PIENSA EN MÍ
(Think of Me)
Mariana Saldarriaga
There is a bolero by Agustín Lara titled "Piensa en mí" (1935). This song has never stopped playing: it was sung by Chavela Vargas (1961) and Luz Casal (1961), Grupo Mojado made their own version under the same title (1996), and now it titles Mariana Saldarriaga's show at Paisaje (2026). The question of forgetting and remembering runs through these songs as a plea of love. Perhaps that is why it endures: asking someone else to think of us is the oldest way of resisting oblivion. Every epitaph repeats that same plea.
Mariana Saldarriaga's (b. 1992) practice operates as an expanding archive: obsessively written lists, merch in different formats, phrases jotted down in passing, images accumulated without any apparent hierarchy... From this exercise the works in this exhibition are born, in which language ceases to be a vehicle for thought and becomes physical matter.
Small tombstones open like the pages of a book made of marble and piedra muñeca. They present phrases that move between irony, humor, and a strange tenderness. These take on the form of the epitaph while questioning the solemnity of these traditional spaces. The gesture is not new: writing on stone has always been a way of defying time. Saldarriaga takes up this gesture to pose questions to it from the present: what deserves to remain in a territory usually reserved for the gravity of death.
Chris Marker says in his documentary Sans Soleil (1983) that memory is not the opposite of forgetting, but its reverse side. This wrenching line calls into question the dichotomous premise of what we remember and what we don't. This question runs through the show: it is not written against forgetting but with it, accepting that all memory is also made of what is lost over time.
Death appears as a close presence, perhaps as a threatening relief. Yet the exhibition does not dwell on its drama. It unfolds as a multi-format text in which stone epitaphs, embroidered t-shirts, and a series of ceramic horses that renounce the animal's heroic iconography enter into dialogue.
These seem like drawings made from memory and from the wound; they unfold as sculptures full of humor. Saldarriaga presents them from the site of injury—fragile, tender, and comic—like a small group of resistance.
Between the eternal and the ephemeral, the solemn and the banal, Piensa en mí proposes looking at memory as a space where humor, vulnerability, and the passage of time coexist in a single gesture. Each piece repeats the same silent plea that titles the show: think of me.
