«Maybe, in the heart of the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling (…). Like an accidental pore in the hard ivory surrounding your inner cistern of living light, a sinuous pore like a termite’s gallery, a tunnel can suddenly open before your eyes, lit by the immortal inner fire, while you toss and turn, in dreams and visions, circling again and again around the Enigma»
Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding: The Left Wing
Geological time within machine time. Two systems of landscape creation and destruction confronting each other. Can a mountain be seen disappearing? How much time must pass before what we see becomes only light?
These questions emerged in Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas’ installation Pintura de roca [Rock painting] (2021), and now they echo through this exhibition under the specific material conditions of Casal Solleric’s aljub [old cistern reservoir]. In that earlier installation, the super 8 film and its magnetic soundtrack were subjected to continuous projection, eroding with each cycle—mechanically worn down by repetition and time. In this exhibition, the process is reimagined through another kind of insistence: that of matter and its silent contact with the environment.
Here, the film is surrendered to the action of the space itself. The aljub, with its persistent humidity, dense air, invisible microorganisms, and porous architecture, becomes an active agent of transformation. Without the mediation of projector or light, the film undergoes a more subtle and gradual process of inscription—a trace that is neither immediate nor fully visible, yet operates within a different, almost imperceptible temporality.
The insistence of repetition becomes the insistence of the ambient, the constant pressure of the intangible. The film material, now vulnerable, records the brush of the atmospheric, the accumulation of the minuscule. A dialogue with time that does not follow the speed of the machine, but the breath of space—its own logic of erosion and transformation.
In the heart of the heart is an installation in which, beyond the image and the device that sustains it, the film becomes a surface of contact. What is projected is no longer light, but time held in suspension.
The photochemical material, in its sensitive dimension, allows for the recording of imperceptible alterations, registering the conditions of its environment without the need for artificial mediation. This material becomes a witness to that which would otherwise escape representation. In this sense, the film becomes an active memory—paradoxically, through its own deterioration—a constantly forming archive that resists the fixity of the document and instead becomes a process.
This gesture also resonates with the memory of a disappearing language and territory. In his project Pintura de roca (2021), Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas took as a starting point the original documentation from the research of Jon P. Dayley with Mamie Boland as the principal consultant: an archive on the Tümpisa language in the place that is now known as Death Valley, California. In 2019, the artist traveled there to record images of the landscape—footage which is revisited in this exhibition to trace a path through the singularity of the Casal Solleric’s aljub, its architecture, and its environmental conditions.
Using as its point of departure an audio recording by Jon P. Dayley from 1972, in which Mamie Boland recounts how Death Valley was inhabited decades earlier, En el corazón del corazón invites us into various testimonies of erosion and decay: from the memory of a language to that of celluloid. The exhibition includes a series of written documents listing Tümpisa vocabulary, the 2019 footage filmed by Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas in Death Valley (frame-by-frame scans made before this exhibition—in 2020 and 2025—showing various states of degradation), and the film itself—in all its material, sonic, and visual dimensions.
Finally, in this journey of erosion and transformation, the last space presents the film directly exposed to the aljub’s conditions, so that, after the exhibition’s closure, what will remain is the material trace inscribed on the film reels.
Just as a language or a community may disappear, the filmic matter on display is subject to its own erosion—a slow process of vanishing that is not only loss but also transformation. Between image, matter, and memory, En el corazón del corazón forges a bond that registers what escapes, but also proposes ways of inhabiting and listening to what endures—silent, yet present.
Artist: Jorge Suárez Quiñones Rivas
Curator: Sergi Álvarez Riosalido
From June 5 to September 7, 2025, at Casal Solleric (Palma de Mallorca)