaces between words to generate new implications in a utopian language. The word is abused, cut, amputated to the point of becoming illegible and losing all meaning. Only a few punctuation marks and fragments of letters reveal the musicality of the text. We are left with a horizon of unrealized events and mute thoughts. Metaphorically, the spaces generated by Mar Arza remind us of the need to integrate silence and its quiet force into our lives.
More poetically, one might also ask where are the words when they are gone? Is there a place to collect the lost pages and words? Are they gathered somewhere? It is perhaps with this question in mind that one should view the work ((.(..(( which is a photograph of an eyelid with eyelashes that look suspiciously like parentheses.
With her Inventario (Inventory) she recreates an alphabet that structures an unknown language. Borrowed from Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and other scripts, these new characters are listed, inventoried and finally cast in metal. These little "megaliths" can be seen in a small box originally intended to contain jewellery. Next to this box hangs a blank page stamped with these mysterious characters. One senses the proximity of this alphabet to Braille writing.
Mar Arza raises the question of the future of a language, of its disappearance, of censorship and even of oblivion. Her work is both delicate and radical, universal and timeless, which gives it a very long reach.