“It is neither the acacia thorn nor the edge of emergence“1
I recall a conversation with a friend about photography in the darkroom—about negatives and the moment before the image appears. At one point, she spoke of that critical, decisive instant: the latent photograph. According to one definition:
“The latent image is an invisible image formed on a photographic material as a result of exposure, which becomes visible through development.”
This notion feels profoundly revealing—almost like an epiphany—for the way it resonates with the images displayed on the floor of Unbound Realms. It is precisely in that threshold, in that liminal space of the invisible, where something precedes us, yet we are granted the rare fortune of witnessing its manifestation.
The arrangement of words is also a way of giving shape to objects, of granting body to what has not yet happened. As if language and matter shared the same pulse, the same breath.
In Abruptly Faded Laughter, Axel and Jo present a cinematic composition—cadrage cinématographique—inspired by Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos, as part of Unbound Realms at FABRIKculture. The work is a silent film, composed solely of intertitles. The material is “object pins”—letters pinned like Amazonian butterflies, made only of intertitles and visible only in their arrested flight. As the artists suggest: no images, just the echo of language.
The mind movie, flickers to life only in the spectator’s imagination. These pinned letters, words, sentences do not emerge from a linear story or recognizable causal structure. They surface as impulses, tremors, small detonations that seek not to explain, but to open. Their origin is little more than an unease, a fissure through which something new slips in. The iconic book of the marvelous real by Carpentier is filmed within three intertitles.
That instant, before the pictures forms is a suspended territory: not yet narrative, but not silence either. It is the threshold where creation unfolds as anticipation. The latency.
This in-between state alludes the Popol Vuh 2, the sacred book of the Maya, where at times animals and objects lead the narrative. They are not allegories: they act, they have agency. Amphorae, fire, the dogs that flee do not adorn a story—they push it forward. This autonomy of the inanimate unsettles human hierarchies, shifting the gaze toward a world where things, on their own, hold power.
What can be seen in the art space has an independent presence from what is narrated. They are correlates, but the letters on the floor covered by a mantle of pins that flatten the voice without silencing it, stand as quiet witnesses. The pins rise over each sign, each word, like battalions protecting what is most sensitive, most infinite. They create a distance between the work and the viewer, yet a strange curiosity draws one into contemplation, to a visual and tactile conquest through the gaze. The pins are not a threat; they can come together to lift the flight, or the mantle that protects them.
The works of Axel and Jo inhabit this terrain of latency. Like in silent cinema, they conjure suspended atmospheres where red butterflies prolong the night and dawn becomes an uncertain play between light and threat. Time does not belong to historical chronology but to an expanded chronos: that thick moment where what is about to happen already carries weight and vibration.
A stifled laugh, a whistle running through the pipes, echoes announcing the arrival of another scale of beings—these do not describe a finished world; they call it forth. It is not narrative, it is apparition.
In this process, narrative—if it exists at all—becomes sinuous, fragmented, foldable. Like Penone’s thorns stretching across a landscape, these images seem to prepare for migration, to set another story in motion.
Here, creation does not stand as evidence but as an act in transit, a space where more is sensed than said. It is in that tension between the latent and the manifest that the work takes place.
Ileana Ramírez Romero
Octubre, 2025
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References
1 Giuseppe Penone’s Acacia Thorns In his series using acacia thorns, Penone explores the skin’s sensitivity and the trace of contact. As he writes:
“When the skin touches a surface, it leaves a mark that is an image of all the points of contact and, consequently, this is the image of the points of sensitivity… I used thorns because they suggest the sensitivity of the skin.” Spine d’Acacia, Robilant + Voena
2 Popol Vuh A foundational K’iche’ Maya text written in the 16th century, the Popol Vuh chronicles the creation of humankind, the deeds of gods, and the origin of the K’iche’ people. Popol Vuh, Britannica.
About the exhibition Unbound Realms in FABRIKculture
Unbound Realms is a transdisciplinary exhibition curated by Ileana Ramírez Romero at FABRIKculture in Hégenheim, France (Sept 27-Nov 2, 2025) conceived as a porous constellation rather than a fixed narrative, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices traverse borders—geographic, linguistic, and symbolic. The works inhabit a space of latency and transformation, where images, texts, and gestures resist closure and instead invite unfolding.
Through cinematic fragments, poetic inscriptions, and tactile interventions, Unbound Realms explores the thresholds between visibility and invisibility, memory and materiality, fiction and testimony. The exhibition foregrounds diasporic perspectives and the marvelous real, drawing from Latin American literary traditions, migratory imaginaries, and the politics of translation.
Rather than presenting a unified theme, Unbound Realms offers a terrain of encounter—where the viewer becomes witness to what is not yet fully formed, and where creation is understood as a relational, anticipatory act.
Ileana Ramírez Romero is a curator, editor, and cultural producer with over 25 years of experience across Latin America and Europe. Founder of Tráfico Visual and lead curator of Unbound Realms at FABRIKculture, her practice centers on poetic resonance, transregional dialogue, and the politics of representation. Her curatorial writing is known for its lyrical precision and conceptual depth, often weaving together literary references, affective textures, and critical inquiry.
Unbound Realms was developed in close collaboration and the participation of the artists:
Axel Töpfer & Jo Preußler
Daniela Brugger
Javier Grajales
Joana Amora
Juan José Olavarría
Katherine Newton
Luisanna González Quattrini
Raily Yance
Raphael Reichert
Rubén Bañuelos
Suwon Lee
Parque Industrial
The project also accounted with the support of FABRIKculture’s, fostering a space where diasporic imaginaries and experimental forms converge.
Unbound Realms is part of an ongoing commitment to expand opportunities for Latin American and diasporic artists in Europe, and to reimagine the limits of art, language, and belonging.