To listen, to breathe, to pause, to err
Cristina Mejías’s exhibition “Knowing by Ear” at C3A
In a world that prizes speed and constant production, this exhibition offers a quietly radical proposal: a different mode of engagement rooted in rhythm, silence, and presence. It asks us to listen, to pause, to wander without destination. The exhibition space becomes a kind of clearing, an opening that does not assert itself, but emerges only when we slow down, when presence deepens.
On an oppressively hot and quiet July afternoon in Córdoba, I stepped into Knowing by Ear, Cristina Mejías’s exhibition at C3A (Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía). Outside, the city was thick with sound and sunlight, tourists and the dry summer hum. But inside, the noise faded, the air shifted. I found myself entering not just an art space, but another kind of time, slower and quieter. Spread across several rooms, the exhibition invites both looking and listening.
The exhibition title Knowing by Ear suggests an alternative mode of knowledge one accessed through composition, rhythm, and the material language of the works such as fragile and solid elements, ceramic, wood, glass, metal, and found objects. They do not occupy space; they vibrate, asking the body to adjust, to walk through, as the title proposes, the ear to open.
Multidisciplinary visual artist Cristina Mejías engages with systems of oral traditions and embodied knowledge. The art space C3A, where the exhibition is staged, is itself a site of transition, a vast, minimal structure in Córdoba, straddling the divide between the city’s intense visual culture and a quieter, more experimental encounter.
In two interconnected installations Silent Singers (Cantantes silenciosas) and Wandering Apprentices (Aprendices errantes), diverse materials are brought together into sculptural rhythms. At the conceptual heart of the exhibition lies the thought of María Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher whose writings emerged from exile, physical and spiritual. Curator Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga draws from Claros del bosque (Clearings of the Forest, 1977), a work composed during Zambrano’s years of exile, in which the “clearing” becomes a metaphor for a state of inner openness and receptivity. Zambrano’s understanding of knowledge unfolds through rhythm, breath, and poetic intuition. It is within this irregular pulse, this gentle, non-linear flow, that Mejías’s works begin to resonate.
The exhibition also gestures to the legendary flamenco guitarist El Polinario, known for reproducing the delicate sound of water with his guitar. Like Polinario’s gesture, Mejías invites us to listen to what the water knows, through bowls that resemble meditation bowls, situated near to the ground level within delicate glass sculptures that seem to flow/swing just above the water’s surface. Suspended materials, curved forms, and the spatial arrangement of Wandering Apprentices seem to echo the improvisational structure of jazz. Rather than presenting a fixed choreography, the installation suggests openness, compositions unfold without a strict linear path, instead proposing variation, rhythm, and fluidity. One might ask: what kind of knowledge or experience is being proposed here? Perhaps it is a knowledge of water I would say, fluid and deeply felt. The sculptures, quietly suspended in space, waiting, listening. In this way, Knowing by Ear positions itself within a lineage of sonic practices. The ear becomes the organ of knowing. Or rather, the experience proposes a way of knowing, through experience of listening and observing.
Produced specifically for the exhibition at C3A, the work Silent Singers enters a quiet dialogue with the concrete architecture of the space. Responding to the scale and austerity of the space, the installation, specifically with a branch standing, proposes an atmosphere of isolation. Suspended circular curtain structures shape and partially conceal the space they enclose. It invites the viewer to move around it. A quiet sense of curiosity draws the body into motion, walking hesitantly, spiralling around and through the installation.
In Spanish, the verb errar holds an ambiguity. It means both to err, to be mistaken, and to wander without direction. Mejías seizes on this doubleness in Aprendices Errantes (Wandering Apprentices), a sculptural ensemble that reimagines the figure of the apprentice as one who learns through movement, uncertainty, and listening. To err, in this exhibition, is a kind of wandering that becomes a way of moving through the works.
What does it mean to know by ear? In Mejías’s work, listening becomes a mode of existence, a practice of dwelling in ambiguity, of giving space to silence, of allowing error to guide rather than interrupt. Knowing by Ear seems to ask for a different kind of participation: one that breathes with the works, that attunes itself to a meditative environment amid a chaotic world. It proposes a form of knowledge that does not separate mind from body, or sound from space.
It is moving to perceive these works in this way, especially in a world saturated with constant images and relentless demands for comprehension. In Knowing by Ear, Mejías returns us to what is elemental: breath, rhythm, silence, and presence. The exhibition reminds us that to wander is not to be lost, and that some of the most profound forms of learning, or un-learning, emerge through listening. It is a radical form of listening, attuned to the quiet resonance of materials and the stories that dwell at the margins of what is already assumed to be known.
References
Ferrández, R. (2023). Listening to the breath, chanting the word: The two breaths in María Zambrano’s Claros del bosque. Poligrafi, 28 (111/112), 225–242.
Rodríguez-Ponga, C. (2025). Cristina Mejías: Knowing by Ear [Curator’s text]. Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A).
