Project 46
Con los ojos en la garganta - Licelotte Nin & Juan Manuel Gautier
Curated by Lorena Tabares Salamanca
September 5th - October 3rd, opening reception on Friday, September 5th from 19h
The individual and collaborative work of Licelotte Nin and Juan Manuel Gautier, on view at the Tangent Projects gallery, forms an open assemblage of multiple media and visual-performative dimensions. We accompany this duo of visual artists on their itinerant path —back and forth between Santo Domingo and Paris— through images that are present, raw, virtual, ambiguous, and distant. These images are traced from gestures in action: in voice and body, in the search for destinations and desires for return.
Entangling the representation with the continuous narratives of image and performance, within a space of “exhibitionist choreographies”, is proposed as a curatorial mode– one of movement, and gesture. This approach simultaneously embraces fragmented and exposed bodies through pigments, lights, and shadows; metaphors of sugar cubes and coal; voices shouting “Go, Go, Go…” or “Black, Sugar”; and trauma embedded in bones and soil. Their passage oscillates between resistance and hostility, between centrifugal and centripetal forces of soft matter, eroticisms, (anti)heroisms, and organs, within an expanded and choreographed proxemics: visible in the bodily dispersion of subjective micro-universes.
The transformative challenge to the conventional staging format gives this exhibition a tone of performative proximity. Con los ojos en la garganta presents a constellation of images, remnants of actions, texts, and installations that lie beyond the conceptual boundaries of theatrical and social staging. This arrangement in particular invites the viewer to alter and dismantle the conventional narrative sequentiality—cause and effect—of theatrical creation, while also engaging with the pictorial, sculptural, and photographic propositions of the artists. Added to this are the sensory, ethereal, and imaginary traces that permeate this selection of works.
The traces of each body-image unfold their (un)utterable metaphor across the expanse of the space; from the organic interiority to the capacity to travel through distant geographies, the Caribbean and Europe, through embodied memory.
Licelotte has an interest in unveiling the female role within labor and factory frameworks, as well as the weight of gender within an unequal social epic. Through incisive narratives, she explores the hierarchies of class, race, and gender: violence, labor asymmetries, and the image of the Afro-descendant woman in the collective imagination. From a shared and related perspective, Juan Manuel has focused on the times of (dis)appearance inscribed in bodies, landscapes, and environments. The circumstances of his own body are extrapolated to other subjectivities, thus embodying the paradoxes and absurdities of war, trauma, and the accidental. All of this occurs even when the shadow of finite existence intervenes, randomly and distinctly, in all of our experiences. We burn and sparkle in the tragedies and comedies of daily life, unable to anticipate their flare.
Exhibitionist and “slippery,” these choreographies cross through the way we view image, text, and movement via other systems of performative meaning —linked to visual arts and the archive— softening the architectural and social divide between audiences and social actors. Thus, this exhibition considers the relevance of presence in the specific site and proposes a radical collective encounter where the exhibitionist expectation takes on polysemic qualities; it references the body and exposed corporeality and alludes to a critique of sensitive and urgent themes: cultural identity, the reflections of mestizaje, reinterpretations of modern gestures, and cultural misalignment.
Licelotte Nin is a visual artist, author, and stage director whose practice merges visual arts with theatrical creation. After training in dramatic arts, she shifted her focus to the visual arts and completed a Master’s degree in Creation and Research in Visual Arts at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2022.
Through painting, installation, and performance, she explores the Afro-descendant body, its migratory dimension, and women’s rights in contemporary society, addressing memory and identity through visual narratives. Her work is characterized by the integration of digital scenography projected into her performances, creating immersive spaces where image and body in motion interact.
She has exhibited in Paris and Santo Domingo and is currently developing a thesis on the hybridization between visual and dramatic arts. She is the director of the company Au nom de ma mère and a lecturer at the Sorbonne, and her work reflects on contemporary representations and cultural narratives.
Juan Manuel Gautier is a Dominican artist born in 1980. Initially trained as an architect, he later turned to the performing arts and theatrical performance, building a career in visual arts through the design of scenographic spaces for contemporary theatre.
In 2020, he moved to Paris, where he works in theatre performance and photography. His work addresses themes such as war, clandestine migration, and experiences of temporary death. Through theatrical performance, he engages with these subjects explicitly, while in photography he explores the interaction between light and shadow to reveal metaphysical dimensions of reality. He currently directs the theatre company Bunker Poets, founded in 2024.
Additionally, he is conducting academic research on Dominican migrant identity in New York, as part of the preparation for a doctoral thesis to begin in late 2025.
Lorena Salamanca is a Colombian cultural producer, born in 1990. She creates artistic culture through writing, research, and curatorial work, focusing on the intersections of fictions, reenactments, and the unarchiving of the body.
From a curatorial perspective, she engages in participatory processes that promote political ecologies and vital transcultural relationships. In 2023, she obtained a Master’s degree in Communication and Arts from Nova University Lisbon.
Between 2014 and 2016, she worked as a research assistant at the archive of Tulio Emiro Sandoval (Galería La Sucursal.clo). In 2017, she moved to Mexico City to collaborate on the digitization of the Ex Teresa Fund (Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual). The following year, she helped conceptualize the Antonio Juárez Caudillo Archive (Arkheia-MUAC/UNAM). In 2019, she coordinated the educational program Dialogue Tables: Performance in Review 1990–2019, and has been a curatorial resident in Serbia, Brazil, and Italy.
She has also written for platforms such as Arteinformado (Spain) and TBA21–Academy (Austria). Since 2019, she has lived in Lisbon, where she has developed mediation projects with Nowhere, Atelier Artéria, and the Goethe Institute.