work in collaboration with Lauren Gault.
Dilalica, 2025
glossia (some urgencies) began with a question: What could collaboration look like?
When we invited Ariadna Guiteras to explore the idea of coauthorship and collaboration with another artist, she proposed to work with Lauren Gault. They met in 2019 during a residency in London and perhaps there was the gut feeling that their works could potentially allow the permutation of the other, and together morph into something new. They shared references, images, studio time and countless conversations over months. The result is an exhibition that attempts to dissolve two artistic practices and merge them into a third.
Like a word suspended in the air, vibrating in anticipation of being heard or understood, glossia (some urgencies) is a meditation on the Greek concept of enargeia –the quality of making the absent present through language—and on the material location of the voice. From the physical gesture of speaking to the cognitive act of assigning a meaning, the distances between what is said, what is heard and what is ultimately understood fill the room with possibilities. Language as a tool of verbal communication that assigns and distorts, concrete and vague, with potentials and limitations.
At the very entrance of the gallery, we are welcomed by a glass sculpture: two enlarged hyoid bones joined together. This small bone, located in the throat, plays a crucial role in enabling speech and it is a recurring figure encountered multiple times throughout the exhibition.
Throughout the space, suspension functions as both form and strategy: a way of holding. From the gallery’s ceiling hang undulating metal structures that reach toward the walls, where they hold, press, or sustain sculptures. This configuration forms a chain of supports—a concatenation of materialities that collapse timelines and technologies, amplifying their capacities for bodily interaction and message-making.
Echoing the undulating movement of the snake, the figure of the speech scroll emerges as a repetitive element. Historically used to denote speech and sound, these devices are here reduced to a minimal expression: shapes rendered in positive and negative. Their role is no longer to carry a specific written message, but to become the message themselves. Coated in jesmonite and marked with gestural traces, they press against and are wrapped by transparent sacking material that itself cradles materials and images. Within these sacks lies an amalgam: drawings, fabric scraps from Guiteras’ previous works, images of ectoplasm and engorged snakes, strands of plant rope, necklaces and raw wool from Gault’s family farm. The message unfolds in layers, where each material embodies not only its physicality but also its history, and where every element is simultaneously a medium, an object, and a sign.
Co-authored by the two artists, this exhibition challenges the convention of individual authorship. Simultaneously, these works open onto a broader issue: the limitations and possibilities of language and communication, and, through them, the potential for collective growth.
Cati Bestard – Dilalica