El desierto de ella; Alicia, Chantal, Eunice
Exhibition by Manuela de Laborde, curated by Margaux Knight – PEANA
Alice’s fall opens a world.
A world where you fall slowly, and every gesture becomes a drift of identity: eating, drinking, growing, shrinking. Here there is no linear logic, but a poetry of disorder: flowers bleed, furniture shifts, and time is trapped in the hour of tea.
This exhibition emerges from the desire to bring into dialogue three unruly, resilient female figures: Alicia, the protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s novel (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865); Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015); and Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio (1919–1974), who lived and died in Mexico. Each questions her reality and blurs the boundaries between inner and outer worlds, undermining fixed identity. As avant-garde figures, they transform opposition into mirror and wandering into initiation.
To give them voice, the desert asserts itself as a symbolic landscape of revelation and absence, where the labyrinth becomes the stage of intimacy. For Manuela de Laborde, these virtual and alternate spaces render positively her cinematic process.
The exhibition is conceived as a living landscape.
Entering the vestibule, a video greets us with a new pool of tears, performed by her sister Pía, whose tears dry a field of hibiscus flowers. This is followed by a confrontation with glass monoliths swept with pigments and sands. Around them, analog photographs framed in lead narrate correspondences between Her, Alice, Chantal, and Eunice: “I seek myself revealed and pierced through other names.” —E. Odio
At the heart of the space, a monumental video projects an eviscerated trout: one literally enters a body, a gesture, an emotion. Nearby, two textile works, like fluid texts, evoke thread as memory and repeated gesture as care. The journey culminates in a tactile mise en abyme: a tasting box with ingestions of crystallized salt.
A volcanic poet, Eunice Odio describes the body as ocean, bleeding flower; for her, emotional chaos is material. “I am on the verge of wounding and listening to myself” resonates with the trout film: a knife opens a fish, its interior revealed. Manuela de Laborde works from a dense inner world, permeated by ordinary pains.
In Je, tu, il, elle (1971), Chantal Akerman locks herself in, films herself, thinks herself, loves. Manuela discovered this film at age 26—almost the director’s age at filming—and it transformed her way of seeing cinema, of thinking self-reference as a radical gesture. Film asserts itself as a space of slowing down and drifting, aligned with her vision of minimalism as intimate and essential.
“Time is a living thing,” the Mad Hatter tells Alice. Influenced by theories of kinetic art, especially critic Guy Brett’s writings, Manuela conceives her work as an animated process—storyboard, essay, maquette or film. She does not confine herself to a single discipline, but freely crosses media, formats, and techniques with total, intuitive creativity. It’s not about mastering a technique, but about a reflective and affective relationship with making.
The gesture need not be perfect, but must be precise. This conceptual and critical production—at times hard to follow—manifests as free from authority, rebellious even toward itself. It aligns with a feminist tradition that revalues domestic gestures and so‑called “minor” arts as spaces of subject formation. Chantal Akerman films daily life with almost painful patience: minimal gestures become resistance; kitchens, gentle prisons. The bed, the tub, the darkroom become alchemical places where the everyday transforms—through salt, baths, red lights, slow revelations. “To make films, one must get up.” (C. Akerman) It resonates as a physical and existential exhortation.
Likewise, in her textile work, union does not come through embroidery but through sutures. The needle traces an anatomical, piercing dialogue. Textile becomes a digital image stretched to infinity, pixelated and distorted. An almost erotic gesture, where thread touches, penetrates, with the intent to stitch herself together. Emerging forms adapt, like reversed water, a glove molding itself to the body.
Manuela de Laborde explores an aesthetic of extreme proximity: so close to things they blur and open a fissure to other realities. She admires the work of spiritualists like Georgiana Houghton, seeking to “conjure” presences and considering abstraction a sign of connection. Alchemy, dreams, and fantasy form an imaginary foundation where materials become “energetic mirrors” (G. Bachelard). Working with matter is summoning invisible forces.
Symbols and materials circulate as persistent presences: red, as an emotional trace; salt, marine residue that preserves and corrodes; hibiscus flower, emotional diuretic; lead, weight of inheritance and alchemical potential.
A poetics of incorporation runs through the project: from the sugar Chantal eats compulsively, to Eunice’s carnal impulses, to the magical commands of Wonderland—eat me, drink me. It is not about representing these women, but internalizing them, as one would steep herbs, or let lead slowly penetrate.
El desierto de ella; Alicia, Chantal, Eunice conjures the imagery of the pool of tears. Tragedy runs quietly through them: Eunice dies in her bathtub, Chantal takes her life in Paris, and Alice’s world is haunted by the constant threat of decapitation. Each carries a sharp awareness of finitude, of bodily and spiritual dislocation.
Here one can fall.
One can bleed, float, dissolve.
One can be reborn, a little closer to oneself.
“I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good‑bye, feet!” —Alice
Margaux Knight
