Literature

There are structures whose purpose is to enable movement and connect spaces on different planes. Yet it is worth asking: what happens when these forms lose—or rather, suspend—their original function?

Jessica Briceño’s work establishes a dialogue between the multiple dimensions that inhabit verticality. Using concrete to create bifurcated and helical staircases of unfinished paths, folded slides, and diving boards that invite us to leap into an imaginary void, the artist builds miniature replicas of these devices and transforms them into objects that, beyond capturing motion, suspend time itself.

This mythical temporality, as described by Anna Adell (2022), is characteristic of liminal spaces that have failed in their purpose of taking us elsewhere. It materializes a suspended time in which past, present, and future blend into an eternal present. An idea that resonates in the lucid verses of Burnt Norton (1936) by T.S. Eliot: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.”

Concrete, the emblematic material of twentieth-century architectural modernism, acquires particular relevance in this context. For the artist, returning to this compound means revisiting a language charged with historical promises, ideals, and utopian futures that now appear to us as warm, not cold, ruins—full of porosities and cracks through which the mildest and most hypnotic nostalgia slowly seeps.

The works gathered here encourage us to linger within a dimension that is both concrete and fragile—to become passengers in a state of pause and to face a different temporality, one perhaps driven by imagination and an affective memory that awakens through the gentle gesture of tactile exploration, fingers charged with playful energy tracing these time-laden structures. They invite us, in their purest essence, to leap into a suspension that has become—especially today—urgently necessary.

Isidora Kauak Aguad