Solo show/ Chiasso Perduto, Florence, Italy, April 2026

To inhabit oneself in a primordial sense is an exploration that Delfina Velar, an Argentine artist in residence, has experienced by temporarily limiting her sense of sight in order to perceive other registers.

The project is built on a visual and non-visual dialogue: walls intervened through pictorial gestures made without seeing, like a portal to our inner version that has no voice and is free from conditioning. It is a space in which the purest choice seems possible precisely because it is deprived of the noise of visual overstimulation.

The work becomes a paradoxical visual experience: what is perceived has not passed through the control of sight and enters into tension with that which produces judgment and interpretation, and which perhaps loses its playful dimension.

To touch, smell, listen, taste, and not see—for those who can see—implies a deprivation that destabilizes an almost unilateral model of learning, especially when each person spends on average eight hours a day in front of a screen consuming all content through a single stimulus: light and the repeated gesture of the finger on a cold, flat surface. There are no smells, no three-dimensional sound, no variations in temperature or texture. In this current context, Delfina’s practice becomes a primitive and primordial gesture of being.

The artist returns to seeing through subtraction and, therefore, through the “editing” of signs, using tools to mark the walls from which beings emerge—amorphous fragments from her imagination that seem to have been birthed by the space itself. They are companions, explorers; primordial.

The space becomes a threshold to inhabit, the cave of ideas before they are trapped in different systems, long before—perhaps—language.

Curated by Sandra Miranda Pattin & Francesca Morozzi.