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“Strata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As ‘sedimentary beds,’ they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readability, from contents and expressions.” — Gilles Deleuze, Foucault.
The drive to go deep, to descend, is the first movement of the human spirit—as it was the first gesture of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entering the dark mouths of caves. This descent—both literal and symbolic—speaks to knowledge: caves are not only sanctuaries, but the birthplaces of speech and image. We are always drawing in the dark, tracing forms we cannot fully perceive, haunted by absent referents that nonetheless structure what and how we see. Caves are spaces of projection and concealment, origin and distortion. Speech and image originate—and collapse—into abstract surfaces of meaning.
And yet, caves are rarely simple holes; they are fissures. They open where different strata of material rub against each other—creating paths, pressures, and liminal spaces that unsettle fixed categories. Each practice emerges from the friction between materials, references, and representational systems—between seeing and saying, making and unmaking.
Caving In is an exhibition about surfaces that fall, shift, or give way—slowly or all at once. Caving in alludes to moments when something breaks under pressure or opens up unexpectedly. Caves, caverns, cavities, hollow spaces—and the act of caving in—generate material languages of collapse, excavation, and the complexity of form. The exhibition follows three interwoven lines of thought: Unlearnt Lessons, Absent Referents, and Hard Waters Flat Earths.
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The works in Unlearnt Lessons use schoolroom acrylic boards as both literal and symbolic grounds for inquiry. The whiteboard becomes the cave wall—a modern surface for inscription, exposure, and erasure. Referencing diagrams from disciplines such as physics, biology, and mathematics, these pieces invoke the rationalist project of education—only to destabilise it through gestural marks, chemical reactions, and the slow degradation of materials exposed to light and time.
Conversely, Absent Referents centres around PVC marble panels and stencilled silhouettes derived from religious and mythological iconography, particularly the disembodied hands from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. These artificial surfaces of removal evoke a sculptural form of painting, where absence and excess interact to produce ghostly anatomies and visceral fragments.
Hard Waters Flat Earths is a video work in which quartz is a central material—valued for its siliceous composition formed through long geological processes, its associations with esoteric divination, and its critical role in microchip manufacturing. The transparency and translucency of quartz allow these images to be reflected, refracted, and diffused within it, creating a layered and unstable field of visual perception.
Across these three lines, a shared concern with fragmentation, artificiality, and the unstable—yet fluctuating—status of the image emerges. The image is never fixed; it is approached through subtraction rather than accumulation, through erasure, incision, and distortion. The visual language is dense and dissonant, layered with references to microbiology, pedagogy, mysticism, and techno-aesthetic collapse.
Now the question remains: how do we learn, unlearn, and reconfigure our ways of seeing in an age marked by pervasive uncertainty and global collapse?
Camilo Parra (1989) is a Colombian artist currently living and working in London. He recently participated in the Turps Off-Site Studio Programme and holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art. He previously completed undergraduate studies in Fine Arts and a Postgraduate Course in Photography at the National University of Colombia. Parra's artwork has been exhibited internationally in Colombia, Uruguay, Spain, France, Canada, Portugal, the US, and the UK. He has received several accolades, grants, and distinctions from the Ministry of Culture of Colombia and the District Institute of the Arts of Bogota. Notably, he received the honorable mention from the jury of the Flora Arts & Natura Prize at ARTBO 2015 and was nominated for the Max Werner Drawing Prize and the Chadwell Award in London in 2023, followed by a nomination for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in the UK in 2024.
His work explores visual "primordial soups" related to the origin and collapse of the world. This exploration draws upon imagery and visual platforms from science, pseudoscience, esotericism, and religion—all used to illustrate and explain the functioning of alleged realities beyond our immediate perception, spanning outer space to the inner body, and the macro to the micro.
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