Fala Mariam’s project for this edition of EMPTY CUBE takes the form of a summary of the premises of this curatorial project. The architectural construction, placed like a stage prop in the middle of the gallery, is also another exhibition space, in which two drawings and a painting are displayed. The drawings, entitled “resenhas” and dated 2016, dialogue with “The Swimmer”, a 2009 painting, Fala Mariam being a visual artist as well as a music composer and trombonist. Basically, Fala Mariam is an artist, and as such none of the two previously mentioned areas takes precedence over the other. On the one hand,  it may seem that we are looking at a multidisciplinary action that explores equivalences between the visual arts and music. On the other, however, this action, which comprises these two areas, is a challenge to our perception and to our ability to integrate an artistic act in which we can find correspondences. In the intervals during which the connections appear to absent themselves, for an approximate period of two hours, Fala Mariam and cellist Helena Espvall develop another duality, within the context of the three images mentioned in the title of this work.
The body (or bodies) has a very important presence in this project, for the painting “The Swimmer” indexes performative movements in the performance of the trombonist and of the instrument itself. However, the strings of the cello, and its player, can once again confront us with the plasmatic, though fluid, density of the first image that the painting presents to us and which the drawings, in their syncretic construction, represent in the spatiality of the gradations in the painting’s poetic texture.  
Other moments will certainly follow, and their musical construction may eventually be a different one. But the present work reifies itself in the individual’s awareness as an artistic act that is indivisible, though built in various layers. 

João Silvério
Curator