I was invited, along with fellow artist Diego Lara, for a 7-day inaugural art residency. Days were spent exploring, excavating, listening to what was, what is, and what wants to be. A year after our first collaboration, we started where we left off. Scraping, collecting the earthly matter. Adding only water to these sediments, we created pigments and dyes.

Upstairs, in the cellar among the tinajas, we dyed handmade paper with the pigment we'd gathered, then folded it, scrunched it, crumbled it, watching how the earth left its marks. No adhesive holds any of it together — not by accident, but by choice. A hundred and twenty-two sheets, suspended above the vessels that once held wine, still shifting, still changing. Nothing stays the same. Time Beneath Us.

From the cave's oldest room, we gathered capachos, esparto grass filters once used to press oil, softened and shaped by decades of hands before ours. We held them. Dressed them. Draped them over a hidden armature, layer by layer, until a character emerged, nearly two and a half meters tall. She became herself. The Great Mouth Below.

Two works, one instinct: the cave already remembered. We only had to listen.