“Thought follows the procedures of dreams.”
—Pascal Quignard
DOUBLE PHANTOM
One body is embroidered, another decomposed. One is summoned from organic memory; the other, from an archive of fragments that simulates the human. In Doble Fantasma, Cecilia Avendaño and Juana Gómez follow different paths toward a shared question: the image of the body and its truth—not as a unified whole, but as symptom, double, phantom, or vulnerable surface.
Gómez works with her own flesh as territory. By embroidering over photographs, she transforms her skin into a symbolic topography: networks of organs, vital flows, invisible pathways. The visible becomes a map of what persists from within. Her work embodies Pascal Quignard’s idea: “Thought follows the procedures of dreams”. Thus, biology becomes image, and image becomes a form of resistance: to forgetting, to closure, to fear. Like the myths studied by Joseph Campbell, her practice is rooted in the physical—not imagined through language, but through the body that dreams, feels, and embroiders. Each stitch is a gesture of persistence in the face of loss.
Avendaño, by contrast, begins with photography in order to transcend it. For years, she has built an extensive archive of faces, pupils, skin, and bodily fragments—all photographed by her. She then dissects, classifies, and recombines them. Her portraits belong to no one: they are assemblages, bodies without origin, faces without identity—hybrids that blur the boundaries of the human. In her most recent works, she has trained algorithms on these altered images, generating figures that resemble the human body without belonging to it: digital doubles, doppelgängers that shadow it, replicate it, betray it. In her visual universe, reality ceases to be a certainty and becomes a plausible fiction, digitally multiplied.
The exhibition also presents hybrid pieces, where the artists’ visual languages intersect: embroidery over digital skin, synthetic faces fissured by manual stitching. In these intersections, Doble Fantasma reveals its core—not collaboration as harmonic fusion, but the unsettling overlap of specters. The visible no longer functions as evidence. It becomes symptom. As David Le Breton notes, pain cannot be located, it “absorbs the whole of existence”. So do these images: they absorb us, confront us, mirror us.
Who can say what a body is today? Who constructs it, archives it, exposes it, fragments it? Gómez and Avendaño do not answer—they create tension. And in that tension, they return a pressing question. As Quignard writes: “We yield to our thinking. We yield as a dike would yield”. The image overflows us.
