L’insularité prend tout son sens Nous retrouver entourés d’eau Nous découvrir sans terre continentale Partager ce fantôme avec toi, la soif d’un foyer jamais visité

L’insularité prend tout son sens… is the title of Sofía Salazar Rosales’ first solo exhibition in Paris. The title points to one of the exhibition’s central concerns: locating oneself—bodily and in spirit. In a recent poem written to accompany her journey, and that of the person she loves and who loves her, toward a territory woven into her lineage, she writes: “Habitar lo desconocido / Ya no más en lugares que poco a poco nos pertenecen como París / Sino uno de los lugares de donde viene mi ombligo vulnerable.” (To inhabit the unknown / no longer in places that little by little come to belong to us, like Paris / but in one of the places from which my vulnerable navel comes.)

For several years now, Salazar Rosales has devised forms that carry stories of movement—or more precisely, of diasporic detours. Detour is intrinsic to diasporic experience; it is what articulates its complexity. These are necessary detours, at work and for life: they constrain, they compel, and they are passed on, from one body to another. In Sofía Salazar Rosales’ sculpture and installation, fruits and flowers are torn up and transplanted in cargo planes; so are the complicit-captive packaging systems that enable such transport; then the migration of materials and commodities; and finally the migration of forms—their slides and modulations, their aesthetic sense—constantly reworked to narrate diasporic detours and let us hear their vibration.

The exhibition begins in the gallery courtyard: a way for Salazar Rosales to set a landscape, to project herself and us into it, and to let the longing for a never-visited home, a never-inhabited place, permeate. It is a story between ancestors and plants. It is the story of a tree: the yagrumo. A pale apparition within a frenetic tropical green, shaggy with filaments that turn it into a chromatic signal—leading, once upon a time, cimarrones toward the palenques. It no longer leads: that story belongs to the past; and yet the tree remains. It recalls the possibility of a safe place that once existed somewhere in the infernal time of the colonial empire. Here, contemporary yagrumos broadcast the persistent fantasy—and the concrete potential—of a safe haven within the globalized violence we inhabit. The trees have become sculptures (copper, electroforming, oxidation, aluminum): urban trees planted in bottles, the heavy kind from cities without potable water. They mingle with acclimatized plants—Parisian poco a poco, Parisian “by sheer insistence”—whose itineraries we can only guess.

What occupies the first room is, at first, a refusal, a holding-at-bay: a gate whose troubled ornamental softness only reveals its materiality up close. It is a Cuban memorial vestige and an optimization of materials—a recurring gesture in Salazar Rosales’ practice. It is also an illuminated representation of fear, keeping at a distance those who might steal from you. Made of cardboard,- sugared with paraffin, it carries what the Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría theorized, in his Marxian critique, as a structural social comportment—both shelter and weapon—for the individual caught in capital’s logic and unable to step outside it: an ethos baroque that is also a creativity proper to Latin American culture, a way to think an “after” to capitalist modernity3. In one image: a lace doily draped over a TV set. In Sofía’s eye, it is these property gates—bearing a North African grace, traveling through Spain, and, suddenly, around a corner, declaring a syncretic fidelity to the orishas, painted in the same rhythmic palette that summons them, the same as the colors beading Sofía’s bracelets—securing a double protection, material and immaterial.

This gate (a copy of an existing one in Cuba) is not solely baroque; it negotiates between curves and another, unsymmetrical, sharp-edged geometry—an afterimage of other ideologies and of modernity’s systemic loves5. Around this manifesto of thwarted hospitality stand other sculptures: the “hugs”, conceived as properly Parisian embraces—evocations of the expanded metal sheets one encounter sin a city under repair. Here, the sheet metal has softened, folded in on itself; it is re-inforced with cardboard tears and dusted with metal powder. A trompe-l’œil searching for where its force has gone, it reveals, in its pleats, the same strings of bicolored beads as in those bracelets.

At the end of a corridor, a scaffolding. It cuts through the final wall; an idea of scaffolding, a silhouette, a storefront under renovation, a flayed façade. It becomes the support and display for other works: a large patchwork dress—partly schematic, unfinished—summons the memory of a real object, a doll Salazar Rosales once owned, the only toy to arrive from that place she did not inhabit, a toy she rejected. What remains now is the sadness of that rejection, the idea of a phantom, the image of small fabric fragments that once composed the dress and now evoke “how things are repaired in Cuba.” Nearby, paper sculptures stand like the sad skeletons of palms; braided bead meshes cradle petrifi ed bananas and metal-cast residues of banana stems (where the fruit fastens to the rachis): witnesses to uprooting, witnesses to the journey.

Finally, on a metal platform that may make our steps resound—and perhaps even let a hint of reggaeton ring—we avoid walking on a delicate ground made from the relics of melted votive candles (another evocation of the circularity of those colored jewels). Along this sheet-metal path—which also marks, for the artist, the capitalist urgency to replace vernacular materials in order to accelerate global exchange without end—we approach a new series of sculptures: the machetes. Composed of jingle bells, with beads, they belt an invisible warrior. They summon memories of machete attacks during Cuba’s Ten Years’ War, tracing the itinerary of an imported object that shifted from a tool used in sugarcane fi elds to a weapon of combat; they also recall the presence of machetes in Santería. Ambivalent arms—first weapons of liberation when fi rearms were unavailable—celebrated in the poetry of independence, here they converse with banana packagings that bronze, this time, has rendered immortal. On one, a fugitive drawing appears in adhesive tape: schematic banana leaves, like those printed on a shipping box. Each blade of the foliage, vulnerable, is about to be lost, to come apart. A leaf fragmented forever. And your imperceptible breath against uprooting. My own experience of the diasporic detour makes me feel, with particular intensity, the vibration of each object I have just described—the memory of having met them, the anticipation of getting to know them; this is what this text is written with.

Eva Barois De Caevel, July 2025