Valentina Attolini

Unión presents Sonámbulos: los párpados lloran by Valentina Attolini, SOLOS resident.

At night, before dawn, when the birds of the day have not yet awakened and the birds of the night are already asleep, there is a minute of silence, a film director once said. But what happens to the nocturnal howls, the objects and beings of everyday life that become chimeras in the time of reverie? How can we name the noises we dream of when there are no birds to announce their rest? Sonámbulos: los párpados lloran initially arises from a desire to capture interior landscapes that, faced with doubt and obstacles, sought answers in dreamscapes, in dreams. Insomnia, like sleepwalking, although they refer to states closer to wakefulness due to bodily movement, still belong to the territory and temporality of sleep: carnivorous hours that open their jaws wide and are everything except a haven for calmness.

The four pieces presented here are just a fraction of the work of approximately six weeks in the Solos residency, which led to a final result of 24 pieces. Each of them exists under the monotype technique but is really a nocturnal state. Valentina's work is attention to a crying that is not common, because when the eyelids –and not the eyes– cry, particular attention is paid to what is behind, that is, to the eversion of the usual, to the paroxysm of pink and to the tiny veins that are perceptible only when you want to see them: it is the water of the flesh. “In the snow, tears are pink when you cry,” says Raul Zurita, who has known how to observe the greatness of detail and honor the glorious pain of the desert, and whose verses, moreover, were detonators of attentive listening to the grunting that engulfs and the fish baits that are present in the entire series of Sonámbulos.

Valentina's pieces are inhabited by baits falling from the sky, whirlpools of fish churning under the sea, a bed, a hole in the garden and, similar to the roar of the sea, a nocturnal growl, greedy and insatiable of dreams, that chokes and suffocates, cries and cannot scream. A flower that could be a starfish that, at the height of its beauty, stinks and bewitches the insect emblem of putrefaction.

The weeping eyelids are composed of monotypes that allow the alteration of the order of things through accident and remind us of Rimbaud's disordering of the senses. Catastrophe becomes a feasible scenario and all forms of suffering, madness and love are possible. And in the quest to exhaust all poisons, a snake penetrates our body and after fear and pleasure opens our eyes to wake up. Sonámbulos crystallizes the corners and flows of the enjoyment that is enlivened when we close our eyes at night, it returns to a place we all know because the state of sleep is a kind of prehistory.

–Lucrecia Arcos Alcaraz