A woman picks at herself in the mirror, searching for a wound and finding only a scar.

She feels like a scar — like a numb, deafened stump. Not long ago, she had lost her father, and the pain had seemed like an immense, impassable lagoon of unasked questions, unspoken words, and unexpressed feelings. Now, exhausted from grief, she was almost inert. Sometimes she tried to rebel, but there was no way. Pain always won. Nothing led to anything anymore; all the connecting vessels had suddenly atrophied, isolating her, drowning her in herself.

How does one escape oneself?

“Tajo abierto” is, therefore, more than an art exhibition — it is a meditation on loss. On how, sometimes, pain seems like a dormant, hidden muscle that needs so little to start thrashing again, sinking its sting into us once more. Each piece is a fragment of that struggle to break free from paralysis, the effort to restart time.

“I can’t stop weaving,” Mariu told me one day, in the midst of her mourning. I suggested she shouldn’t stop, that she should intervene as much as she could. And so, the entire house became covered in a dense veil. Everything within it became entangled in an intricate, difficult membrane — one that could very much resemble grief itself. And so, in each of these works, the very remnants of loss take center stage. Here are the dozens of her father’s shirts that had remained there, untouched, their collars, cuffs, or pockets still distinguishable. And over them, the weaving spread voraciously, like dark, viscous saliva, covering everything.

She carried them this far; and with this handful of scars, in a corner of a distant city, she has built the most luminous mourning.

José Falconi